Reading Strange Matters celebrates of some of the best in fantasy from the twenty-first century. Two dozen essays discuss important books from the new millennium which mix wild imagination and literary sophistication. First published at Blackgate.com, these pieces collectively show the breadth of modern fantasy. Texts examined include Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, Ali Smith’s Hotel World, Stella Gemmell’s The City, and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.
One essay, on Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk, appears here for the first time. See where speculative fiction’s going, and see some of the new worlds opening up in literature! The future’s being written right now — and you can read about the strange matter of that writing here.
This edition is a .zip file which includes Reading Strange Matters in ePub, mobi, and PDF formats.
Essays included in this book:
Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction
A Ghost Put to Good Use: Ali Smith’s Hotel World
The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Precise Transgressions: Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires
The Thinning of Thinness: Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar
Raising the Golden Fortress in Oil Country: Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush
Unconcerned with Genre: Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
The Opposite of the Uncanny: Wonder and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
Cosmological Intertextuality, or, T.S. Eliot by way of Michael Moorcock: Hal Duncan’s The Book of All Hours, or, Vellum and Ink
Learning to Fly: Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk
An Art Of Harmony: Mary Gentle’s Black Opera
Qualities of Richness: Steph Swainston’s The Castle Omnibus
Wandering Myths on Motorcycles: Drew Hayden Taylor’s tales of Otter Lake, The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
Digging Up The Dead: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black
Underneath the Centre of the Universe: Leah Bobet’s Above
Animal Stories: Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story
Urban Areas: Stella Gemmell’s The City
Urban Fantasy Gothic: Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride
American Fabulation and Literary Fantasy: Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio
Voices and Echoes: J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another
Narrative Dance: Darcy Tamayose’s Odori
Stellar Archetypes: Greer Gilman and Cloud & Ashes
Reshaping the Undescribable Forest: Brian Catling’s The Vorrh
Every Kind of Story, All At Once: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence