Monday, May 13, 2019

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/10/19

This week I have two books: both came in the mail from the fine folks at Night Shade Books.

Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends is a new reprint anthology edited by Paula Guran. It's a nice big book, over 400 pages and twenty-seven stories, and the focus is loose enough to be interesting but not restrictive. (I've seen books like this that are all Greek myths, or all Aesop's fables, and that means a reader can often guess where a story is going from the first page.) This officially hit stores on My 7th, which means you should be able to find it wherever you prefer to buy books. Included are stories by Nisi Shawl, Catherynne M. Valente, Sofia Samatar, Rachel Swirsky, M. Rickert, Rachel Pollack, Elizabeth Hand, and Yoon Ha Lee, as old as Tanith Lee's "The Gorgon" from 1982 and as new as Tansy Rayner Roberts's "How to Survive an Epic Journey" from 2017.

And for something completely different, Night Shade also just published Neal Asher's The Warship, the second book in the "Rise of the Jain" space-opera series. It follows The Soldier in that series, and doesn't say how long the series is. (Though my experience of Asher is that all of his books basically stand alone -- he does the same kind of thing each time, but you can jump in with any book, and they're all fun modern space adventure with lots of action.) I haven't read Asher in a while, but what I read of his stuff was all good: if you ever wished Iain Banks would cut out the convoluted plots and just concentrate on things blowing up, you'll like Asher. This is also set in his common Polity universe, for returning Asher readers.

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