Season’s Readings everyone! As is generally true, there have been some marvelous books published in 2025, and I’m thrilled to share my favorites with you. I’ve listed these books in alphabetical order…
Travis Baldree is a full-time audiobook narrator who has lent his voice to hundreds of stories. Before that, he spent decades designing and building video games like Torchlight, Rebel Galaxy, and Fate…
D.J. Waldie is a historian of Los Angeles, a memoirist, and a translator. He is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1995), Where Are We Now: Notes from Los Angeles (2005), Becoming Los Angeles…
Eric Heisserer is the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of Arrival and the creator of the Netflix series Shadow and Bone. He lives in Los Angeles. His debut novel is Simultaneous and he recently…
Deston Munden is the author of several books, including Tavern, also set in Dargath. Born and raised near the Outer Banks, he can be found writing, cooking, playing World of Warcraft, and cosplaying…
Richard Wolinsky co-hosted and produced Probabilities, a half-hour radio program devoted to science fiction, mystery, and mainstream fiction, from 1977 to 1995 on KPFA-FM. He took the program solo in…
Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Duke Univ. Press, 2015). Oliver is a…
Jennifer O'Callaghan is a freelance writer and journalist. She has worked as a reporter for Metro News, The Sundance Channel, Shaw TV, and CKUA radio in news, entertainment, and lifestyle beats. She…
Jim C. Hines is the author of 20 published SF/F novels, including the Goblin Quest trilogy, the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the Janitors of the Post…
Josh Rountree is a novelist and short story writer who writes across multiple genres, and focuses mostly on horror and dark fantasy. His novel The Legend of Charlie Fish, released by Tachyon…
When Sylvia Capley, the Health instructor at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages, is found in the school library bisected from head to toe, cleanly down the middle, the National Mage Investigative Service (NMIS) concludes that her death was an accident, a spell gone wrong. The Headmaster of the school doesn’t...
When famous, and some would claim infamous, poet Hugh de Bonne dies unexpectedly, his last remaining family relations are called upon to enact his final request. De Bonne wishes to be buried on the moors near Shropshire, in a chapel of stained glass he had built 16 years earlier as...
It’s happened to all of us. You hear a song and it instantly raises your spirits. Or, you hear a different song and it instantly makes you feel melancholy. Some music makes you want to move, while other music makes you want to relax and be still. Something reminds you...
Roger Middleton is a rather typical seven-year-old boy. He lives with his adopted parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He seems to be exceptionally gifted when it comes to grammar, spelling, anything to do with languages, really. But he struggles with even the most basic levels of mathematics.Dodger Cheswich is not a...
Speculative Fiction has a long history of using the tropes of the genre to comment on our world. Ursula K. Le Guin used The Left Hand of Darkness to examine cultural gender constructs. Using the original Star Trek television series, show creator Gene Roddenberry commented on issues like race relations...
"Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.” 'Red as Blood and White as Bone' in Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora GossTheodora Goss is an award winning-author, a professor of literature and writing at both Boston University and the Stonecoast MFA program. Her debut...
In 2018, readers discovered the first book in Anthony Horowitz’s new mystery series: The Word is Murder. In it, a wealthy woman enters a London funeral parlor in the morning to make her final arrangements. She is found in her home, murdered, six hours later. When disgraced Detective Inspector Daniel...
Ji Lin is a young woman who is working as an apprentice dressmaker by day and secretly working as a “dance instructor” at a dance-hall in the evenings to repay a family debt. Ren is eleven, but tells everyone that he is thirteen. He has lost his entire family, including...
"Milicent Patrick's final resting place is in every single Creature from the Black Lagoon T-shirt, every Metaluna Mutant toy, every VHS tape of Fantasia, every DVD of The Shape of Water. It's on the desk of every female animator and in the pen of every woman doodling a monster in...
Harry Rosenmerck, a successful Jewish Cardiologist, just walked away. He walked away from his family, his career, his life, and everything he knew and loved to start a pig farm in Israel. This sounds like the set-up for a potentially insensitive joke, but it isn’t. Harry is deadly serious, as...
