Book picks similar to
Oracles: A Pilgrimage by Catherynne M. Valente
poetry
fantasy
fiction
mythology
The Wizard Knight
Gene Wolfe - 2005
given a hero's adult body and named Able. Though forced to act as a man, inside he is still a boy, even as he sets off to find his destined sword and become a knight. repeatedly tries to seduce him), and serves the mercurial dragon king Arnthor in a was that could end everything.
By Light We Knew Our Names
Anne Valente - 2014
Across thirteen stories, this collection explores the thin border between magic and grief.
Press Start to Play
Daniel H. WilsonSeanan McGuire - 2015
The humble, pixelated games of the ‘70s and ‘80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become the cultural icons around which pop culture revolves.PRESS START TO PLAY is an anthology of stories inspired by video games: stories that attempt to recreate the feel of a video game in prose form; stories that play with the concepts common (or exclusive) to video games; and stories about the creation of video games and/or about the video games—or the gamers—themselves.These stories will appeal to anyone who has interacted with games, from hardcore teenaged fanatics, to men and women who game after their children have gone to bed, to your well-meaning aunt who won’t stop inviting you to join her farm-based Facebook games.At the helm of this project are Daniel H. Wilson—bestselling novelist and expert in artificial intelligence—and John Joseph Adams—bestselling, Hugo Award-nominated editor of more than a dozen science fiction/fantasy anthologies and series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (volume one forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2015). Together, they have drawn on their wide-ranging contacts to assemble an incredibly talented group of authors who are eager to attack the topic of video games from startling and fascinating angles.Under the direction of an A.I. specialist and a veteran editor, the anthology will expose readers to a strategically chosen mix of stories that explore novel video game concepts in prose narratives, such as save points, kill screens, gold-farming, respawning, first-person shooters, unlocking achievements, and getting “pwned.” Likewise, each of our authors is an accomplished specialist in areas such as science fiction, fantasy, and techno-thrillers, and many have experience writing for video games professionally.Combining unique viewpoints and exacting realism, this anthology promises to thrill generations of readers, from those who grew up with Atari 2600s to the console and PC gamers of today.
The Quotable Doctor Who: Wise Words from Across Space and Time
Cavan Scott - 2014
Now for the first time, fans can enjoy a plethora of their favorite memorable quotes and wisest words spoken throughout the series from the first episode to the most recent season starring Matt Smith. The Official Quotable Doctor Who is an insightful and unique look into the exciting universe of Doctor Who like never before!The quotes will be compiled into nine chapters that each focus on a reoccurring theme or subject from the series. The book includes hundreds of the series' most quoted words on the human race, tools, power, corruption, war, space travel, historical celebrities the Doctor and his encounters, and many more. It will also feature running artwork by popular Doctor Who Magazine illustrator Ben Morris. This book truly is a must have for the ultimate Doctor Who fan.
The Forest of Enchantments
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - 2019
In this brilliant retelling, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni places Sita at the centre of the novel: this is Sita’s version. The Forest of Enchantments is also a very human story of some of the other women in the epic, often misunderstood and relegated to the margins: Kaikeyi, Surpanakha, Mandodari. A powerful comment on duty, betrayal, infidelity and honour, it is also about women’s struggle to retain autonomy in a world that privileges men, as Chitra transforms an ancient story into a gripping, contemporary battle of wills. While the Ramayana resonates even today, she makes it more relevant than ever, in the underlying questions in the novel: How should women be treated by their loved ones? What are their rights in a relationship? When does a woman need to stand up and say, ‘Enough!’
Little Weirds
Jenny Slate - 2019
Inside you will find:× The smell of honeysuckle× Heartbreak× A French-kissing rabbit× A haunted house× Death× A vagina singing sad old songs× Young geraniums in an ancient castle× Birth× A dog who appears in dreams as a spiritual guide× Divorce× Electromagnetic energy fields× Emotional horniness× The ghost of a sea captain× And moreI hope you enjoy these little weirds.Love,Jenny Slate
Hera Lindsay Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird - 2016
this impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl………with many beneficial thoughts and feelings………with themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is………juxtaposing many classical and modern breezesBird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog………or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert………this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness………heartbreaking and charged with trees………without once sacrificing the forest………Whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parent’s sleepout………………or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram………this is the book for you………………………heroically and compulsively stupid………………………………………………………………………………whipping you once again into medieval sunlight.
The Complete Krondor's Sons 2-Book Collection: Prince of the Blood, The King's Buccaneer
Raymond E. Feist - 2000
Feist. This bundle includes the complete Krondor Sons series.The bundle includes: Prince of the Blood (1), The King’s Buccaneer (2).Set between the rift wars, these two novels explore Midkemia beyond the borders of the Kingdom of the Isles.Prince of Blood is set twenty years after the events in The Riftwar Saga, and follows the adventures that erupt when a group of powerful nobles attempt to overthrow the Empress of Kesh. In the centre of the conflict are the two princes of Krondor – Borric and Erland.In The King’s Buccaneer, Prince Nicholas and Squire Harry set sail to visit Martin in Crydee. However, shortly after their arrival, Crydee is brutally attacked. With the castle reduced to ruins, the townspeople slaughtered, and two young noblewomen – friends of Nicholas – abducted, the two young men must venture further from the familiar landmarks of their home than ever before.While in pursuit of the invaders, Nicholas learns that there is even more at stake than the fate of his friends…
A Tangled Web
Mercedes Lackey - 2012
But in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, nothing's ever simple—and the wrong blonde goddess is stolen by mistake, leaving Prince Leopold without his new bride. At least until he braves the realm of the dead to get her back...A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms novella. Previously published in the Harvest Moon anthology.
Fall of Cthulhu Omnibus
Michael Alan Nelson - 2015
Lovecraft pitting some of his most famous creations against each other.For the first time ever, Michael Alan Nelson’s Lovecraftian epic is collected in one spellbinding volume! When gods go to war, what must mankind do to survive? To know the answer, you will take a journey to the very limits of consciousness…and beyond. Do not miss the complete acclaimed series!
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
Alice Walker - 1985
She has said that her poems-even the happy ones-emerge from an accumulation of sadness, when she stands again “in the sunlight.” “[This collection] has two fine strengths-a music that comes along sometimes, as sad and cheery as a lonely woman’s whistling-and Miss Walker’s own tragicomic gifts” (New York Times Book Review).
Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Díaz - 2020
Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black
E.B. Hudspeth - 2013
A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world’s most celebrated mythological beasts—mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind? The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.
The Cosmic Puppets
Philip K. Dick - 1957
But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind—and never did. He also discovers that in this Millgate Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape. Unable to leave, Ted struggles to find the reason for such disturbing incongruities, but before long, he finds himself in the midst of a struggle between good and evil that stretches far beyond the confines of the valley.Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Whispering Wind
Frederick Forsyth - 2000
The favour is returned when the scout is saved by the Cheyenne and given mercy, but when he falls in love with the girl he saved he knows that the tribe will never allow them to be together. They escape, but are forced to abandon their flight when they encounter an omen telling them that she is pledged to another. This frontier tale soon becomes a violent present day manhunt through the Wild West.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Veteran.