Tag Archives: fantasy

About Painsharing and Other Stories

I wrote the stories in the collection Painsharing and Other Stories while living in Greece. However, unlike the tales in my first collection, The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories, which are mainly set on Earth on the Indian Subcontinent, these … Continue reading

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On Rereading Jurgen by James Branch Cabell (again)

Due to my ongoing need for literary comfort food, I turn once again to the brilliantly written fantasy Jurgen (subtitled in the original, though not in the edition I own, A Comedy of Justice). I think I was still a … Continue reading

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2023: A Personal Overview

What can I say about 2023? It started out with a bang with a great event: I finally got a chance to meet my grandson Charlie. I flew down from Seattle to Los Angeles to spend a couple of weeks … Continue reading

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Triumphs in the Creative Life

Recently I wrote an essay called “Setbacks in the Creative Life.” It was a reaction to a publisher deciding to cancel an upcoming anthology to which I’d sold a story. It focused on the necessity of putting aside the many … Continue reading

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A Christmas Gift for My Blog Followers

As a Christmas gift to readers, I have enrolled electronic editions of some of my books and stories in the Smashwords End of Year Sale, which runs through January 1st. Complete books are half price, marked down from $3.99 to … Continue reading

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Books Make Great Gifts!

After Thanksgiving has come and gone, people commence a search for holiday gifts for family members, relatives, friends, acquaintances, in-laws, outlaws, colleagues, and sometimes total strangers. If you’re looking for fun, sophisticated, lively, intense, flamboyant, and otherwise variegated literary fare, … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Being Michael Swanwick by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Although Zinos-Amaro is listed as the author of this book, it is in fact a collaborative effort. It consists of a series of interviews between prolific science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Swanwick and Zinos-Amaro. These interviews cover Swanwick’s stand-alone … Continue reading

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A Glimpse of the Cosmic Dance and Other Stories Is Now Available!

My 35th book and 12th short story collection, A Glimpse of the Cosmic Dance and Other Stories, is now available as a paperback and as an ebook at various online outlets. Links to these are below. In a world whose … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Babel; or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang

I had never heard of this book until it won this year’s Nebula Award for best novel from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Since then it has won several other awards, and since awards season is not over, … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Elevation by Stephen King

The cover of this recent book by Stephen King says: Elevation: A Novel. In fact, though, it’s not a novel; it’s a novella, and a short one at that. We are all accustomed to King’s books being thousand-plus page brick-heavy … Continue reading

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