Alexander Pyles's Blog, page 8

Review: We Should All Be Feminists

[image error]I’ve been needing some pallet cleansers of late and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has really been coming through as one as I jump between genres and fiction projects. This was another shorter form work, which is actually an adapted TEDx talk she gave a few years back. It’s more of an essay than a full fledged work, but one that will subtly shift your perspective just a little if you read closely enough.

I listened to this one on audio book and given it’s brief nature it was easy to do in one sitti...

Review: The Council of Dads

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I haven’t come across many books that just don’t land with me, but Bruce Feiler’s, THE COUNCIL OF DADS is one of those books. I just could not get into it, and maybe it was in part that I listened to it on audio book, which was narrated by Feiler himself or maybe it was just the medium.

THE COUNCIL OF DADS is part memoir, part inspirational narrative about Feiler’s brush with bone cancer when he was still a relatively young dad. His daughters were only three when he was diagnosed. In order t...

Review: Confessions of X

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I recently started a book club with some friends in the area and this was the first book (and my pick) we read for fiction. This month is nonfiction, but I’ll review it next month.

Anyway, THE CONFESSIONS OF X by Suzanne M. Wolfe, is a beautiful historical fiction following the unnamed woman, who was St. Augustine’s concubine and bore him a son. We follow X from when she was born up to her gray years, when death is just around the corner. The book is rife with small homages to St. Augustine’...

Review: Coil

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Apex sent me this book in return for a review, and I was incredibly excited. Cyberpunk noir? Hell yes! And what Ren Warom gives us in Coil, is not only these but sci fi crime-noir at its best. Without even going farther into the book right now, if you like any of those genres I just listed, you will love this book.

When Officer Stark realizes that a particularly brutal crime seems to have a calling card for Bone Adams, one call puts both men on a ride for their lives. As more and more bodies...

Review: Dear Ijeawele; or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

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I’ve been waiting to read Ms. Adichie for a long time and I was not disappointed with getting a taste here. It should also not be a secret that I’m a father to a strong-willed daughter, so I’m always looking for insights. Thanks to both maturity and my wife’s tireless work to open my eyes, I’m also a card carrying feminist and thankfully most of what Adichie brings up here wasn’t a shocker for me.

This is not to say that her letter to a childhood friend, Ijeawele, did not have anything new t...

Review: The Undefeated

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THE UNDEFEATED by Una McCormack, is brief sci fi novella, just over 100 pages total. Monica Greatorex is a journalist known widely throughout the Interstellar Commonwealth for her reporting along the front lines of conflict. She finds herself back on the planet of her childhood, caught up in nostalgia as well as her drive to not flee from humanities’ greatest threat thus far, the jenjer.

The premise for this story is great. We have an older protagonist, who is at the height of her powers and...

Review: The Power

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I recently finished THE POWER by Naomi Alderman on audio book and boy was it a treat! Narrated by Adjoa Andoh, who did a fantastic job, especially since several different characters had various(and tricky) accents. The book is a literary work, which blends science fiction and realism to a meta-narrative degree, since the book itself is framed as a historical fiction work, written by a history scholar, Neil. He is pitching this book to Naomi, and therein the story unfolds.

(Disclaimer: multip...

Review: 100 Word Horrors Pt. 2

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In honor of the WORLDS anthology releasing on Tuesday, I thought I would offer a small review for another microfiction anthology that came to my attention this week.

Editor, Kevin J. Kennedy, was kind enough to send me a copy, and having read the part 1 of this series, I knew I was in for a wild ride.

I can’t say much about any of the individual stories, given that they are 100 words each, but I can offer my impressions of them and commend Kennedy for a quality anthology of prose.

Some of th...

Review: Longer

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I wanted to like this story more than I did, but LONGER by Michael Blumlein, just did not land in the ways I wanted it to. A nominally quiet sci-fi that wants to deal with larger issues in benign ways(for science fiction), you would think it would follow my taste, but this was not the case.

Cav and Gunjita are researching new pharmaceuticals employed by Gleem Galactic. Alone in an orbiting station, Gunjita “juves” for her second and last time. Cav opts not to. Both of them have access by bei...

Book release: WORLDS

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Today is release day for the anthology which I am in! It has been a long time, since I have been in an anthology and I’m thrilled that I was accepted into it.

So, if you noticed my updated “Publications page” you’ll find this anthology listed there, since I have a handful of micro fiction published in this. I’m also published along numerous other authors, roughly 120+ of them with their own tiny stories. There are a mix of emerging, semi pro, and pro writers in these pages, so you probably d...