Speculative/Fantasy Archives

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia [in Booklist]

04 Jan, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Latin American, Latina/o/x, Mexican, Mexican American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW After voicing Velvet Was the Night (2021), Gisela Chípe returns to read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “loosely inspired” adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. In Yaxaktun, a remote late-19th-century ranch in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, French expat Dr. Moreau lives with his 14-year-old daughter,...

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo [in Booklist]

07 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American

Nghi Vo’s stupendous debut, The Chosen and the Beautiful, alchemized (and improved) The Great Gatsby by shifting narrative control to supporting character Jordan Baker. Vo dramatically gifts similarly transformative autonomy to her latest protagonist, Luli Wei, who is clearly a revisionist stand-in for legendary Asian American film...

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin [in Booklist]

02 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Jewish, Korean American, Repost, Young Adult Readers

In her fifth adult title, Gabrielle Zevin (Young Jane Young, 2017) impressively interweaves multiple threads that twist and tangle around what is essentially a decades-long love story. Jennifer Kim ciphers most of the narration, deftly distinguishing the main three players, with a brief interlude voiced...

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

14 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Chinese American, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

Nell Young, former New York Public Library cartography scholar, is summoned back to the hallowed Map Division when her director father is found dead in his office. Seven years ago, he ignominiously fired her over the Junk Box Incident and she’s hasn’t seen him since....

Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-lee Chai [in Booklist]

05 Jul, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories

In her newest story collection, May-lee Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants, 2018) shifts dexterously between the personal and the fantastical. Four of the eight stories feature autobiographical stand-ins who are, like Chai, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother whose formative years are defined...

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori [in Booklist]

27 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Once more, internationally bestselling Sayaka Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in “A First-Rate Material,”...

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel [in Booklist]

24 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Emily St. John Mandel groupies will be especially tickled to discover Glass Hotel’s narrator Dylan Moore and Station Eleven’s Kirsten Potter are half the quartet that cipher her latest, in which four narrative strands connect almost five centuries. In 1912, the youngest son of a wealthy...

Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang [in Booklist]

21 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories, Taiwanese American

*STARRED REVIEW Relationships between women – familial, beloved, strange, imagined – dominate queer Taiwanese American K-Ming Chang’s (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections – “Mothers,” “Myths,” “Moths” – which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and...

The Peanutbutter Sisters and Other American Stories by Rumi Hara [in Booklist]

29 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese American, Repost, Short Stories

Rumi Hara’s sophomore title (after Nori, 2020) is another shorts collection, featuring seven stories predominantly in black-and-white, interrupted by interstitial scenes that when puzzled together form “The Builders,” a nearly wordless narrative drawn on a black background yet bursting with vivid blooms. These eponymous builders...

Mister Lightbulb by Wojtek Wawszczyk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones [in Booklist]

15 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Polish, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Award-winning animator Wojtek Wawszczyk’s graphic debut, which won the Polish Comics Association’s 2019 Best Graphic Novel award, is available now for English-language readers thanks to this translation by the lauded Antonia Lloyd-Jones. A decade-plus in the making, this epic bildungsroman superbly imbues the surreal...

Made in Korea (vol. 1) by Jeremy Holt, illustrated by George Schall [in Booklist]

06 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Korean American, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Bill and Suelynn Evans of Conroe, Texas, can’t have kids. Their experience at their wealthy friends’ son’s birthday party inspires a search for a proxy of their own. In this not-too-distant reality, “the smartest men on the planet” are consumed with “makin’ phony kids”...

Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang, introduction by Madeleine Thien [in Shelf Awareness]

22 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

The three novellas in Rouge Street, Shuang Xuetao's prodigious English-language debut, feature multilayered voices revealing intricate perspectives that result in gloriously gratifying rewards. Booker Prize finalist Madeleine Thien introduces Shuang's enigmatic work, contextualizing his fiction, which "teeter[s] on a fulcrum between past and future," between...

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter [in Booklist]

11 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, European, Fiction, French, Repost, Translation

Exceptional narrator Dominic Hoffman adroitly assumes the internationally mega-bestselling, 2020 Prix Goncourt-winning, Anglophoned latest from prodigious French author Hervé Le Tellier. Hoffman begins as professional assassin Blake, then becomes frustrated author Victor, film editor Lucie, and David, who is about to be diagnosed with terminal...

New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker, Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, Alex Ross, Cristina Rivera Garza [in Shelf Awareness]

25 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Latin American, Mexican, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's most important contemporary authors, is progressively gaining renown in the U.S. (where she's lived since 1989) and has won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle finalist nod in Criticism. Indie press Dorothy's release of New...

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu [in Booklist]

17 Jan, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories

*STARRED REVIEW Lauded Vancouver-born, Seattle-domiciled poet-novelist Kim Fu (The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, 2018) presents a dozen sly, provocative, fabulous short stories sure to delight and shock. From doll parts to winged ankles to stockpiled gold bars, Fu flaunts an inimitable imagination. She deftly parses...

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai [in Shelf Awareness]

08 Nov, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Cats have long appeared in Japanese fiction, especially popularized in I Am a Cat (1906) by the father of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Sōseki. Joining recent 21st-century mega-successes – The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura, for example – is the...

Sensor by Junji Ito, translated by Jocelyne Allen [in Booklist]

01 Nov, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Repost, Translation

Japan’s graphic-horror auteur Junji Ito has yet another U.S. edition with a serialized manga originally published as Travelogue of the Succubus, compiled here as Sensor, translated by Jocelyne Allen, who also brought Ito’s Eisner-winning Frankenstein to English-language readers. Mount Sengoku erupted decades ago by the time...

Search History by Eugene Lim [in Shelf Awareness]

20 Oct, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

For audiences in search of a quick slender read, Eugene Lim's surreally quirky Search History is not it. The pre-prologue to the prologue opens as "A Warning to the Reader" with various cautions and enlightenments; 152 dense pages later, gratification awaits. The story features a late Korean...

A Girl Called Rumi by Ari Honarvar [in Shelf Awareness]

04 Oct, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Iranian, Iranian American, Persian, Persian American, Repost

Journalist/artist/activist Ari Honarvar's promising debut, A Girl Called Rumi, memorializes the lifesaving power of storytelling through the darkest terrors. In 1981, the Iran-Iraq War was still new and a semblance of normalcy seemed possible for 9-year-old Kimia, who claims "Rumi" as part-time moniker. She's missing...

Secret Life by Theo Ellsworth and Jeff VanderMeer, illustrated by Theo Ellsworth [in Booklist]

24 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

From the cover alone, it’s clear Theo Ellsworth’s visuals are unique, striking, and surreal. A sense of witnessing something unrecognizable resonates throughout, with bizarrely stylized images of people, beasts, and scenes surrounded by intricate backgrounds that might induce trypophobia in some. And yet, self-taught artist...

BookDragon Speculative/Fantasy Tag