A friendly sci-fi blog pointed out that November marks the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s oneironautic graphic novel epic The Sandman. If you need further motivation to check out the series, the blog goes on to list the five ways The Sandman changed the world, and the author isn’t just talking about the numerous spin-offs [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘fantasy’
October 24, 2008
Congratulations!
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting the American “scary fantasy”/horror novelist Frederick Durbin. Mr. Durbin was visiting Pittsburgh from Japan, where he has been teaching English at the university level for almost 20 years. My friends contacted him after reading and loving his best-known work Dragonfly, a Christmas Carol-like homage [...]
June 30, 2008
The Master of Visual Fantasy
Frank Frazetta paints worlds. Enjoying a career that has spanned more than six decades, fantasy painter Frazetta has done more for the sales of paperback novels than almost any other artist. His brilliant and evocative paintings on Lancer Paperbacks’ Conan novels first released in the 1960’s invigorated the genre of adventure fantasy. In his prime his prodigious [...]
May 15, 2008
Shelf Examination: Sci-fi and Fantasy
First in a series of posts designed to help you make friends with a novel you might not otherwise have met. Designed for folks who love to read, but hate hopping back and forth on one foot in front of the shelf, hoping the parking meter won’t expire before they’ve made a decision.
The Book: Freedom and Necessity, Emma Bull [...]
May 14, 2008
Did You Hear the Dice?
You may or may not be familiar with the term “gamer fiction”. For those who don’t know, gamer fiction is a sub-genre of fiction usually associated with science-fiction, horror, or fantasy. Gamer fiction comes in many forms, but is most often found in the paperback or trade paperback format. Even before online and console video [...]
March 26, 2008
The “It’s all good,” all-you-can-read, Eleventh Stack book buffet
Frequently, we library folks are asked to recommend a “good” book. While we’re always happy to do this, the definition of “good” sometimes becomes a sticking point.
For example, in my personal readerly universe, the prospect of spending a few hours with Chicago’s only practicing wizard, Harry Dresden, is decidedly “good.” You, however, may prefer old-school [...]
