Category Fantasy
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” – Kvothe, The Name of the Wind Patrick Rothfuss’ debut novel is quickly gaining ranks among the likes of Game of Thrones and has earned […]
Interview with George R.R. Martin
This interview was conducted for the April 2013 issue of New Jersey Monthly Magazine and appeared originally on njmonthly.com. Read the print-edition article here. HBO’s medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones is based off Bayonne bred author George R.R. Martin’s seven-part book series called A Song of Ice and Fire. New Jersey Monthly writers Joanna […]
Peter Jackson’s Embellished Version of the Hobbit
“Every good story deserves to be embellished.” – Gandalf to Bilbo, An Unexpected Journey It’s pretty remarkable that the short children’s story The Hobbit has been stretched into three blockbuster movies, considering that the 1,000 page Lord of the Rings trilogy was also made into three blockbuster movies. Some (or most) have speculated it was […]
Tales of Dunk and Egg by George R.R. Martin
“A hedge knight must hold tight to his pride. Without it, he was no more than a sellsword.” – The Hedge Knight George R. R. Martin has published three novellas (with the fourth due in May 2013 and many more rumored to come) as prequels to the Song of Ice and Fire series, and begin […]
A Feast of Ice and Fire by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer
“Later came sweetbreads and pigeon pie and baked apples fragrant with cinnamon and lemon cakes frosted in sugar, but by then Sansa was so stuffed that she could not manage more than two little lemon cakes, as much as she loved them.” – A Game of Thrones Food is one of the most memorable aspects […]
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque de Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.” – The Night Circus Much like how Diagon Alley and Hogwarts were so inviting […]
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
“Now the world poured through her, wasted, down the drain. A woman is a hole, Alexandra had once read in the memoirs of a prostitute. In truth it felt less like being a hole than a sponge, a heavy squishy thing on this bed soaking out of the air all the futility and misery there […]
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
“It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us.” – The […]
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
“[The Improbability Drive] crew of four were ill at ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics – as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.” – Douglas […]
A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin
“This one was a bitch.” – George R. R. Martin, Acknowledgments While A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords were simply continuations of A Game of Thrones – ultimately amounting to a 3,000 page book broken into three sections, A Feast for Crows is a noticeable departure both stylistically and thematically. The fourth […]
Top Ten Must-Read Fantasy Novels and Series (Part I)
Where would Shakespeare have been without fantasy — his spirits, his ghosts, and his proto-Orc Caliban, the misshapen villain of ‘The Tempest’? You can’t have Macbeth without the witches three. Today, the final Harry Potter film released on DVD, and with it, the entertainment industry has finally realized that fantasy sells just as fast as […]
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
“Martin’s is a raw, gritty, physical world, where the only joys are fighting and drinking and fucking, and the wicked and capricious gods are no better than the men and women they watch over.” – Lev Grossman Set in a world where eerie arctic winters can last a decade, A Game of Thrones is a […]
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
“The world smells of spice and dried mango, and it also smells, not unpleasantly, of sex.” – Bangkok Below, Neverwhere Neverwhere presents two worlds: London Above and London Below, where London Above is the London as we know it, and London Below is the secret underground city that gives the novel its name. Built along […]
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
(This is the sequel to The Magicians. Read the entry here.) In a rare instance where the sequel exceeds the original, The Magician King reaffirms Grossman’s imaginative capabilities as an author and a creative architect of fantasy fiction. Even though Julia is a largely forgotten character in the original work, she becomes the other main protagonist in King with […]
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
“The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea.” – George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones While The Magicians has been sold as “Harry Potter for adults,” it’s so much more than that. The writing is more sophisticated and beautiful, the magic […]
Sea of Shelves 