We’re talking about Emily Tesh’s new book, The Incandescent, which is out today. Set in a British magical school, it gives us the overworked administrative point-of-view of running a magical school, to what felt like, to us, a very millennial-coded story that was fun. Your hosts are Steph Kingston (@StephOKingston), Christina Ladd (@christinaladd), and Joshua …
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie feels fresh while still retaining the style of writing the author has become famous for. It’s set in a new world, our world in an alternate timeline Europe, where the church wages war with elves that eat the flesh of man and are waiting for their chance to wage war …
Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang is written like a folktale, not about slaying dragons but finding yourself again after you’ve lost who you were to protect yourself. It’s a tale of identity, isolation, and culture. The fact that its main character, Kunlin Yeva, is a famous dragon slayer is less crucial …
The end of Arc 1 of Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive is here, and Wind and Truth feels enormous, metaphorically and physically. The release of The Way of Kings feels like another lifetime, and yet just yesterday, as the end of the first arc seemed so far away in 2010. Now we’ve reached the midpoint where one …
On this Off the Books, we are interviewing Sung-il Kim, author of Blood of the Old Kings, and Anton Hur (Toward Eternity, transl. Blood of the Old Kings, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-Hee) to discuss Kim’s book, falling empires, publishing, translations, technofeudalism, and what’s next for The …
Throughout The Traitor of Redwinter, the follow-up to The Daughter of Redwinter by Ed McDonald, dread seeped from the story, page by page. A title with the word traitor in it, with a main character whose power to see the spirits of the dead, comes with the punishment of death, and all the emotional baggage …
Anahrod was a teenager when the dragons declared her a traitor and had her executed, but she survived and thrived in the Deep jungles far below the peaks where dragons ruled over society. Her past comes back to haunt her many years later as her survival is discovered, and the First Dragon, Neveranimas, wants to …
Fantasy has always had a gift for being malleable to incorporate other genres of fiction from horror, historical, mystery, folklore, fairy tale, humor, romance, suspense, and westerns, so why not slice of life? It has been a staple for anime for years and has become quite popular as a video game genre, so it’s about …
Who is Nona? That’s the question you may ask yourself repeatedly throughout Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, the third installment of The Locked Tomb series. Like the two books before it, you’ll be asking yourself many questions at first, but Nona the Ninth gives far more answers than before. Like you, Nona doesn’t know who …