I am wary of saying too much, because even the titles of the books are spoilery. And you don’t have to read them in order, but they do still spoil each other. So this is your spoiler warning line, though I’m doing my best to summarize vaguely below.
The first book is The Thief, and it is about a kid who was arrested for bragging that he could steal anything, and then proving it. The king’s magus, the brains behind the thrones, then pulls him out of prison to look for an ancient artifact, the ownership of which makes you rightful heir to a neighboring throne. They tell a lot of myths over the course of the book, so it seems like a kinda okay read maybe, and then you get to the end and BAM. TWISTS. that make the whole book 1000% better when you reread.
The second is Queen of Attolia, when this kid is a little older and making himself a nuisance in a foreign country again. He gets his hand cut off for it and this precipitates a three-way war, which he is not initially aware of because he is sulking, because he is majestic and snarky and petty. When he wakes up, he conspires to steal peace, and he does it, of course, in a tricksy heisty magnificent manner involving the cutest boat hook in the world.
The third is King of Attolia, which abruptly changes viewpoints to that of a king’s guard who has just gotten in trouble for punching the king in the face. Costis is a cute sort of honorable fellow, but we really use his viewpoint to see why the king is king, in two… no, three different ways, and it’s also where my shipper heart is abruptly kicked into gear so that I go back and reread Queen and squee magnificently over everything.
The fourth is Conspiracy of Kings, which shifts POV again to a character from the first book who you might almost have forgotten about; there’ve been throwaway lines to some political stuff going on his country that, if you were invested in him, would make you quite worried, and this is the book explaining why no one knew where he was or what he was doing all this time. And also what he does about it which is, sadly, become epic and badass.
Thematically it’s about what it means to be a monarch, and it’s about the prices paid for different kinds of strength, and it’s a hilarious not-quite-heist story, and it’s about international politics in smaller countries that the superpowers of the world would distinctly like to eat up, and it’s about how we relate to our gods, and it’s about maintaining cultural identity in the face of inevitable defeat.
okay now I can’t help but imagine Malory as Sebastian Stan like
“gotta throw in all the characters!!”
omg as a HUGE NERD who discovered Irish mythology as a wee kidlet and then as a teen discovered why “primary sources” are totally different from Lady Freaking Gregory and Yeats and SERIOUSLY PAY ATTENTION TO WHO TRANSLATED STUFF (AND ADDED/REMOVED BITS FOR LOLZ) VERSUS WHO WROTE SHIT DOWN COS IT WAS ALL VERBAL AND 27 DIFF VERSIONS OF THE SAME SHIT EXISTS DEPENDING ON HOW MANY MILES APART THE PEOPLE WERE and by 16 I had already read EVERYTHING I COULD GET MY HANDS ON about Celtic folklore and mythology all over Europe and no-one prepared me for The Mabinogion and shit, but I read IT ALL, including hilariously dodgy ‘scholarly’ books by Jon & Caitlin Matthews like there are no words I cannot even and it made The Mists of Avalon look totes legit and FYI wow so not.
Then when I was at uni I LOVED taking Arthurian Lit so much I TOOK THE SAME CLASS TWICE cos Leslie Donovan changed up the book list the 2nd time and then 10 years later watching people be confused as fuck when Merlin happened and having to explain to them “no, seriously, you don’t understand–Morgana wasn’t Arthur’s sister until way later, originally it was unclear WHO actually died at Camlann–Mordred or Arthur or who was even like the bad guy there–and all the shit you keep referring to is 20th century poetry or novels or the goddam Disney movie omg here’s all the Pre-Geoffrey Monmouth History of Britain Welsh stuff before the French got ahold of it GODDAM FUCKING BRITTANY ok no really, it makes total sense in context and THOSE WACKY NORMANS added Lancelot and shit to make Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court laugh and OMG LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT 8TH CENTURY MONKS THEY’RE HILARIOUS” and let’s face it, no-one was prepared for that shit. IT WAS AWESOME.
Also, The Romance of Arthur is the best fucking book ever. I have the 1994 edition, and clearly need to find the 2013 expanded edition omg I didn’t even know it existed.
@thebibliosphere look what I found? I saw it and thought of you.
in a good way, i promise!!!
I love the caption that says “they’re baaaack” both implying there is more to this, and the author is a 1980s equivalent of s shit poster.
I have. THREE. Of these books. They are a collection of short stories featuring the ridiculous fantasy tropes of women warriors. It’s a group of lady writers taking the piss out of lazy male fantasy writers and they’re FANTASTIC. If you ignore the shitpost covers.
TO AMAZON USED MARKETPLACE
I was gonna add that these books were fucking great.
READ THESE. They are so funny and clever and they take a literary morningstar to the patriarchy.
There are six books in this series. Five of them came out between 1995 and 2004; Book Six came out in 2015 after an 11-year hiatus, so here’s hoping for more. They are, in order:
Chicks in Chainmail
Did You Say Chicks?!
Chicks ‘N Chained Males
The Chick is in the Mail
Turn the Other Chick
Chicks Ahoy! (trade omnibus of the first three books, no new stories)
Chicks and Balances
One of the things I love best about the series is that the various authors will often write short stories for them about the same set of characters: there are several stories about the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society, a support group/workers union for women in the army; merc-for-hire Hallah Iron-Thighs and her partner in violence Gerta Dershnitzel; single mother/also merc-for hire Rivakonniva; etc.
So yes, go out and buy them, they are so fun.
Also edited by the same person, but not in the same series:
Well, fuck me, is there a vampire/horror series!? Don’t leave me fanging!!
UPDATE: It’s the Suburban Fantasy Anthologies.
I need this in my life. Bless my dash and bless you ppl for spreading this
*adds to to-read, buy-if-possible list*
Esther Friesner is a blessing to fantasy literature and should be canonized as a fandom saint. If you can track down her Majyk By Accident series, it’s amazing and hilarious.
So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
We hear over and over again from teachers across the country how they
want to infuse more culturally responsive and relevant texts into their
district or school-mandated curriculum. It’s challenging to do, but what if we had some resources to share to help you out?
Ok so I have to talk about how excited I am about this book. It’s an upcoming children’s novel called George, written by genderqueer author Alex Gino. It’s about a little trans girl who wants the world to see her for who she is.
I’ve poked around the author’s website and was really pleased by what I found and this looks like it could be a terrific read.
You can pre order it at alexgino.com (which I am about to do right now) but if you can’t afford an expensive hardback bother your rich friends to get a copy or something idk in any case this looks exciting and I want people to know about it
Also ask your local public library to order a copy!
And at the center of it all: Chocolate. Chocolate as a discourse on imperialism. Chocolate as a metaphor for sex. Chocolate magnifying the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation. Chocolate as currency. Chocolate as power. Oh, Tremontaine is an adventure, and at least two love stories, too — but it’s also a savvy commentary on the economics and ethics of cultural exchange. Kaab is a woman of color, hailing from a people of color, from a land far away, where chocolate is crafted and exported to a nation of people the color of ant-eggs who bastardize the Kinwiinik’s sacred preparation and consider their sugared up, creamed up version of the drink the height of sophistication. It’s not just an entertaining series; it’s an incisive cultural critique.
Well, and the gayness: One thing most of these writers of have in common is that their previously published works all give prominence to queer characters in worlds where being queer is a non-issue. The same is true of Tremontaine, where every love story is between men who love men, or women who love women, or men and women who love both men and women. The sex is good fun, but the romance is deliriously well-written. Such aching and longing and pining and promises (amid cups and cups of chocolate!).
This list doesn’t include all the memoirs, all the fiction short story collections. They’re mostly books I’ve read— some of them, like “Like Bread on a Seder Plate” and “Queer Jews” I grew up with, others, like “Torah Queeries” and “Keep Your Wives Away From Them” I read on my own time. They range from Orthodox to Reconstructionist to Reform, and encompass a variety of ways of tangling with Jewish tradition.
If you are curious about LGBTQ people in the Jewish tradition, I urge you read at least one if not more of these.
In
the best urban fantasy, the city is not just a backdrop, but functions
as a character in its own right, offering up parallels between personal
histories and histories of place. That is certainly true in Daniel José
Older’s magnificent “Shadowshaper,” which gives us a Brooklyn that is
vital, authentic and under attack.
The
book opens with Sierra Santiago painting an enormous mural of a dragon
on the side of a building. “We hate the Tower,” Manny the Domino King
tells her, explaining why her mural is important. “We spit on the
Tower. Your paint is our nasty loogie, hocked upon the stupidity that is
the Tower.”
[…]
It
turns out that Sierra’s mural is important for another reason. Sierra
comes from a long line of shadowshapers — magicians who channel
friendly spirits into art. Given form, those spirits are able to defend
the community. Her discovery of her own ability and the family history
that comes with it is part dynastic intrigue and part cultural
awakening. The story is messy, the people in it behave imperfectly and
Sierra is heir to all the bad stuff as well as the good.
Sierra
herself is a compelling, refreshing hero, with a “fro stretched
magnificently around her in a fabulous, unbothered halo.” Along with
her brother Juan, a guitar player in a salsa-thrash band; the enigmatic
Robbie, who draws so compulsively that his art covers “every surface of
his clothes, his backpack, his desk”; her trickster figure of an uncle;
and a collection of clever and funny friends, she has to discover who is
murdering her abuelo’s associates and why other murals all over her
neighborhood are fading.
Kimchi and Justice 