Amal El-Mohtar

This book is a tar pit, and I mean that as a compliment.

To read The Traitor Baru Cormorant is to sink inexorably into a book that should not be anywhere near as absorbing as it is — to realize that the white-knuckled grip with which you hold it ...

Reviewing books of humor is a tricky business; whether a joke succeeds or fails is a profoundly individual matter, about as straightforward to analyze as a sneeze. For instance, for no reason either of us can entirely explain, my husband's favourite panel from a Kate Beaton comic is one of ...

As a regular reader of fantasy fiction, I get used to seeing genre conventions established, repeated, played with and turned on their head — but regardless of how they're treated the conventions are always there, a low drone behind whatever music an author's making. A dragon contains a piece of ...

There are several ways in which Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown invites comparison with Susanna Clarke's best-selling, BBC-adapted Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: It features squabbling English magicians, a Regency setting and a mysterious decline in English magic attributed at least in part to difficult relations with capricious fairies. ...

A singer, a soldier, and a scientist walk onto Bar Beach.

In many ways, Bar Beach was a perfect sample of Nigerian society. It was a place of mixing. The ocean mixed with the land and the wealthy mixed with the poor. Bar Beach attracted drug dealers, squatters, various ...

In the acknowledgements for Cold Iron, Stina Leicht writes that one of the questions at the core of her new Malorum Gates series is, "if Tolkien had been American, what would fantasy look like?" It's a fascinating question — and I don't intend to sound cynical or glib when I ...

Shadowshaper had me crying at 3 percent of the e-book. Not because it was sad, but because I am one giant button when it comes to stories about family, heritage, language, art, and the magic mixed up in them, and this book knew just where to push.

Brooklyn teenager Sierra ...

Jo Walton's The Just City, which came out in January and which I utterly adored, ends on a wicked cliff-hanger: The real-world version of Plato's Republic that scholars and philosophers from different times and places tried to build has fractured along its fault-lines; all is chaos, uncertainty, and recrimination and ...

Let me tell you the story of how Max Gladstone became one of my favorite writers, which is also the story of why you should all be buying his Craft Sequence books immediately.

Urban fantasy covers are often so tiresomely generic that they've become a self-referential joke. Author Jim C. ...

I've read a staggering number of excellent books recently, and it's done things to my head. I'm not sure the human brain was meant to read so many brilliant books in such short order — even less sure that swinging my reading-pendulum from Hannu Rajaniemi's collected science fiction stories to ...

I have just finished Hannu Rajaniemi's Collected Fiction and I am still recovering.

My mind feels constellated. I am keenly, weirdly, expansively aware of explosions still taking place inside my head. The world has shifted while I read, and the quartz in the necklace I wear is full of super ...

One of my earliest experiences of how astonishing a tool is Twitter came several years ago, when, seeing Californians tweeting about an earthquake, I texted my best friend in canyon country to ask if she'd felt the earthquake where she was. She said no — and then freaked out as ...

In An Ember in the Ashes, Sabaa Tahir brings us a world at a crossroad of reminiscences: The Roman Empire on the one hand and A Thousand and One Nights on the other. Mixing magic and military intrigues in shifting proportions, the result is an appealing fantasy of crossing destinies ...

A friend once told me the story of an enormous fish, Kun, that turns into an enormous bird, Peng, so huge that it must gain thousands of feet in elevation before it can fly — but once it does, it flies so far and so fast that it crosses ...

I have been reading Genevieve Valentine's writing for a long time, and as much as her fiction delights me, I confess that the work of hers that brings me the most pleasure is her series of Red Carpet Rundowns. Without fail, whether it's the Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG Awards ...

I came late to Seraphina, Rachel Hartman's first book — only discovering that gorgeous story in preparation for reviewing its sequel. I fell deeply in love with it and have been pressing it into people's hands and climbing rooftops to shout about it since: half-human, half-dragon Seraphina and her wonderful ...

There are at least two reasons why I should hate this book.

One: I have a horror of impersonation narratives. The idea of someone looking like me but running around being a jerk to my friends and family is so profoundly unsettling that I still haven't watched more than the ...

A friend recently insisted I read her favorite book in the world: The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. It's a gorgeous book, one that utterly immerses you in a worldview that's simultaneously alien and formative to so much of our modern life. I enjoyed it tremendously, and am ...

Two scenes in The Galaxy Game are useful metaphors for my experience of reading it: In one scene, two characters travel from one planet to another, and have to adjust their balance and breathing to the unfamiliar gravity of their new environment. In the other scene, one character introduces another ...

I've said before that a good collection of poetry — unlike, say, a good novel, or a good short story — is tricky to talk about. If I love a novel, I'll describe the plot, maybe compare it to the writing of others, talk about the successes and failures of ...