Tag: Slipstream
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (2014) A Christian preacher travels to another planet, Oasis, to minister to the alien natives and finds himself becoming more distant from his wife, left behind on Earth where society seems to…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (2014) Mitchell’s latest novel is a genre-bending epic spanning sixty years about the people whose fates are altered by an ongoing war between immortals. The story begins in 1984 England as fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes is…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013) A writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia finds a package washed ashore from Japan containing a diary and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013) Ursula Todd is born on a snowy night in 1910 and dies before she can draw her first breath; then she is born again, on that same night, and lives; and again; and again.…
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Recommended Reading: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
This month I am recommending The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. When Harry August dies, he is reborn as himself at the same time and to the same parents, but with the memories of his previous lives intact. When he learns that another person like him is manipulating history for his own selfish ends…
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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: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
I absolutely loved A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. A writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia finds a package washed ashore from Japan containing a diary and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the teenage girl who wrote it. This novel has all the elements I enjoy,…