The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen

THE BRIGHT SESSIONS is a trilogy of spinoff novels set in the world of the podcast of the same name, both media written by Lauren Shippen. I am generally a fiction podcast fan, so when the third book in the trilogy – Some Faraway Place – hit my radar, something about it sounded familiar. Turns out, on a long road trip a few years ago, I had listened to several episodes of the podcast. I remembered liking it so I wanted to give the books a try.

The Infinite Noise (2019) centres on Caleb, the kind of all-American 16-year-old boy you only get in tooth-achingly sweet teen dramas (of which I am an occasional connoisseur; you can’t blame me for my taste when Hilary Duff was my idol as a tween). Caleb is trying – and largely succeeding – to navigate the high school experience... Read More

It's the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!

What's the best book you read in November 2022 and why did you love it? It doesn't have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material.

Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.

And don't forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.

One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:

a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
a book from Read More

Lindsey Eagar serves up eight fantasy books featuring bread, bread-adjacent foods, and/or baking, on Tor.com.

Giveaway: One commenter chosen at random will win a copy of Even Though I Knew the End  by C.L. Polk.

Vulture has an overview of the life of the amazing Octavia Butler, written by E. Alex Jung.

We’re heading into nomination season for the 2023 awards, and Cora Buhlert is introducing podcasts. This column highlights Tales From the Trunk.

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The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

A little while back, I was very pleased to read my first collection in the genre known as “weird-menace” fiction, which genre mainly dealt, back in the 1930s and early ‘40s, with lurid, violent, supernatural stories that usually turned out to have rather mundane – and often far-fetched – explanations. That collection was Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields, a 2014 release from the publisher Ramble House. I enjoyed my first weird-menace exposure so well that I determined to seek out some similar fare from Ramble House’s immense catalog, and happily picked another winner; namely, The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wy... Read More

Have a good day tomorrow everybody, if you celebrate the holiday or it you don’t.

Giveaway: One commenter chosen at random will get a copy of Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi.

Greg Bear, Nebula Award winner, passed away on November 20, 2022.

Snoopy is part of Project Artemis. At least, a stuffed Snoopy dog is on the lunar vehicle.

The Onion posted this satirical article about Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and his avatar. Oh, come on, they just wrote what we were all thinking.

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Marion: I read The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach. I enjoyed it while I was reading it; I don’t know what I think of it yet though. I finally started a 2019 Hugo winner, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, and I’m so glad I finally did! This is everything I love in a book so far! And, apart from genre, Empty Shells, The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City is helping me learn more than I ever thought possible about incubators, hatcheries, political chicanery, chickens and eggs.

Sandy: Moi? Having recently read and enjoy... Read More

Joe Golem: Occult Detective (volume 1) by Mike Mignola (writer), Christopher Golden (writer), Patric Reynolds (artist), Clem Robins (letterer), and Dave Stewart (colorist)

In the first volume of Joe Golem: Occult Detective, we get two stories: a three-part tale called “The Rat Catcher” and a two-part one called “The Sunken Dead.” Taking place in an alternative 1965, these comics are situated in the "Drowned City," a post-flood New York city, in which canals and make-shift bridges out of boards crisscross the city's landscape. The art is dark and moody, and the images are as murky as the water flooding the city. It's a beautifully haunting set of images.

Joe, who is plagued by dreams of witches and a large Witch-hunting golem, appears to be a human private investigator working for the elderly Mr. Church to fight against occult forces in the cit... Read More

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

Book Two in N.K. Jemisin’s GREAT CITIES duology, 2022’s The World We Make is full of action, suspense, humor and good fun. That doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t serious (the continued existence of our reality), but as she did in The City We Became, Jemisin lets herself have fun with a self-aware New York and its human avatars. In spite of the seriousness of the plot, this book is lighter in tone than the first one.

Here's a brief recap with a risk of spoilers for The City We Became. New York City woke to awareness, a living city, with human avatars — one representing each borough and one who represents the whole city. Neek (NYC), a gay, homeless graffiti ar... Read More

Does anybody have a turkey stuffing recipe that doesn’t call for onions? Seriously. If you do, and you’re willing to share, please put the link in the comments. Thank you!

Z-Library has been seized by the Feds for pirating and copyright infringement.

While overall the election results seem to lean toward support of democracy, in a few places, libraries were defunded. If you think education, reading, and books are important, this might concern you.

It looks like in-person or at least hybrid Read More

Stonefish by Scott R. Jones

2020’s horror novel Stonefish by Scott R. Jones is not your basic horror novel. I tend to forget that, like every other genre, horror has an array of subgenres, styles, and tropes. Even so, it’s hard for me to “sum up” what kind of horror story Stonefish is. I’m settling for futuristic-dystopian-gnostic-phantasmagorical weird horror, with Sasquatch.

Climate change and leaps in high technology have created the everyday world of Den Secord, who writes things for his generation’s version of the internet. Secord has an editor so I’m calling him a journalist. (“Content-provider” might be more accurate.) Den lives in a plural community called a crèche. Social changes have been driven by the noönet, which lets people interact with each other’s minds and emotions directly, in a vast network. You might think that would bring out a... Read More