Book cover of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Book description

“Ka is a beautiful, often dreamlike late masterpiece.” —Los Angeles Times

“One of our country’s absolutely finest novelists.” —Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Interior Darkness and Ghost Story

From award-winning author John Crowley comes an exquisite fantasy novel about a man who tells the story of a…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Ka as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I don’t read very much fiction (although I want to read more!) but I thought it would be interesting to check out some novels where animals are main characters.

I read several, and this is the one I still think about all the time. The main character is a crow and although the book is a fantastical mytho-poetic adventure through time and space, it is also a wonderful exercise in cross-species empathy.

While you are reading, you really feel like you understand what it means to be a crow. It really stuck with me; I found it really rich and…

The longer you write fiction, the harder it becomes to ignore its mechanics and get swept away in a story.

But KA swept me away and right off a cliff. Mostly known among writers for his novel Little, Big, John Crowley's KA is a shining opus that reflects back humanity's relationship with stories through the eyes of Dar Oakley, a crow whose life, destiny, and very nature becomes entangled with those of the story-telling humans who fascinate him.

KA is a sprawling, slow-burn of a novel, starting with Crowley's detailed portrait of crow culture and morphing into the multi-part…

If you love Ka...

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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