THE BOOKS
Out Already
The Sport of Kings by C.E. MorganADD TO GOODREADS
Hellsmouth, a wilful thoroughbred filly, has the legacy of a family riding on her.
The Forges: one of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky; descended from the first settlers to brave the Wilderness Road; as mythic as the history of the South itself – and now, first-time horse breeders.
Through an act of naked ambition, Henry Forge is attempting to blaze this new path on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavour but has desires of her own. When Allmon Shaughnessy, an African American man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, the ugliness of the farm's history rears its head. Together through sheer will, the three stubbornly try to create a new future – one that isn't determined by Kentucky's bloody past – while they mould Hellsmouth into a champion.
This wouldn't normally appeal to me at all, but I've heard from some of my most trusted bookish people that it's amazing. And if the writing is beautiful, I'm generally good.
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu“You should be here; he’s simply magnificent.” These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju (Japan’s giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw.
“The Return to Monsterland” opens 'Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone,' a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In “Rokurokubi”, a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in “The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost”. In “Girl Zero”, a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.
I fully intend to read this collection of short stories because JAPAN.
Out in July
Out in July
ADD TO GOODREADS
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
Let's be real, you had me at "reality TV show." It's compared to Station Eleven and The Passage, so I'm intrigued. This could be a really good literary-scifi-thriller combo.
THE LINKS
Here are 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors. SLAY.
How Two Young Women Reimagined the American Novel - Emma Cline (The Girls) and Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) yessssssss.
Minneapolis residents - we're getting a new bookstore. Milkweed Editions is opening one in Open Books/The Loft.
Rachel Cordasco, one of my favorite Book Riot Contributors, 1. Started a site about speculative fiction in translation. And 2. Interviewed Thomas Olde Heuvelt (who wrote Hex). Cool things all around!
What books did you hear about this week?
