Three years after the mammoth success (in every sense) of 1Q84, the newest work from Japanese literary superstar Haruki Murakami is finally available in English. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which famously sold over a million copies the week it came out in Japan, drops the author’s trademarked mystical, metafictional, sometimes maddening […]
Footnotes in fiction are a tricky business. Handled poorly, they can be the bane of a reader’s existence (1). But in the right hands and the right circumstances, footnotes open up entirely new narrative possibilities (2). Footnotes can add context, build lore and history, introduce new characters, misdirect where desired, or even just make you […]
From The Time Machine to Kirk and Uhura‘s unprecedented kiss, speculative fiction has long concerned itself with breaking barriers and exploring issues of race, inequality, and injustice. The fantastical elements of genre, from alien beings to magical ones, allow writers to confront controversial issues in metaphor, granting them a subversive power that often goes unheralded. On this, the […]
These days, I find it absurdly easy to slip into despair. (Don’t worry, this post is going to be fun, I promise.) It’s all too common to turn on the news or look at Twitter and then spend the rest of the day staring into the abyss, suffering from a kind of horrified paralysis. (I mean it, this is […]
