The Best Books Are Doors Into Other Worlds

My favorite novels are so immersive that they feel like traveling through space and time. Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors, based on true historical figures and events, is my latest literary love--similar to Zadie Smith's The Fraud, but with a greater tenderness of feeling and sensual immersion in a setting as exquisitely pleasure-rich as it is excruciatingly raw with pain. This is the kind of story I love best--one that presents characters in a time and place that are all so specific that they feel alive, and whose particularities cut sharp as knives through barriers of oppression in the heart and mind to expose big mysteries about the human condition. 

If you crave that kind of brightness and depth in your bedside book stack too, take a peek at the virtual shelves I've curated in the Magic Nutshell Bookshop. They include fairy tales, myths, and legends for adults; wild-woman spicy stories; juicy family sagas; magic spells for the soul; and mostly-hilarious how-to guides that are definitely not for dummies. Orders placed through Bookshop.org support real neighborhood bookstores and the literary arts scenes that they create in local communities.

And if you like your novels thick, weird, deep, wild, and thought-provoking but with just a little bit of a sweet (not entirely bleak) finish, a sort of grimmish happily-ever-after, you might enjoy my own work. I am now offering $10 off new hardcover editions of my own emotionally and sensorially rich medieval novels, Leirah and the Wild Man and The Grove of Thorismud.

Happy reading!