Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney is an American writer of fantasy literature. She is best known for her fantasy poetry and short stories and has won the Rhysling Award for her poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride” in 2011 and the World Fantasy Award—Collection for her collection Bone Swans in 2016.
The Navigating Fox (2023) Christopher Rowe "How mysterious is the Navigating Fox! But no more so than the bargains he strikes, the deceptions he weaves, and the paths he walks: geographical, political, ecumenical, and otherwise. The Navigating Fox is by turns charming, biting, enigmatic, languorous, and dangerous, and leaves the horizon just a bit more infinite than before."
The Death I Gave Him (2023) Em X Liu "Shakespeare, a haunted-house escape room, and a plot full of tenderness, philosophy, brazenness, and terror."
Flight & Anchor (2023) Nicole Kornher-Stace "Nicole Kornher-Stace deftly-exquisitely-balances the lightness of classic runaway-child books (Boxcar Children! From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!) with the savagery of survival-in-the-wilderness books (Hatchet! Robinson Crusoe!) to entertaining and harrowing effect."
Nothing But Blackened Teeth (2021) Cassandra Khaw "What with poisonous relationships, parasite houses, and ghost brides, Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a really bad idea for a wedding, and a really great idea for a nightmare on the page. This book is so magnificently rotten it writhes with literary maggots, and deserves a place of honor among its peers in horror."
All the Murmuring Bones (2021) A G Slatter "Two uncanny houses, Hob’s Hallow and Blackwater, bookend Angela Slatter’s new novel like grim sentinels. Whether they are cursed or enchanted, majestic or moldering, refuge or prison, only reading to the end will tell. Meanwhile, the landscape stretching between these gothic structures abounds with corpsewights, kelpies, ghosts, rusalki, werewolves, clockwork mechanicals, and—most alarmingly—actors. And across this treacherous terrain walks Miren O’Malley, scarred, furious, and growing in power. All the Murmuring Bones is brutal and beautiful throughout, with moments of tenderness hard-won and harder-kept, and, pervading all, an atmosphere of inescapable threat like the taste of salt wind and the sound of silver bells ringing in the deep."
The Four Profound Weaves (2020) (Birdverse, book 1) R B Lemberg "Over the years, R. B. Lemberg, in their prose and poetry alike, has built a world of serpents, deserts, stars, and bones, where transformation is omnipresent and restlessness rewarded. The Four Profound Weaves is a jewel-bright tile in their ongoing mosaic. To read it is to experience apotheosis: but instead of toward heaven, we ascend toward a more total humanity. Weaves is a patient work, at times compellingly kind, at other times merciless. Always, subtly woven. Like the Nameless One in its pages, this book does not - perhaps cannot?pretend to be anything other than what it proclaims for itself: the four profound weaves - change, wanderlust, hope, death. But these aren’t chronological; they’re a pattern, a randomized one?and death is only the middle."
Flyaway (2020) Kathleen Jennings "I feel as if a very new voice has whispered a very old secret in my ear, and I'll never be able to un-hear it. Nor will I ever want to."
The King of Next Week (2020) E C Ambrose "In the wake of the Civil War, ship’s captain Matthew Perry and his best friend and best mate William Johnson—veteran soldier and escaped slave—must all sort out love in a time of racism, friendship in a time of division, and magic in a time of skepticism."
Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019) Theodora Goss "What will you find in these pages, dear reader? Why, the encyclopedia of everything (as written by an owl), what the mirror really knows, rubies red with wolf’s blood-and, surprise!—the secret of who actually spun that straw into gold. Ice, iron, apples, birds, bones, subversion: Theodora Goss’s new collection of stories and poems Snow White Learns Witchcraft is woven of the finest spider silk, a funnel-web of faerie tales that will catch you fast and not let you go."
For the Killing of Kings (2018) (Ring-Sworn Trilogy, book 1) Howard Andrew Jones "Honor pushed out of fashion by fanaticism, honest talent diverted by tyranny, monsters at every border, deceit guiding all: For the Killing of Kings is a fantasy for our times, with a sword at its backbone but humans at its heart. World-building shines out of every ritual, in fragments of poetry and lines of plays. There are strong women on practically every page, strong friendships, plenty of warriors and mages, fight scenes galore, and a sense of playfulness to parry each stroke of solemnity. Reading Howard Andrew Jones is like opening a present from a friend who keeps promising, with a cheeky grin: 'This is my best one yet.' And it's always true."
The Robots of Gotham (2018) Todd McAulty "If Johnny 5 had a baby with the Terminator, the result would be The Robots of Gotham a book that explores the consequences of world domination by our Robot Overlords. (And, lest we forget the badassiest of them, our Robot Overladies.) Drones, dinosaurs, and doggies--with a plague thrown in for good measure!--the barter is banter, and death is cheap. With man against machine, machine against machine, man against man, unlikely alliances must be forged across all species, rational or otherwise. For all its breakneck world-building, constant questing, and relentless wheeling and dealing, The Robots of Gotham is deceptively deep-hearted: a novel about, of all things, friendship."
