Crafting a fantasy or science fiction world requires both creativity and structure, with a prerequisite care in its conception required if one wishes to succeed in suspending their readers’ disbelief. The essence of world-building lies not just in avoiding excessive exposition or sparse detail but in the foundational design itself. This is essential, for the […]
“Music for New Bodies,” premiering Saturday at Rice University in Houston, sets Jorie Graham’s poetry to music with a chamber group of instruments and electronics, as well as five vocalists. Peter Sellars wanted to know more. He was in San Francisco a few years ago, attending a performance of “ The No One’s Rose ,” […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright strange. In Cheever’s short story ‘The Worm in the Apple’, the narrator […]
‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story, which runs to just a few pages, involves just two characters: an unnamed husband and wife. The husband has received a letter from an associate simply identified as Jimmy; the wife seeks to know what the contents […]
Credit…Rebecca Clarke “I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.” Credit…Rebecca Clarke What books are on your night stand? My night stand doesn’t speak to me anymore. That’s because, here’s the […]
Gary Clement Children’s books have long featured pint-size heroes overcoming fierce antagonists: ogres, witches and big bad wolves. So it comes as no surprise that a similar drama occurs in these three stories. Only here, children are up against something far more complex: their parents. These moms and pops — by turns cruel, overprotective, distracted […]
Most students are running behind in success, and that comes with marks. We all know that the common process of achieving success in life is mostly dependent on academic performance and prominence. In this modern world, everything is getting competitive. Students and workers are getting bumped up with new challenges and opportunities from work to […]
April is showering us with two excellent SFF collections right at the start of the month, which both feel like poking around in the brains of their respective authors (Cixin Liu and Ann Leckie). If you’re more in the mood for a novel to get lost in—maybe even, weather permitting, at a café or the […]
If the human infant is primitive so is its earliest vice, jealousy—probably the most innate vice of all. First comes love, then jealousy, an unholy, uninvited symbiosis. Once there was a great gaunt dog called Griselda, who lay, snarling softly, in an alcove beside the blacksmith’s furnace. With clash and with clangor he shod Bonny […]
In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject “Furby Alert.” According to the Post , the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including “toys, such as ‘Furbys,’ with built-in recorders that repeat the audio […]
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