Author: Shannon Turlington
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Recommended Reading: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days is a new magical realism novel by Salman Rushdie. In the twelfth century, a female jinn (a jinnia) called Dunia fell in love with a philosopher and bore many children, whose descendants were part-jinn, part-human. A thousand years later, the slits between earth and the world of the jinn reopened, sparking…
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Links for readers…
A roundup of interesting stuff to read about reading, featuring some of my favoritest writrs: All the critical backlash over Go Set a Watchman is missing the point on XOJane: I’ve got a copy and am ready to read it, but the Internet feeding frenzy really turned me off; I like to form my own opinions on…
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A Kinder, Gentler Apocalypse: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I discuss a less brutal and, I think, more realistic approach to the post-apocalyptic novel in this essay.
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The slippery genre of slipstream…
Of all the sub-genres crowded under the broad umbrella of “speculative fiction,” slipstream is probably the trickiest to nail down. Bruce Sterling, who coined the term, called slipstream “…a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.” (Presumably,…
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Recommended Reading: What Makes This Book So Great
What Makes This Book So Great is a compendium of blog posts about Jo Walton’s rereads of books, not necessarily all science fiction and fantasy. These are blog posts originally published on Tor.com, so they are short, breezy, and quick to read. Walton is such a prodigious reader, averaging a book or more a day (I wonder…
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Horror is a feeling, not a genre
Yes, I’ve started a new blog project called Noir Femme. This one is kind of a sister project to Sci Femme, about women writing horror and dark fiction, as opposed to science fiction. But before I could get started on the reading, I had to identify (for myself, anyway) exactly what horror is. Here’s my…
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On Harper Lee…
It seems fitting to highlight this great piece about Harper Lee by Roy Hoffman in the New York Times now that Go Set a Watchman has come out and blown up the Internet.
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New blog: Sci Femme
I’ve resurrected an old idea of mine, which is to read science fiction about women and blog about it. I call the blog Sci Femme, and I hope to use it as a forum for longer-form essays about themes and trends in science fiction written by women. I’ll be looking at both new and classic…
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Links for readers…
Some interesting links I’ve stumbled across lately: On annotating books (BookRiot): I personally cannot mark up a paper book, which is another reason why I like my Kindle–it makes highlighting painless. More marginalia (New York Review of Books). A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another (Brain Pickings). What’s reading…
Shannon Turlington 