And we continue on with spotlighting authors:
Tim Pratt is one of my favorite people currently writing. He has a series of urban fantasy novels which I haven't read, the first of which is Blood Engines (he also has a stand alone first book called the Strange Adventures of Ranger Girl). I fully intend to read them at some point, but for the moment my tremendous regard for Mr. Pratt comes entirely from his voluminous library of short fiction (collected so far in Little Gods and Hart and Boot and Other Stories).
This is a man who knows how to write a really bang up short story, with everything tying into an emotion or concept. Off the top of my head, my favorite stories I've read or listened to of his (and this is a fellow who has made a lot of his work available in one free format or another) are Jubilee, Hart and Boot, Annabelle's Alphabet, Cup and Table, Restless in My Hand, and the Terrible Ones. Pratt has a fabulous handle on mythology, trivia, and genre tropes, and a lot of his stories are a mix and match of all these things soldered and still burning into the seams of the world we know. They tend to be smart, thoughtful little bites of wonderful, and I hope you do check some of them out.
The Ranger Girl book is a lot of fun--combining comics and the Wild West and outsider art and weird mythology...very imaginative and fun, and I think you'd like it. I haven't read much of his short fiction. Will have to check it out more.
ReplyDeleteI have to work through the other recommendations you've given me first. I still have City of Saints and Madmen around. If it had puppy eyes, it would be making them at me.
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