Tag: Genres
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Why read horror?
I’ve been reading a lot of horror this year. More than I usually do, which was already a large amount. I’ve been feeling the need for extreme escapism. And despite the truism that good horror reflects current societal fears, I still find it very escapist. Recently, I shared this article from Tor about women characters in…
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Reading journal: Mid-February
Reading has slowed down, although I have one new recommendation to post shortly. I reread The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin with my son, which I think was a bit too old for him, but I still love it. I also reread Dracula on audio. I last read Dracula as a pre-teen or youngish teen. I don’t remember exactly when,…
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Book review: Three Themed Anthologies
I have never been a huge fan of short stories. I prefer to seek my teeth into something meatier, a novel. Short story collections by a single author have always felt particularly unsatisfying to me. Invariably, the stories vary in quality but share similar themes, insights, and style, so that they all start to run…
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Gothic horror: We’re all mad here | Noir Femme
I try to define gothic fiction and why I love it so much: Gothic horror: We’re all mad here | Noir Femme
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A Kinder, Gentler Apocalypse: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Originally posted on Sci Femme: This essay also discusses Into the Forest (Jean Hegland; 1996); A Gift Upon the Shore (M.K. Wren; 1990); and Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin; 1985), among various other stalwarts of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. There will be spoilers for these books. Pop quiz, hotshot. It’s the apocalypse: What do you do?…
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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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Horror is a feeling, not a genre
Originally posted on Noir Femme: Horror has one goal: to disturb. To remind us that we don’t have all the answers. To explode our illusions of being in control. There may be monsters or the supernatural, but there doesn’t have to be. There may be blood, gore, and guts, but there doesn’t have to be.…
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Reading with focus, or the annual theme read…
This year, for the first time, I tried reading around a theme or focus. The focus I picked was mysteries, a genre I have not paid much attention to since I devoured them as a youngster. To tell the truth, I really didn’t get focused until around August, so most of my reading was random…
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What is speculative fiction?
The kind of fiction I like to read the most, and that I tend to focus on here, falls under the broad umbrella of “speculative fiction.” I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the traditional genre labels of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The definitions that are most often applied to these genres seem so limiting,…
Shannon Turlington 