Day: April 16, 2012

flipside spotlight

My interview with Charles Tan is on On the Flipside!

Every Monday, we’ll have a blog entry focusing on one of Flipside Digital Content’s titles.
Lower Myths

Eliza Victoria is the author of Lower Myths.

What made you decide to combine speculative fiction with the other genres like crime and mystery?

I am fond of crime and mystery stories, and I am fond of speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, sci-fi), so I saw no reason not to mash them together! One of my favorite authors, Donna Tartt, writes murder mysteries with horror undertones, and her novels are very unsettling reads. One of my own murder mystery stories that recently appeared on Philippine Genre Stories (“Needle Rain”) contains elements of fantasy and horror. It can be surprising what you come up with, when you mix genres.

Read more.

book reviews

I want to get my reading groove back, so right now I’m re-reading Donna Tartt’s sumptious The Secret History and reading Let the Right One In by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Here are some short thoughts on books I’ve finished. What are you reading?

Pretty Monsters

Kelly Link writes surreal stories. Reading one is like stepping into a dream. And like dreams, her narratives usually meander and don’t concern themselves with closures and resolutions. Not necessarily a bad thing. My favorites in this collection: “The Faery Handbag“, “Magic for Beginners”, and “The Specialist’s Hat”.

Dream Hunters

A Sandman-style retelling of a Japanese folk tale about a monk and a fox-spirit. Neil Gaiman writes in simple words that are amplified by Yoshitaka Amano’s beautiful illustrations.

Zsazsa Zaturnnah sa Kalakhang Maynila (Blg. 1)

Bonggang-bongga itey! I got this as a compli copy from Ms Nida of VISPRINT. If you enjoyed the first collection of Zsazsa’s adventures, you’ll enjoy this one.

American Short Story Masterpieces

I found this in a secondhand bookstore. Happy I picked this up. So many good stories! My favorites are “The Amish Farmer” by Vance Bourjaily, “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Ile Forest”, “The Story of A Scar” by James Alan Macpherson, Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of Jews”, John Updike’s “The Christian Roommates”, and Andre Dubus’s “The Fat Girl”.