“We still can’t reach the speed of light. But people are acting like we’ve conquered the universe. When all we’ve conquered is what the universe allows us.” This quote from Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go At The Speed of Light perfectly captures the vibe and themes of this seven-story short collection. Translated from Korean…
Continue reading ➞ If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light – Seven Punches To The Heart
I’ve been on a bit of a journey lately with my own reading schedule, trying to develop different reading projects to make sense of “the genre,” along with the world that the “genre” exists within. That’s a very vague way of saying “god I need something to read that I can talk about positively.” And…
Continue reading ➞ Sister Svangerd and The Not Quite Dead – Pray Like Hell
If you passed through Iowa City in the mid-2010s, you might encounter a lanky, baseball-hatted kid in a tie-dye Hawkeyes sweatshirt (me) loping alongside his giant afroed friend Ryan, yapping about fantasy books and other nerdy potpourri. To be fair, that is a likely sighting on any liberal arts college campus, but it’s where today’s…
I suffered an intense movie hangover after watching Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” so I needed to read something on the lighter side. Luckily for me, T. Kingfisher’s latest novella, Nine Goblins, has been waiting patiently on my TBR. So I decided to see what shenanigans a group of goblins got up to while I mended…
The only Kurt Vonnegut I ever got introduced to at school was Harrison Bergeron, a short story about physically enforced equality. My grandparents furthered my reading of his with his short story collection Armageddon In Retrospect. And over the years I’ve slowly picked up his novels in the most insane ordering I can think of.…
While reading and writing for The Quill is one of my passions, I also have two young daughters who are the joy of my life. Each week, we go to the library and pick out 5-10 new picture books from their incredible selection and make our way through them (purchasing those that we find outstanding).…
Continue reading ➞ QTL – Picture Book Recommendations Vol. 1
Back, back, back again! Here's a fresh puzzle for the sci-fi fans! QTL Crossword: Some Books Need More?! For more puzzles, subscribe to my newsletter, The New Dork Times. It's now completely free, with three weekly puzzles.
And so we’ve reached the end of Evangeline and Jack’s love story in Stephanie Garber’s A Curse for True Love. Will it be a happy ending for the pair? Or will the doomed lovers suffer the curses at work in this tale? Spoilers ahead if you have not started the Once Upon a Broken Heart…
Continue reading ➞ A Curse For True Love – Broken Hearts Unite
The Automaton, by Ian Young, is an indie darling that has been teasing me from the aether for a while now. Its striking and bold cover with an old school automaton, staring at the reader, was a sniper shot trained on me. Throw in some concerns about the difference between a digital human being and…
There was one last book on my schedule for the end of 2025 that made its way onto store shelves in late December. Its cover features a delightfully large white salamander looking coy and suspect as it crawls all over the page surrounded by a vibrant and lush forest. The Great Work, by Sheldon Costa,…
