Sublime

I’m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California , about a woman who assumes her brother’s identity shortly after his death. It’s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it’s about grief. Blackburn’s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations—of both ... See more

Jeff VanderMeer charts Area X's impossible terrain in his Southern Reach trilogy. The first book of the series, Annihilation, flirts with various genre conventions but warps and refracts them. Most often, VanderMeer is cited as a foremost writer of the New Weird, which, in the tradition of Lovecraftian Old Weird, deals with the wonder and horror at... See more