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New York I love you but you’re bringing me down

The City We Became by NK Jemisin

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The City We Became is a love song to New York and all its messy parts. I imagine (hope) that part of NK Jemisin’s writing process for this book was wandering around all the different boroughs of the city, watching and listening to people. It is the first book of a “Great Cities” trilogy, but since according to her bio Jemisin actually lives and works in Brooklyn I am curious if her other books are going to have this level of adoration for the cities […]

Annual Short Story Collection Round-up

New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps by Paula Guran & Others

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Because I’d never ask my students to do something I wouldn’t do, and also because NK Jemisin highly suggests reading short stories to get better at writing long stories, I try to read a short story collection every year. For whatever reason, no matter how good the writing is, short story collections take me EONS to finish, and New York Fantastic was no exception. With twenty stories by different speculative authors, New York Fantastic offers a wide variety of story types and a nice selection of award […]

The Best of the Trilogy

The Stone Sky by NK Jemisin

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  While the whole Broken Earth series was incredibly deserving of the Hugo award, the Stone Sky, in particular, was a feat of literary perfection (at least in my opinion). As I’ve said with both of Jemisin’s previous novels, her ability to successfully deploy second person POV continued to astound me in this last chapter of her epic, and while hints are given in book two of who this narrative voice is, it all comes roaring to the surface in book three. As with any trilogy, […]

Stone and Ash and Magic

The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin

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The more of Jemisin’s works I read, the more I fall in love with her craft. The Obelisk Gate is book two in her Broken Earth Trilogy, and even though I’m normally not the biggest fan of any middle book in a trilogy, I enjoyed this book even more than her first one. We pick up the story almost exactly where we left off in book one, and follow Essun as she pivots her focus from finding her daughter, Nassun, to assisting the orogenes of Castrima […]

Samantha’s hand were still red from the cold, the skin over her knuckles taut and dry.

Ark by Veronica Roth

Emergency Skin by NK Jemisin

Forward by Blake Crouch

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Mostly I got this collection because I was interested in some short stories for walks and I like the mix of authors in general. Blake Crouch tells us in the intro/outro to each story the basic purpose of the collection, and like all such genre anthologies, it’s a mixed bag. The audio productions are really good with Evan Rachel Wood, Jason Isaacs, Rosa Salazar, David Harbour, Steven Strait, and Janina Gavankar are the readers of these stories. Each come in around an hour and all […]

Once upon a time I didn’t think I could write short stories.

How Long Til Black Future Month? by NK Jemisin

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I was a little leery of this one for two distinct reasons. One, when an author tells us in the first pages that they don’t like or know how to write short stories…uh oh. And two, I might be one of the few people who didn’t particularly enjoy The Broken Earth (first) book(s). I might go back to them now, because I did enjoy this one. I was worried of getting my time wasted with what I misperceived as a possible dilettante attitude about short […]



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