Things tagged fantasy
Novels
Articles
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Read the first chapter of the novel Toward the Gleam by T.M. Doran. If you like what you’re reading, visit the novel’s page to learn more or order! November 8, 1972 Saint Hugh’s Charterhouse, Sussex Porter broke silence. That was no little thing, but the breaking of his silence was… Read more »
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This is an interview from last year, but why should time matter? Especially when it involves the notoriously tricksy, almost unclassifiable science fiction writer Gene Wolfe. When many lament the state of Catholic literature these days, they almost always forget and leave out the great Catholic writers working in genre… Read more »
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I recently read Ray Bradbury
’s beautiful book Dandelion Wine. It is incredibly evocative of what being a child is like. I found myself pausing repeatedly in my reading as Bradbury’s prose jostled memories of my own childhood: the first realization that, yes, I was a real person and really truly alive; walking in the moonlight during a warm night and suddenly going from comfort to fear; the first real awareness of mortality; the joy of being allowed to stay up late and share in the world of adults; the foods, activities, music that come with summer.
Ray Bradbury uses the metaphor of dandelion wine to represent capturing summer in a bottle, one that can be opened and shared even in the dead of winter to awaken those remembrances of joy and warmth. Bradbury’s writing is itself a bottle of that wine—I’m not sure how he did it, but he captured magic with his words. He himself humbly described how he felt when reading his own work: “Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful.” Read more »
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When nine-year-old C.J. Walker touches the arm of his mother’s dead friend at her wake service and whispers the wish that she wouldn’t be dead, he’s just trying to do the right thing. But when the undertaker sees the woman’s rosary sliding off her outstretched fingers and tumbling down her… Read more »
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Journeying through Space and Time with the Legacy of C.S. Lewis
by John Herreid
November 22, 2013 2:32 pm 2 Comments
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis. It’s difficult to gauge exactly how different the world of fantasy and science fiction would be without his influence (or the influence of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien). We’ve gathered a number of links that explore different facets of his… Read more »
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Set eighty years in the future, this novel by the best-selling author Michael O’Brien is about an expedition sent from the planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, the star closest to our solar system. The Kosmos, a great ship that the central character Neil de Hoyos describes as a “flying city”,… Read more »
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Matthew Schmitz writes over at the First Things blog First Thoughts, reflecting on Randy Boyagoda’s article Faith in Fiction: We have to be more creative about where we look for faith in fiction, and in order to do so, we have to expand our tastes beyond the high modernist aesthetic… Read more »
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The Man Who Was Thursday
by G. K. Chesterton
July 19, 2013 11:25 pm Comments Off on The Man Who Was Thursday
With Annotations by Martin Gardner This edition of Chesterton’s masterpiece and most famous novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, explicates and enriches the complete text with extensive footnotes, together with an introductory essay on the metaphysical meaning of Chesterton’s profound allegory. Martin Gardner sees the novel’s anarchists as symbols of… Read more »
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Between the two world wars, on a hike in the English countryside, Professor John Hill takes refuge from a violent storm in a cave. There he nearly loses his life, but he also makes an astonishing discovery – an ancient manuscript housed in a cunningly crafted metal box. Though a… Read more »