Tasha Robinson

The book — which Lynch wrote with journalist Kristine McKenna — is intimate and honest about the filmmaker's quirks and flaws, but doesn't dislodge the air of mystery that's settled around his work.

Dana Schwartz is the Twitter whiz behind the @GuyInYourMFA and @DystopianYA accounts, but she stumbles in long form. Her debut novel, And We're Off, is quick and compelling but needs fleshing out.

Beagle has spent his career writing about unicorns — and he returns to that enclosed garden with In Calabria, the tale of a grouchy farmer who finds a pregnant unicorn investigating his fields.

Carolyn Parkhurst's new novel is told entirely from female perspectives; a mother and two troubled daughters. But the book really revolves around what's going on in the head of one man.

The title of this followup to V.E. Schwab's 2015 fantasy novel A Darker Shade Of Magic might be considered a warning for impatient readers: In A Gathering Of Shadows, plenty of shadows gather. Portents simmer. Tension mounts. Disaster looms. Evil threatens. But nothing much comes of any of it ...

Midway through T. Kingfisher's fleet fairy tale The Seventh Bride, 15-year-old protagonist Rhea is shocked to learn how terrible her betrothed really is. She seeks solace with another woman, who sympathizes, but doesn't stop mixing dough. "You're making biscuits," Rhea wails. "Yes," the other woman says, "I am. We could ...

Pop Sonnets author Erik Didriksen has been writing poetry most of his life. "I grew up with a knack for rhyming," he says. "When I was little, I used to write my grandparents poems. There's a poem [the family] dug up recently — I wrote an ode to pickles. Which ...

For lifelong literature fans, there's a special kind of joy in stories that play with stories. Books like John Myers Myers' Silverlock, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series and Mike Carey's Unwritten comic all operate as though book covers are permeable, allowing characters to slip off their pages and sneak along ...

Margaret Atwood is one of literature's greatest living interior decorators. Some of her best stories are light on incident, but rich in character, as she examines her protagonists' inner lives at length. In rearranging their mental furniture and dusting the cobwebbed corners of their consciousness, she often comes across complicated ...

This is a video built on surprises and unusual juxtapositions, so it's hard to say much without ruining the pleasure of watching them unfold. But suffice to say, "Norwegian Black Metal," by the L.A.-based electro-pop group Superhumanoids, is both comical and heartbreaking — and worth multiple views.

Directed ...

Marvel Comics elder statesman Stan Lee is widely credited as the first successful writer to understand that while superhero stories are power fantasies, they're more relatable and appealing if they come with a hefty dose of limitation as well. The characters he's credited with co-creating in the 1960s — particularly ...

Spoiler alert: Terry Pratchett's final novel begins with the death of one of his toughest and best-developed characters.

Over the course of more than 40 novels about the Discworld, an absurdist fantasy realm that let England's one-time bestselling author metaphorically (and often comedically) explore humanity, Pratchett built up a handful ...

"We smacked the Sad Puppies with a rolled-up newspaper," said a woman on the shuttle bus between hotels at WorldCon in Spokane, Wash., on Sunday night. "It's the only way to teach them."

The presentation for the 2015 Hugo Awards had ended an hour earlier, and this was the ...

The annual World Science Fiction Convention is happening now in Spokane, Wash., packed with the usual discussion panels, author readings and autograph sessions. In most ways, it's like any other WorldCon — five days of mingling between fans and creators of genre-related media from novels to paintings to music ...

Aliette de Bodard's first novel outside her Obsidian and Blood Aztec fantasy-mystery trilogy has a touch of Silly Fantasy Name problem, where florid compound words take over the page. Set in a Paris devastated by a war between factions of fallen angels, The House Of Shattered Wings is packed with ...

Fans of Netflix's world-spanning science-fiction/action soap opera Sense8 have experienced a long, tense wait for renewal in recent weeks. While Netflix series like Daredevil, Bloodline and House Of Cards got their next-season notices back in March or April, and the second season of Grace And Frankie was finally announced in ...

The spoken word doesn't count for much in Vu Tran's hard-hitting debut novel, Dragonfish. The book turns on a few weary confessional speeches, but what people write is usually much more important than what they say. A secret diary, a series of anguished notes, and multiple caches of hidden letters ...

Lars von Trier's films Melancholia and Antichrist both open the same way, with catastrophe playing out in beautifully rendered, ultra slow motion. One calamity destroys the Earth and the other only claims the life of one toddler, but both films have the same feeling of presenting disaster as a sort ...

At least no one can complain Ernest Cline wears his influences too lightly. Nerd culture pervades everything he does, from his screenplay for the movie Fanboys to his spoken-word routines. ("The Geek Wants Out," a rant from his hilarious free-download album Ultraman Is Airwolf, is a revealing highlight.) It ...

It's a shame Ben Kingsley doesn't have more of a mustache in Tarsem Singh's new science fiction thriller Self/less. If he had one long enough to twirl menacingly, if he was playing that kind of outsize stereotype, at least he'd be able to clarify exactly what sort of role ...