Book View Cafe: 297 books

Philadelphia, 1950‘s: a boy, a baseball, a cockroach. Unlikely place. Unlikely characters. Unlikely love story. From the author: I grew up with tales of Old World magic. Fairy tales, ghost stories, legends of great Slavic heroes like Kralyevich Marko and his marvelous horse, Sharats....

When one sees eternity in things that pass away and infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge. But if one mrerly sees the diversity of things then one has impure knowledge. And if one selfishly sees a thing as if it were everything, independent of the ONE and the many, then one is in...

Tina Clancy is looking forward to a nice, quiet Christmas, but life has other plans for the newly-minted lawyer.  As a Daughter of Saturn, Tina expects a healthy dose of crazy in the Zone, Baltimore's roughest docklands.  Sparkling holiday lights that spontaneously combust – check. ...

Rowena Cherwood did not go around boasting of it, but she had a tidy legacy from her parents. Free to choose the life she wanted, and unwilling to live with her overbearing aunt, she accepted a position as Lady Bradwell’s companion. A spinster of twenty-seven, Rowena gave little thought...

Leaving is the same as arriving. In pursuit of her art, fleeing an unhappy affair, Nola Lynch sails from New York, through the Panama Canal, to California. Alone. The year is 1914. Nola anticipates romance, excitement, adventure, and she finds it all in a ship-board magician with a...

Some people play roleplaying-games for the challenge; others play them for the story. Award-winning fantasy author and freelance game writer Marie Brennan is unabashedly in the latter camp. In these essays she looks at tabletop and live-action RPGs from a narrative perspective, exploring the...

Time travel with a twist. A group of scientists travel to 14th century France… and the novel is written by a Medievalist. In March 1305, a group of Australians and Americans arrive in medieval France. To be precise, they arrive in the Languedoc, near a village called Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert. The...

Ghosts trail after us. They are our fears and the shape of our hates. We bring them into our lives and into our homes. Some years our fears and hates are so strong our ghosts turn tangible and fracture our landscape. Poltergeists and the spirits of drowned girls; malicious presences...

Pink tutus, sarcasm, amulets and bushfires: that is suburban fantasy in Australian cities. It is magic. Life is never quite what it seems, even without the lost family heritage delivered to Judith and Belinda in boxes. Judith (who owns the haunted lemon tree and half the boxes) wants...

Step into a world of your own making . . . Worldbuilding is one of the great pleasures of writing science fiction and fantasy -- and also one of its greatest challenges. Award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan draws on her academic training in anthropology to peel back the layers of a setting,...

Explore a world of your own . . . Science fiction and fantasy are renowned for immersing their readers in rich, inventive settings. In this follow-up to the collection NEW WORLDS, YEAR ONE, award-winning fantasy author Marie Brennan guides you through new aspects of worldbuilding and how they...

A bomb explodes on a busy street in Minneapolis, just before the annual Aquatennial celebrations. None of the pre-cogs in the city sensed the disaster before it occurred. None of the post-cogs can catch a glimpse of the bomber. Cassie thinks she can solve the case. But no one listens because...

Cassie cannot turn away her most recent client. She needs the money. Though honestly, trying to find the woman's damned cat turns her stomach. But the client also carries a rose with her. It represents…something. Something destructive. Something apocalyptic. Something Cassie can't...

Rotten Row is the worst place we’ve made. Humankind can travel to the stars — but only those content to be flung as a datastream through space, flitting from male to female, dark to fair, one random discard body to the next. Those who go are the Upshot, rare individuals subject to their...