Jason Heller
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
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African Australian author Eugen Bacon's debut is a rich, multidimensional tale of a preacher's daughter whose life on Earth is upended by two interstellar visitors — and that's just the beginning.
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Reports of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso have dominated the news in recent days; Robert Jackson Bennett's novella Vigilance draws a direct line from today's America to a bullet-riddled future.
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As heat waves roll across Europe and storms pummel the American South, literature is responding. But climate fiction — or cli-fi — is nothing new, and we've got a roundup of some classics.
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Craig Davidson's new novel follows a group of kids through a strange summer of hunting urban legends — it's a coming-of-age story that's also about loss, particularly what we lose when we grow up.
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Richard Kadrey — known for his Sandman Slim series of supernatural noirs — reinvents himself in grand fashion with The Grand Dark, a diesel-punk fantasy set in a simulacrum of Weimar Germany.
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Craig Laurance Gidney's debut adult novel is set in a marshy, mysterious rural town where a community of artists, students and townspeople are united by visions of a strange, pinkish-purple color.
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Hornsby's new album is as melodic as his past oeuvre, but it's also an absorbing peek into the veteran musician's love of avant-garde classical, jazz and progressive rock.
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A torch-song singer whose indie roots only add to the vastness of her voice and feeling, Natalie Mering keeps her head in the clouds.
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Author Nicholas Eames's series The Band is a joyous mashup of classic rock and fantasy tropes — because if there were monsters, why wouldn't there be bands of celebrity mercenaries to slay them?
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The wildly talented Tuareg guitarist returns to his North African roots on his latest album.
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Kyle Craft's second album is full of unabashed odes to courtship, confusion and the timeless power of storytelling in song.
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Chandler Klang Smith's novel, set in a crumbling far-future metropolis menaced by dragons, is a dizzying, delirious crash of wonders and grotesqueries, spiked with crackling dialogue and detail.