What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. I can only speak for one childhood—and one adulthood—spent reading Le Guin, but I’d bet my last ...
Tag: Fantasy
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...
Genre Wars, Amazon, and the Market for Heart: Where Do We Go From Here?
In the past year in books, two conversations made a descent into debate—one about genre, and the other about Amazon—without necessarily being cast as two sides of the same story. It is a portrait of ...
The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like ...
Gallantry, Ishiguro-Style
Quaintness is history defanged, a past we render harmless by declaring it naive. It’s a form of retrospection somewhere between a sneer in the rearview mirror and longing’s backward glance, one ...
Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with ...
Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he ...
The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what ...
What’s the Matter with Dystopia?
Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power. If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be ...
Behind the Dungeon Master’s Screen
From Dickens’s David Copperfield and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to Elena Ferrante’s Elena Greco, we are familiar with the fictional protagonist as novelist, or as novelist-to-be. Recently, 40 years ...
Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny ...
The Essential Gratuitousness of César Aira
It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory ...
Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of ...
Odd Angles
Rjurik Davidson’s debut novel Unwrapped Sky is set in the fictional city of Caeli-Amur, a complex mixture of ancient Rome, steampunk industry, H. P. Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh, and Davidson’s ...
Baggy Monsters
In 2012, the New Yorker hosted a roundtable discussion on the question “Is Television the New Cinema?” Two years later, the New York Times asked, “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?” ...
Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in ...
Queer Magic
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek both use magic to imagine solutions to childhood anxieties: What do you do when your family doesn’t feel ...
Dreaming in the Multiverse
The American Southwest has long been associated with unsavory scientific research, from Manhattan Project nuclear experiments at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the only recently acknowledged ...