Mar 11
2007
American comic book writer and artist Eric Wight is the author of My Dead Girlfriend, one of our Book of the Week picks, and a contributing author to Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of the Esc...
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Feb 25
2007
While Dan Simmons is probably best known for his Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi novel Hyperion, we here at Wordcandy prefer his sprawling, Greek-mythology-influenced novel Illium, the subject of one of...
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Feb 15
2007
I have loads of horror/fantasy novels on my shelves—everything from Carmilla to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell—but Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize is unique: it stands alone as the only book that has ever inspired me to genuinely freak out. I’m a pretty unflappable person, but when I saw the words “chilled baby squirrels, simmered in orange brandy, bathed in honey cream sauce” on the restaurant dessert menu featured on page 174, I needed to lie down...
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Feb 12
2007
Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of the YA dark fantasy novel Tantalize, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews, is an Austin, Texas-based author noted for her stories’ cultural diversity...
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Jan 30
2007
Vivian Vande Velde has written dozens of excellent fantasy novels and short stories for children and teenagers, including Heir Apparent (one of our Book of the Week picks) and Companions of the Ni...
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Jan 11
2007
Kat Richardson is the Seattle-based author of the Greywalker books. This urban fantasy series features an enjoyable blend of horror and action, and has been the subject of two of our Featured Boo...
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Dec 12
2006
Laurell K. Hamilton’s most recent book, Mistral’s Kiss, the fifth title in the Meredith Gentry series, is better than I expected. It’s not as good as the first two installments in the series, but Mistral’s Kiss has some decent action scenes, ends on a tantalizing cliffhanger, and...
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Nov 13
2006
I always encourage comic book-wary female readers to try Bill Willingham’s Fables. Not only is it unquestionably a story for grown-ups, it’s one of the few American comics I've encountered that boasts a truly involving romantic storyline. I love almost everything about this series—except for the internal artwork, which has consistently been competent but pedestrian...
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Sep 7
2006
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the excellent "Bartimaeus Trilogy", a fantasy/alternate history series starring a terrorist, a fairly unpleasant boy, and a very sympathetic demon. In Stroud’s un...
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Aug 18
2006
M. T. Anderson’s self-described “thrilling tales” are sure to delight anyone with a nodding familiarity with kids’ detective fiction. Whales on Stilts! and The Attack of the Linoleum Lederhosen p...
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May 14
2006
When I started researching Elizabeth Marie Pope, I was shocked to discover that she had written The Sherwood Ring in 1958 and The Perilous Guard in 1974 (and then I was totally bummed to find that...
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May 14
2006
Playwright and novelist Alexandre Dumas is so irrevocably linked in my mind with images of pre-Revolutionary France that it’s always a shock to remember that he actually wrote his books in the mid...
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May 14
2006
John Christopher (real name: Samuel Youd) is an English science fiction writer. Mr. Christopher has written more than 70 novels under a variety of pen names, but he is best known as the author of...
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May 11
2006
As post-apocalyptic visions of the future go, the world in John Christopher’s Tripod series isn’t so bad. In some ways, it’s almost idyllic—a world without war or famine, where people are comfortably assured of their own destiny. But there is one major downside: as soon as you turn fourteen, you’re sucked up into the belly of a three-legged, alien-controlled machine called a Tripod, and you’re not returned until a mind-controlling metal cap has been fused onto your skull...
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Apr 19
2006
Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe has three books currently translated into English: Crossfire, All She Was Worth, and Shadow Family. Miyabe’s novels are an intriguing mix of horror, mystery, and pol...
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Apr 19
2006
Although I’ve seen several critics comparing Carrie Vaughn’s new werewolf series to the Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books, I think they have more in common with Charlaine Harris’s stories or...
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Apr 17
2006
Jim Butcher is the author of The Dresden Files novels, a series about Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, a wizard-slash-P.I. who’s doing his best to save the people of Chicago from various supe...
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Apr 11
2006
Suzanne Collins is the author of the critically acclaimed Underland Chronicles. Collins’s series is an Alice-in-Wonderland-on-crack story about an eleven year old boy named Gregor who tumbles thr...
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Apr 11
2006
Pretty much the only things that went through my head while reading Suzanne Collins’s novel Gregor the Overlander were My God, this book is awesome! and There’s a sequel, right?. It’s been a long...
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Mar 21
2006
Edgar Allen Poe was a brilliant novelist, poet and editor. His writings (particularly his most famous poem, 1845’s The Raven) have become such an integral part of our cultural identity that you c...
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Feb 18
2006
The works of Mervyn Peake, poet, illustrator, and author of the children’s story Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and the fantasy/horror Gormenghast trilogy, fall somewhere between Edward Gorey...
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Feb 18
2006
Megan Whalen Turner is the author of the excellent (possibly ongoing?) children’s fantasy series featuring The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. Borrowing freely from Greek my...
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Jan 28
2006
More than one critic has compared the English poet Christina Rossetti to Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (A character, by the way, that I have always longed to kick in...
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Jan 28
2006
Most people don’t realize that James M. Cain, the taciturn, womanizing author of such hardboiled pulp classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, originally trained to become ...
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Jan 24
2006
Stephenie Meyer is the author of Twilight, the only vampire novel with the distinction of being set in the town of Forks, Washington. Unfortunately Ms. Meyer just Googled Forks, rather than bothe...
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Jan 24
2006
Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight appealed to me for two reasons—I liked the cover, and my mom mentioned that it was a vampire story set in the town of Forks, Washington. If you’ve ever been to...
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Jan 11
2006
We would not be the first to compare Stephen King with Charles Dickens. Both were staggeringly prolific, both frequently used an obnoxiously faux-avuncular tone to address their audience, and bot...
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Dec 26
2005
The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen. (Yes, nineteen. Take THAT, Christopher Pa...
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Dec 26
2005
H. G. Wells was the author of numerous science fiction masterpieces, including The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Time Machine. Although a pacifist, Wells enjoyed war games ...
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Dec 26
2005
Holly Black is the author of a series of excellent YA horror/fantasy novels: Valiant, Tithe, and Ironside, one of our Featured Book picks. Ms. Black is also one of the authors (along with Tony Di...
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