Archive for the ‘Speculative (Beyond Reality)’ Category

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier builds his novel, A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD, on a platitude: the dead live on in the memory of the living. The City is a mysterious metropolis that seems to expand by folding in on itself, much like the convoluted corrugations of the brain, in order to accommodate its ever-increasing population. However, this unearthly metastasis notwithstanding, The City isn’t much different than any urban environment found in the living world. People get up, they go to work, they go grocery shopping, and life is still filled with the minor annoyances endemic to city life like “the blasting sound of garbage trucks in the morning, chewing gum on the pavement, and the smell of rotting fish by the river.”

June 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  · Posted in: Contemporary, Reading Guide, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Theme driven

CENTURIES OF JUNE by Keith Donohue

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

May 31, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Unique Narrative

SPIRAL by Paul McEuen

Paul McEuen, a professor of physics at Cornell, makes good use of his scientific knowledge in Spiral, a provocative and frightening techno-thriller. The story opens in 1946, with biologist Liam Connor witnessing a horrifying scene of destruction from the deck of the USS North Dakota. Liam is a prodigy whose expertise includes “saprobic fungi, the feeders on the dead.” At twenty-two, he already has an impressive résumé, having spent four years at Porton Down, “the center of British chemical and germ weapons research.”

May 30, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Debut Novel, NE & New York, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Thriller/Spy/Caper

EMBASSYTOWN by China Mieville

The core of EMBASSYTOWN by China Mieville is an exploration of the nature of language in the context of the future on a far-distant solar system where humans interact with an alien species that speak a profoundly different language. This is a new book by the brilliantly inventive author of THE CITY AND THE CITY, PERDIDO STREET STATION, KRAKEN and others. I have read four of his books now and one common thread is that they have a philosophical emphasis, and plunge us without much explanation into a radically different world than our own. Due to the strangeness of these worlds, the first part of each book is like visiting some foreign place without knowing much at all about the place, the people, and the customs. Initially clueless, we are rewarded with an unfolding appreciation of the environment. Complex philosophical and conceptual issues are the point of this body of work. EMBASSYTOWN is no exception to this rule.

May 17, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Speculative (Beyond Reality), y Award Winning Author

THE GREAT NIGHT by Chris Adrian

In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering reimagining of Shakespeare’s comedy into an elaborate feast of faeries and monsters, Lilliputians and giants, demons and derelicts, heart-broken humans and a group of outspoken homeless people who are staging a musical reenactment of Soylent Green. And that is just a segment of the odd and atavistic population of characters that you will meet in this multiple narrative tale of loss, love and exile. As you enter San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park during this millennial summer solstice, the moon shines eerie and luminous over creatures large and small, and a thick wall of fog sluggishly spreads its fingers during the celebration known to the faerie kingdom as the “Great Night.”

April 26, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: California, Humorous, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Unique Narrative

GALORE by Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

April 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Canada, Commonwealth Prize, Facing History, Speculative (Beyond Reality), World Lit, y Award Winning Author