Ellen Klages | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

SFF Author: Ellen Klages

Ellen Klages’ The Green Glass Sea won the Scott O’Dell Award and the New Mexico Book Award. White Sands, Red Menace won the California and New Mexico Book awards. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula Award and “Wakulla Springs,” co-authored with Andy Duncan, was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

Click here for more stories by Ellen Klages.

Passing Strange: Simply irresistible

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

Ellen Klages’ short novel Passing Strange (2017) is a beautiful, fantastical melding of history, romance, magic and revenge, set against a meticulously researched San Francisco of 1940. At just over 200 hundred pages, the story follows six women in the city, each one in some way an outcast. Add a present-day story frame that includes secret passages in Chinatown, pulp magazine covers of the 1940s, and an elaborate scam, and for many of us you have something irresistible.

I loved Passing Strange from the cover by Gregory Manchess.

Wicked Wonders: The wonder and magic in our lives

Wicked Wonders by Ellen Klages

In Wicked Wonders (2017), Ellen Klages has assembled an impressive collection of her short stories. Although almost all of these stories have been previously published (the sole exception is “Woodsmoke”), most of them appeared in anthologies and are unlikely to be familiar to most readers. These fourteen stories run the gamut from non-fiction (“The Scary Ham”) to straight fiction (“Hey, Presto,” “Household Management” and “Woodsmoke”) to science fiction and fantasy. They’re often bittersweet or wistful and frequently surreal; tales of ordinary lives in which the fantastical or unexpected element sneaks up and taps you on the shoulder,

SHORTS: Pratt, Liu, Lee, Klages, Maberry

These are a few of the online short works we read this week. Our themes this week are libraries and books, mixed with some poison and zombies. As long as we keep the zombies and the poison out of the libraries, it’s all good.

The Fairy Library by Tim Pratt (2013, free on Apex, Kindle magazine issue, also included in Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories by Tim Pratt)

When I realized I had,

SHORTS: Byrne, Klages, Humphrey, Lecky, Vaughn

Our weekly exploration of short fiction, old and new, available on the internet.

“Alexandria” by Monica Byrne (Jan. 2017, Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2017 issue)

They were travelers, though of the domestic sort. After their terrible honeymoon, they’d never left Kansas again.

Monica Byrne is a playwright and fiction writer who won the James Tiptree Award in 2015 for her novel The Girl in the Road. “Alexandria” starts slowly, maybe a little bewilderingly, with Beth, an older woman living alone on her Kansas farm,

Next SFF Author: Mindy Klasky

Previous SFF Author: Amber Kizer

SFF Author: Ellen Klages

Passing Strange: Simply irresistible

Wicked Wonders: The wonder and magic in our lives

SHORTS: Pratt, Liu, Lee, Klages, Maberry

SHORTS: Byrne, Klages, Humphrey, Lecky, Vaughn

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