Fantasy has long been a favorite genre of mine for the way you can explore so many different concepts and ideas, and the freedom it gives you as a storyteller. If you feel like you’ve been transported to that world as the story unfolds, I see that as a successful story. Creating vibrant, diverse, new worlds and real, flawed characters for readers is something I strive towards with every project. As a queer author, I find it especially important to give queer characters the hero roles they deserve. The best thing about fantasy is it can be anything, and anyone, from any background, can be the main character.
I was introduced to CLAMP’s work through one of their most popular works, Card Captor Sakura when I was seven or eight, but I really grew to love their darker, more surreal projects such as xxxHolic. Not only is the artwork throughout the manga series gorgeous, but the story also introduces you to all sorts of Japanese folklore, explores time loops, and the thin barrier between the human world and spirits. xxxHolic has been at the top of my recommendation list for manga lovers and newbies to the medium for years. Any fan of dramatic twists and turns, the supernatural, and snarky, snappy dialogue will certainly love this series as much as I do.
Kimihiro Watanuki is haunted by visions of ghosts and spirits. He seeks help from a mysterious woman named Yuko, who claims she can help. However, Watanuki must work for Yuko in order to pay for her aid. Soon Watanuki finds himself employed in Yuko's shop where he sees things and meets customers that are stranger than anything he could have ever imagined! Watanuki is Yuko's unwilling assistant, but even he is compelled by the fascinating adventures he's having since he started working for the 'space-time witch.'
For many years, I’ve been creating visual nonfiction books for adults. These books are about climate change, indigenous sovereignty, and nuclear physics—not typical kids’ book fare. But because my books include artwork, everyone always asked me when I would write and illustrate a book for children. Once I had my own children, I was suddenly full of ideas. Children’s books are often underestimated. The best books of the genre are accessible enough to interest a young person, sophisticated enough to engage the adults reading them aloud, and multidimensional enough to reward countless re-readings. I believe books that meet this standard fit alongside civilization’s great works of literature.
I never tire of reading this brilliant book to my son. His imagination (and mine) goes to new places with each rereading. Each spread relocates the reader to another corner of the world, where we glimpse a snapshot of action: someone honks their car horn in a traffic jam in Mexico City, a volcano erupts in Papua-New Guinea, a woman drops a mysterious envelope on the sidewalk in Budapest.
For my son and I, the book has been as interactive as any game, offering endless possibilities for discussion and debate. Because each spread is a single moment, we can dream up our own interpretation of what might have led to this scene and what will unfold afterward. It’s wonderful to see wildly varied landscapes as we travel the planet.
Inspired by the question, "What are they doing right at this moment on the other side of the world?" this book focuses on natural and human events happening all over the world in the same second. Talking about the world and how it's so different in places but also so similar and shared, so incredible and surprising, the books takes us to New York, Chicago, Mexico, Portugal, Angola, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungry, Brazil, and South Africa, among others.
So, while you sit turning the pages of this book, things are happening everywhere. Somewhere, a wave is reaching the shore. Elsewhere,…
I am a former journalist, currently a freelance writer and editor, book blogger, and author. I’ve spent my entire life voraciously reading. I majored in history in college and spent many years covering Congress and politics in Washington, D.C., before turning to writing books.
Edward Eager’s books were my inspiration when I started writing the President and Me series. I picked The Time Garden here because it specifically deals with the concept of time, but most of Eager’s books would fit the bill, including Half Magic. Eager’s books, published in the 1950s and ‘60s, feature kids who have magic adventures, often through time travel but are also grounded in their own present-day reality, with issues they have to cope with in between their escapades.
Book four in the series called "truly magic in a reader's hands" by Jack Gantos, Newbery Medal winner for Dead End in Norvelt.
Time and again, the children from Knight’s Castle have longed for another magic adventure.
But you can’t find magic just anywhere. It doesn’t grow like grass. It requires the right place and the right time . . . Or thyme, as the case may be. At Mrs. Whiton’s house, magic grows as wild as the banks of thyme in the garden. Growing there is olden time, future time, and common time. Or so says the Natterjack, the…
Realms of the imagination have always called to me. My father had shelves ofAstounding Science Fictionand Galaxy magazines. The covers alone were enough to streak me to far-off worlds, aliens, and spaceships. Here, I discovered Robert E. Howard, creator of sword and sorcery. A walk in the woods was a quest to find pixies in a magic kingdom. And a much-loved babysitter read every Oz book to me, easing me to sleep. With all this to get lost in, it’s a wonder I earned a PhD in psychology. Or not. The mind is a limitless universe. Who knows what we might discover in our dreams?
Dean Koontz has influenced my writing more than any other author. For decades, his books have been at the top of my reading list. Year after year, he consistently writes top-tier, inventive page-turners. His villains are evil. His heroes and heroines are likable and easy to relate to. He gets that one can’t traverse a frightening world without humor, and by analogy, neither can we. Elsewhere is one of his best in a long time. Equal parts bone-chilling, creepy, nerve-racking, and sinister, balanced by love, compassion, loyalty, and second chances, it doesn’t get better than this.
The fate of the world is in the hands of a father and daughter in an epic novel of wonder and terror by Dean Koontz, the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense.
Since his wife, Michelle, left seven years ago, Jeffy Coltrane has worked to maintain a normal life for himself and his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, in Suavidad Beach. It’s a quiet life, until a local eccentric known as Spooky Ed shows up on their doorstep.
Ed entrusts Jeffy with hiding a strange and dangerous object—something he calls “the key to everything”—and tells Jeffy that he must never…
I have time, save time, spend time, waste time, write, and teach time. I am fascinated with the question of time both as a cosmological phenomenon and as an aspect that is inseparable from our existence. I channeled this fascination into a PhD dissertation, books, and articles examining the relationship between time and human existence. But like Saint Augustine, I am still baffled by the question of time and like him: "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it …, I do not know."
The question "what is time" troubles not only physicists and philosophers, but also captivates every human. The Fabric of the Cosmos offers a lucid examination of time (and space) that is accessible to the layperson. The book focuses on the notion of time from a cosmological perspective and explores questions from the realm of physics and philosophy. This book offered me ways to address questions that perplex me, such as: relative time and absolute time; whether time flows; whether time has a direction; the relation between quantum mechanics and time.
From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.
Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and…
While I write Appalachian historical fiction, I’ve spent my non-writing career in marketing and fundraising. That includes a dream job in the public relations department at Biltmore Estate from 2000-2006. It was a thrill for me to spend time in America’s largest privately owned home, learning about and sharing the estate’s amazing history. And while you just can’t beat the actual history, who wouldn’t have fun building a story around a French chateau in the Appalachian mountains? In writing my own Biltmore novel, I read others set there as well and found some true gems!
I love a good dual timeline novel, and Pepper Basham has the perfect touch.
Now throw in a bookstore that may have to close, a lost now found love letter, and a trip to England, and I’m absolutely hooked! Oh, and did I mention that the 1915 timeline characters flirt via notes left in books in the library at Biltmore House? Swoon.
Uncover the Story Behind a One-Hundred-Year-Old Love Letter
Walk through Doors to the Past via a new series of historical stories of romance and adventure. Clara Blackwell helps her mother manage a struggling one-hundred-year old family bookshop in Asheville, North Carolina, but the discovery of a forgotten letter opens a mystery of a long-lost romance and undiscovered inheritance which could save its future. Forced to step outside of her predictable world, Clara embarks on an adventure with only the name Oliver as a hint of the man's identity in her great-great-grandmother's letter. From the nearby grand estate of the Vanderbilts,…
One of my favorite sections in the library is the collections of folk and fairy tales. Especially the lesser-known tales. My novel, Vasilisa, is inspired by the Russian folktale Vasilisaand Staver, plus my question of “how did Vasilisa get so strong?” I love combining folk tales with extensive research of the culture and history of their settings, as well as delving into characters who have vastly different experiences than mine. And I love reading character and detail-rich novelizations of traditional tales. It was difficult to pick only five novels based on lesser-known fairy tales. Enjoy, then go find some others!
This book blended fantasy and science fiction in a way that caught me and didn’t let go. I appreciate the moral dilemma of: is it better to interfere and stop a wrong if the interference might cause an even greater wrong? I like to make decisions based on facts rather than emotion, but this book shows how both are needed in balance. And how even doing good comes at a cost—are we willing to pay the cost?
Rediscover this beloved Newbery Honor-winning classic, Featuring a brand-new cover and a foreword by Lois Lowry!
Elana, a member of an interstellar civilization on a mission to a medieval planet, becomes the key to a dangerous plan to turn back an invasion. How can she help the Andrecians, who still believe in magic and superstition, without revealing her own alien powers? At the same time, Georyn, the son of an Andrecian woodcutter, knows only that there is a dragon in the enchanted forest, and he must defeat it. He sees Elana as the Enchantress from the Stars who has come…
Somehow, electrical impulses shoot through our brains to generate a surround sound, 3D-movie experience of the world. How on earth is this possible? When I was a college student, this question burrowed into my brain and wouldn’t get out. So I decided to make a living thinking about it. Now it’s 20 years later, I’m a philosophy professor at Yale-NUS College, and I still don’t know the answer!
Most things are ultimately explained by physics, but what if consciousness isn't? David Chalmers explores the idea that consciousness can't be explained in terms of bits of matter and energy scattered across spacetime; instead, consciousness is another basic part of the universe.
I’m impressed by how Chalmers’s arguments are extremely rigorous, but he also makes them accessible to ordinary people. It’s no surprise that this has become a classic of recent philosophy.
What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning?
David J. Chalmers unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain. Writing in a thought-provoking style, Chalmers proposes that conscious experience must be understood as an irreducible entity similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the…
I am a philosopher of science who has an obsession with time. People think this interest is a case of patronymic destiny, that it’s due to my last name being Callender. But the origins of “Callender” have nothing to do with time. Instead, I’m fascinated by time because it is one of the last fundamental mysteries, right up there with consciousness. Like consciousness, time is connected to our place in the universe (our sense of freedom, identity, meaning). Yet we don’t really understand it because there remains a gulf between our experience of time and the science of time. Saint Augustine really put his finger on the problem in the fifth century when he pointed out that it is both the most familiar and unfamiliar thing.
Price is a philosopher and this book, along with Paul Horwich’s Asymmetries in Time and David Albert’s Time and Chance, are heirs of Reichenbach’s masterpiece. I select Price’s book here because it is more accessible than Horwich’s or Albert’s books. It is packed with fun and deep stuff: criticism of Hawking’s cosmology, exploration of the electromagnetic arrow of time, and serious discussion of wild ideas like causation going backward in time.
`splendidly provocative ... enjoy it as a feast for the imagination.' John Gribbin, Sunday Times
Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way round? The universe began with the Big Bang - will it end with a 'Big Crunch'? This exciting book presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the paradoxes of time to look at the world from a fresh perspective and he throws fascinating new light on some of the great…
I grew up in farm country of central Indiana. But spent my summers on an island in northern Ontario with my grandparents. My grandfather was a self-taught naturalist and shared his love and fascination of the world around us with me. I went on to become a geologist and traveled the globe exploring for natural resources. My love of nature and science is the foundation for the science fiction I write. Whether a proven theory, a fantastical hypothesis, or true science fiction, it’s all based on science fact. It allows everyone to learn about a world built in science fiction which one day may exist in science fact.
In February 2016, astronomers announced the discovery of gravitational waves, the last remaining prediction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Gravitational waves are produced by the collision of gigantic bodies—neutron stars, blackholes—and from exploding stars. This book details the trials and tribulations as scientists attempt to build the most accurate measuring devices known to humankind. The result of their success is the LIGO observatories in Washington and Louisiana.
Since the first discovery, we now have listened to a multitude of gravitational waves—our universe sings with these songs as the waves flow across the universe. Waves that may allow us to hear the sounds of the Big Bang. The intragalactic ships in my own books utilize these gravitational waves to travel at faster-than-light speeds. I was awed by the scientific determination and rooted for the scientists as they overcame one hurdle after another.
An updated classic that recounts the long hunt for Einstein's predicted gravitational waves-and celebrates their recent discovery
In February 2016, astronomers announced that they had verified the last remaining prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity-vibrations in space-time, called gravitational waves. Humanity can now tune in to a cosmic orchestra. We have heard the chirp of two black holes dancing toward a violent union. We will hear the cymbal crashes from exploding stars, the periodic drumbeats from swiftly rotating pulsars, and maybe even the echoes from the Big Bang itself.
Marcia Bartusiak was one of the first to report on…
