The Pasha of Cuisine


Saygın Ersin - 2016
    Morais's The Hundred-Foot Journey, a sweeping tale of love and the magic of food set during the Ottoman Empire.A Pasha of Cuisine is a rare talent in Ottoman lore. Only two, maybe three are born with such a gift every few centuries. A natural master of gastronomy, he is the sovereign genius who reigns over aromas and flavors and can use them to influence the hearts and minds, even the health, of those who taste his creations. In this fabulous novel, one such chef devises a plot bring down the Ottoman Empire—should he need to—in order to rescue the love of his life from the sultan’s harem.Himself a survivor of the bloodiest massacre ever recorded within the Imperial Palace after the passing of the last sultan, he is spirited away through the palace kitchens, where his potential was recognized. Across the empire, he is apprenticed one by one to the best chefs in all culinary disciplines and trained in related arts, such as the magic of spices, medicine, and the influence of the stars. It is during his journeys that he finds happiness with the beautiful, fiery dancing girl Kamer, and the two make plans to marry. Before they can elope, Kamer is sold into the Imperial Harem, and the young chef must find his way back into the Imperial Kitchens and transform his gift into an unbeatable weapon.

Even Greater Mistakes: Stories


Charlie Jane Anders - 2021
    The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse. Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant. The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

Long Division


Kiese Laymon - 2013
    The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson--but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985 City, along with his friend and love-object, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet protect his family from the Klan.City’s two stories ultimately converge in the mysterious work shed behind his grandmother’s, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance.

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth


Warsan Shire - 2011
    As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own". In 'teaching my mother how to give birth', Warsan's debut pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

The Infinite


Patience Agbabi - 2020
    Rarer still are Leaplings with The Gift – the ability to leap through time. Elle Bíbi-Imbelé Ifíè has The Gift, but she’s never used it. Until now. On her twelfth birthday, Elle and her best friend Big Ben travel to the Time Squad Centre in 2048. Elle has received a mysterious warning from the future. Other Leaplings are disappearing in time – and not everyone at the centre can be trusted. Soon Elle’s adventure becomes more than a race through time. It’s a race against time. She must fight to save the world as she knows it – before it ceases to exist . . .

Signal To Noise


Silvia Moreno-Garcia
    Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said "I love you" with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, discovers how to cast spells using music, and with her friends Sebastian and Daniela will piece together their broken families, and even find love... Two decades after abandoning the metropolis, Meche returns for her estranged father's funeral, reviving memories from her childhood she thought she buried a long time ago. What really happened back then? Is there any magic left?

Aye, and Gomorrah


Samuel R. Delany - 2003
    In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

The Pain Tree


Olive Senior - 2015
    “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers


Alyssa Wong - 2016
    Weather workers. Time benders. When two people so determined have opposing desires, it's hard to say who will win - or even what victory might look like. This stunning, haunting short story from rising star Alyssa Wong explores the depth and fierceness of love and the trauma of family.

Diesel: Ignition


Tyson Hesse - 2016
    With only her broken-down robot and a mysterious flying engine to help her, Dee is sent on a sky bound journey that will take her from the darkest wastelands below the clouds to the brightest capital of her world. Her greatest challenge will be to look beyond her family legacy and create a destiny of her own choosing. Tyson Hesse’s (Bravest Warriors) visually stunning graphic novel examines the importance of family, responsibility, and heroism, all set in a grand, new world!

The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi


Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - 2018
    A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine” —and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice.Ngũgĩ’s epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”

Three Moments of an Explosion


China Miéville - 2009
    Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse's bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.

The Best of Subterranean


William SchaferCherie Priest - 2017
    From Hugo and Nebula winners to Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalists to New York Times bestsellers, this anthology collects 30 pieces of Subterranean’s best, representing diverse, breathtaking short fiction from today’s modern masters.In “Last Breath” Joe Hill spins the tale of a man who collects the breaths of the dying for his haunting museum. Catherynne M. Valente’s “White Lines on a Green Field” chronicles what might happen if Coyote became a small town high school quarterback. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” finds a woman confronting her daughter’s new boyfriend, who happens to be a vampire. Visit the Twilight Zone via George R.R. Martin in the script “The Toys of Caliban”. In Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” the narratives of a journalist and a young man are told in contrast, both impacted by technology and literacy. And in Kelley Armstrong’s “The Screams of Dragons” a boy is declared a changeling and things only get stranger from there. Other pieces visit far-flung space and intimate sick rooms, the futuristic pyramids of the rich and a jungle where a man-eating tiger stalks a village.Contents:- Perfidia (2004) by Lewis Shiner- Game (2012) by Maria Dahvana Headley- The Last Log of the Lachrimosa (2014) by Alastair Reynolds- The Seventeenth Kind (2007) by Michael Marshall Smith- Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind (2007) by Rachel Swirsky- The Pile (2008) by Michael Bishop- The Bohemian Astrobleme (2010) by Kage Baker- Tanglefoot (2008) by Cherie Priest- Hide and Horns (2009) by Joe R. Lansdale- Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul (2011) by Daniel Abraham- Last Breath (2005) by Joe Hill- Younger Women (2011) by Karen Joy Fowler- White Lines on a Green Field (2011) by Catherynne M. Valente- The Least of the Deathly Arts (2012) by Kat Howard- Water Can't Be Nervous (2012) by Jonathan Carroll- Valley of the Girls (2011) by Kelly Link- Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill! (2012) by Hal Duncan- Troublesolving (2009) by Tim Pratt- The Indelible Dark (2013) by William Browning Spencer- The Prayer of Ninety Cats (2013) by Caitlín R. Kiernan- The Crane Method (2011) by Ian R. MacLeod- The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn (2011) by Robert Silverberg- The Toys of Caliban (script) (2005) by George R.R. Martin- The Secret History of the Lost Colony (2008) by John Scalzi- The Screams of Dragons (2014) by Kelley Armstrong- The Dry Spell (2009) by James P. Blaylock- He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes (2014) by Harlan Ellison- A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011) by K.J. Parker- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (2013) by Ted Chiang- A Long Walk Home (2011) by Jay Lake