This is a short story/YA book written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by a full cast in the audiobook. I suppose we get a full cast in exchange for the illustrations we do not get to see. It is an extended and alternate take on Sleeping Beauty, as you may have guessed. And if you know Neil Gaiman, you may have also guessed that nothing is straightforward here. The story seems straightforward enough – the sleeping curse on the kingdom is spreading, and Snow White, the queen […]
Endless Philosophizing Doesn’t Make a Story
On the surface, this story collection is full of things I love: fantastical beings lurking under familiar places. But as I started reading I found that these stories really weren’t for me. The common thread among the stories in this collection was fascinating, as almost every story contains some measure of supernatural force acting upon the characters. Cities we might think ourselves well acquainted with have become the breeding grounds of mysterious creatures. These inevitably collide with the humans that live there, resulting in strange […]
Not just Coyote
So it turns out that I have downloaded/bought about eleventybillion titles for my Kindle and read less than half of them (I don’t feel too guilty about this, because books and also because a lot of them were freebies). Despite that lack of guilt, I’ve decided I need to go through and, well, make my way through all of them. At least in this case it wasn’t a total mistake.
The power of imagery and story
My friend K, who is specializing in short fiction in her doctoral work, suggested Season of Migration to the North as something I might be interested in rotating for my global literature courses. I don’t always find novellas satisfying, but sometimes they are handy when you try to fit in a lot of literature for your courses. Plus, in broadening my literary horizons beyond the Western canon, I am interested in the way writers have been translated into English and confront exotic “Othered” myths about […]