The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories: 75th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Once again it’s December, and that means, in the immortal words of American poet Tom Petty, it’s Christmas all over again. No matter how digitally sleek and cloud-based the world becomes, every holiday season we all devolve to a more primitive state where things we can touch and feel have value; no one gets excited […]

Myths and legends are a keystone of any culture, and certainly of genre writing—the new stories that draw from history, the older ones that have stood the test of time. Fantasy and sci-fi allow us to examine and remix these stories into new forms, update them with contemporary mores, or alter them until they are near-unrecognizable. Here […]

Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, a time for love, romance, and, for those of us not romantically inclined, weird traditions. SFF is full of great romances, from the courtship of Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan (whose banter in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga recalls the squabbling of classic screen couples), to The Lord of the […]

Beauty and the Beast is one of a strange species of tale whose retellings have eclipsed the original. Just a year after Villeneuve’s death in 1756, the first retelling was published, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Beaumont trimmed the story considerably, stripping out the backstories for Beauty, Beast, and their families, truncating the action, […]