From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

Archive for August 2011

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather.  She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem.  Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely [...]

The Weirdest Fairy-Tale Wishes Ever Made

Thanks to a tireless awareness campaign on behalf of folklorists everywhere, the dangers of your standard wishes are well-known these days. In the wrong hands, we all know, a wish can go terribly wrong.

Michael Swanwick: Author Spotlight

The problem Donna, Russ, and Piggy have is that they live in a world which is, so far as they can tell, entirely devoid of magic. Also, they’re adolescents, which amounts to the same thing.

The Edge of the World

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks, rusted out buses, even yachts up in cradles with stoven-in sides.

Leigh Butler

Leigh Butler is a writer and blogger for Tor.com, where she conducts The Wheel of Time Re-read, which has just begun The Gathering Storm, the first book in the series co-written by Brandon Sanderson. She currently resides in New Orleans.

Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest has written for radio and television, but is best known internationally for his novels. The Prestige has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was made into an Oscar-winning movie.  His twelve published novels, including The Glamour and Fugue for a Darkening Island, have lead to him receiving prizes in Australia, Yugoslavia, Germany, [...]

Nadia Bulkin

Nadia Bulkin is a writer and International Politics M.A. student in Washington, D.C.  Her focus is post-colonialism and governance in Southeast Asia.  Her stories have also appeared in ChiZine, Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  More info is available at nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.

David Brothers

David Brothers was born in Georgia and lives in San Francisco. He likes to spend time watching movies where people smoke cigarettes in dark bars, reading books where criminals get away with the loot, and attempting to figure out exactly how hard it would be to rob a bank.

Brooke Bolander

Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings [...]

John Baur and Mark Summers

John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers were just a normal couple of guys until, in 1995, they invented a holiday – International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The world took notice, and now the ersatz holiday is celebrated on all seven continents, they’ve appeared on stage in Vegas and L.A. and Chicago [...]