Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the unexpected curiosities of growing older is watching the train of "rediscovered" books come back around for a second try. In my teens, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men , by a Belgian-Jewish author named Jacqueline Harpman. A gender-based dystopia about a young girl who grows up in an underground bunker with a group of women, it was a dark, elliptical novel (one that many critics have tied to Harpman's experience of fleeing the Nazis as a child). I didn't particularly get on with it, but it has lingered with me for decades. Flash forward an undisclosed number of years, and I Who Have Never Known Men has become a BookTok sensation and a runaway bestseller. Naturally the response by publishers is to see if the rest of Harpman's voluminous catalogue might prove a similar hit. They are now testing the waters by reissuing a novel that was already translated into English in the 90s, Orlanda . Pitched at a very different emotional register than I...

"The Doors of Durin" by J.R.R. Tolkien This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. It's Hannukah, and for me this has always been a time to revisit The Lord of the Rings . I don't reread it every year, but always when the candles are lit and the days grow darker, I find myself feeling the urge to return to this story....

After I published my effusive review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances , I received a comment from Tchaikovsky on twitter noting that he intended to continue writing in the novel's world without continuing directly from its story. This made sense to me, both because the breadth and complexity of the world revealed in City could clearly support many different stories in many different settings, and because the novel that City most reminded me of, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, had similarly spawned standalone sequels in separate settings. Two years later, we are four books deep into what has become known as the Tyrant Philosophers sequence (with a fifth book coming next year), and the project that seems to be emerging from this series feels more complex than what I had originally imagined. While each of the novels in this series stands alone and has a different setting and protagonist to the others, there are progressions that become clear when you r...

There's something almost irresistibly appealing about the musical biopic. It combines melodrama and genuine accomplishment. It conveys profound importance—this is about music, after all, the kind of music that worms its way into people's minds and hearts and becomes part of the set dressing of their psyches—while at the same time being unbelievably trivial and soapy, reveling in the bed-hopping and drug habits of a bunch of self-absorbed people of moderate talent. It was almost inevitable that fiction writers would begin embracing the form, as seen in books-turned-TV-series like Daisy Jones and the Six , but I don't think I expected science fiction to get in on the action. Or, at least, not in the form that Jordan Prosser has done in his debut novel Big Time , which is making its way to UK publishers this year after its Australian publication in 2024. For Prosser, the gargantuan importance of art, and the silliness of the people who make it, are both shades with which he i...

I waited most of September for my review of The End of the World As We Know It to appear on Locus 's website, and now my two other reviews from the August issue have both turned up in quick succession. First up, The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, a Ruritanian fantasy in which a court magician must save a pair of star-crossed young lovers. There's always been a certain "you know it when you see it" quality to YA fiction, and all the more so in the decades since it has become popular for adult readers to consume it alongside its intended audience. Louis Sachar, author of the beloved YA classic Holes (1998) as well as a raft of novels for younger readers, describes The Magician of Tiger Castle as his first novel for adults. Which of course encourages the critic to read the novel with an eye towards identifying those aspects of it that distinguish one reading category from another. Is it simply that Anatole, our narrator, is a man nearing middle age, a self-d...

Like a lot of genre fans of my generation—and perhaps several generations before and after—I had a Stephen King phase. The adage that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen might just as easily be applied to the mega-prolific horror-meister, who, besides being a gifted scribe with an eye for both the sentimental and the absurd, is a good entry point for young readers looking to explore darker, more disturbing topics. And, also like a lot of King fans, I reached a point in my early twenties where King's work started delivering diminishing returns, and where other authors—some of them, like Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier, he had originally pointed me towards—turned out to have more to offer. I am—once again—most likely not alone in being encouraged to revisit and reevaluate King by the excellent podcast Just King Things , whose hosts, Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunzelman, are reading and discussing King's works in publication order. It's been interesting to be remi...