drupagliassotti @ November 25, 2010 # No Comment Yet
Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone in the U.S.! I hope you’re all safely spending time with your loved ones today. I have a lot to be thankful for in my life — health, friends, family, a great job — but today in particular I have two writing-related “thanks” to give. First, I’m thankful for having been [...]
drupagliassotti @ April 18, 2010 # No Comment Yet
Steampunk romance has been getting attention this week! Heather Massey has written an update on the latest steampunk romance novels in “Steampunk Romance Watch” on Galaxy Express — I try to keep my reading up to date, but I hadn’t run across mention of Regina Riley’s novel Clockwork & Corsets before, so it’s time to [...]
drupagliassotti @ December 9, 2009 # 3 Comments
The Archer’s Heart Astrid Amara 2008, Blind Eye Books Blind Eye Books certainly doesn’t turn a blind eye to high-quality writing. The Archer’s Heart is a fantasy retelling of the great Indian epic the Mahabarata, which tells a 1.8-million-word story about the war between the Kaurava (in this novel, Uru) and the Pandava (Paran) branches [...]
drupagliassotti @ November 15, 2009 # 2 Comments
Wicked Gentlemen Ginn Hale 2007, Blind Eye Books Wicked Gentlemen is a dark and lush gaslamp fantasy set in the Victorianesque city of Crowncross, where the Covenant of Redemption brought Ashmedai, Sariel, and Satanel up from hell to experience baptism and the Great Conversion. Now the demonic offspring of hell’s great princes, the Prodigals, dwell [...]
drupagliassotti @ August 24, 2009 # No Comment Yet
“If you’re lying to me, I’m going to cut out your eyes and cut off your balls. Then I’m going to put your balls in your eye sockets and staple your eyes in your ball sac. So, let me ask you one more time, are you absolutely sure you’re telling me the truth?” (—p. 198) [...]
drupagliassotti @ August 12, 2009 # No Comment Yet
Over the weekend I read China Miéville’s The City & The City, and once again I’m in awe of his apparently limitless imagination. C&C is a much more understated book than, say, Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels, but its premise is startlingly original. Lit grad students take note — The City & The City is as analytically [...]
drupagliassotti @ August 5, 2009 # One Comment
I just read & enjoyed one of the latest installments in original superhero novels, Black & White by Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge, and I’m looking forward to its sequel, Shades of Gray. I’ve enjoyed reading about original superheroes since the Wild Cards shared-world series back in the ’80s — well, okay, I quit the [...]
drupagliassotti @ July 25, 2009 # No Comment Yet
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about simplicity, although I haven’t stopped reading or practicing it. Thus, I was delighted to discover three books in the library earlier this week about simplifying one’s life. Enough Already: Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You by Peter Walsh is the latest in the organizational expert’s [...]
drupagliassotti @ July 19, 2009 # No Comment Yet
My favorite find in the library this week is The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers, by Bryan Christy. My mother used to catch snakes in the back yard of our house in Missouri and bring them to my sister and me to pet and maybe keep for [...]
drupagliassotti @ June 24, 2009 # No Comment Yet
A quick rundown on my reading this last week: The Stranger by Max Frei is an international bestseller, a Russian fantasy translated into English by Polly Gannon. In this hefty but easy-going novel, the first of a series, a rather diurnally challenged man named Max from our world wanders through a fantastical city in his [...]