Jason Sheehan

Yoon Ha Lee's new novel is hard to sum up — in an alien world so dissimilar to ours its technology seems like magic, reality is a consensus that requires intense, rigid belief to function.

Mark Z. Danielewski's proposed 27-part saga about a girl and her very strange cat rolls on in Volume 3, Honeysuckle and Pain — in which all the different voices and stories start to find a groove.

Ren Warom's tale of AIs, genius hackers, corporate crime and the occasional sea creature uses familiar building blocks to create a wild, loud, corkscrewing story that builds to a bloody conclusion.

Justin Cronin's blood-and-thunder tale of a viral vampire apocalypse began in 2010 with The Passage. He brings it to a rousing conclusion in his new book, hitting all the beats fans have waited for.

Lavie Tidhar's new novel follows a motley crew of spacemen, castaways, data vampires and magical children in a beautifully realized far-future Tel Aviv. It's short, lush and close to a masterpiece.

Richard Kadrey kicks off a new series about a magic-immune thief in a magic-soaked Los Angeles with The Everything Box. It's a madcap ride in which the end of humanity is just the beginning.

Tin House editor Rob Spillman's new memoir chronicles his search for a maybe-nonexistent home across decades and continents. He's a winning writer despite occasional lapses into artsy self-importance.

Writer Augusten Burroughs has grown up on the page, in a series of unvarnished (and sometimes unhinged) memoirs. His latest is the story of a man trying to stay sober, stay in love and not blow it.

Peter Behrens' novel, Carry Me, follows the fortunes of two interconnected families through the World Wars in Europe, as well as the turmoil leading up to Ireland's War of Independence.

Mischa Berlinski's novel is about a failed Florida policeman trying to make a new life in Haiti. Critic Jason Sheehan says the book explores "the gray middles of everything."

"Ever since I was a little boy, I've been trying to reconcile constructivist aesthetics and fascist metaphysics...lucidity and violence...and the endless implications of that dichotomy."

That's Mark Leyner, ladies and gentlemen. One of the best, the brightest, the weirdest and the most influential modern writers of, say, 1996. Who once ...

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is not just the greatest American food writer who's ever played the game, she's one of our greatest writers, period. She was, variously, a travel writer, an essayist, a chronicler of American idylls, an observer of decline, of lack, of old fashioned custom and manners, a ...

The best thing Luke Skywalker had going for him in the original trilogy was that he never had to worry about who was going to feed the war orphans left behind by the rebellion, or rebuild trashed moisture farms. No, if you're Luke, all you gotta do is show up ...

There are a thousand chapters in Sayed Kashua's new book, Native. A thousand of them (that might be an exaggeration), but my favorite one is called "Anti-Hero" and it begins like this:

"We have to leave the country," I informed my wife as I went over the final proofs. ...

Imagine if you could kill God. Literally just roll right up on him and shoot him in the face.

Now imagine that it's gods, plural. And while putting them down isn't by any means easy, it is possible. You can kill them. All of them. And free the world from ...

China Miéville is a magician. He's the Keyser Soze of the New Weird because you never know who he's going to be. He can do noir, do steampunk, do aliens and magic caterpillars. He's a shape-shifter. An incredibly prolific Dungeons & Dragons loving geek golem who can both blow your ...

Harlan Ellison is America's weird uncle. He's the angry, elderly cousin at the table — the one who, for weeks before dinner, everyone asks about. Is he coming this year? Is Harlan gonna be there?

They ask because they're worried; Harlan is always starting something. But they'd also be sad ...

All the best science fiction has giant robots in it. That's just wisdom.

All the best science fiction has spaceships. Has ray guns and maybe dinosaurs, too. Has a sense of clutching wonder that takes you right in the chest, stutters your heart, widens your eyes and sucks the breath ...

Rick Moody wrote one of my favorite short stories of all time, a novella called "The Albertine Notes." He wrote one of the most affecting books of my young adulthood, The Ice Storm — and to a white-bread suburban kid who idolized the guts of Hubert Selby Jr., William Burroughs' ...

In the late 1800's, it would've been tough to find two men more famous than Mark Twain and Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Twain was Twain — author, essayist, humorist, irascible old coot. In the public eye, on stage and in the newspapers, he was America's ur-curmudgeon. A man who spun ...