Episode 638: Books that were off our radar

The end of the year may be fast approaching, but this episode isn’t quite our usual year-in-review discussion (which will come up later), or our books-we’re-looking-forward-to episode. Instead, we spend some time musing about books we maybe should be looking forward to, if we only knew about them. This raises the question of forthcoming novels that contain substantial fantasy or speculative elements, but that are marketed almost entirely as general or “literary” fiction. The examples Gary cites are The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard and Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice. (Of course, some of our favorites like Kelly Link also get this “mainstream” treatment, as with The Book of Love.) This is turn raises the question of how we find out about new novels from the margins of the field, how we choose what we read when discovering an exciting new writer may mean forgoing a new novel by a favorite, and how to find a balance.