Tag
Magic
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras on “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”
“I realized that if I was going to write a story about healers, I also had to write a story about healing.”
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Behind the Dungeon Master’s Screen
From Dickens’s David Copperfield and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to Elena Ferrante’s Elena Greco, we are familiar with the fictional protagonist as novelist, or as novelist-to-be. Recently, 40 years after E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), we have seen the emergence of a new spin on this convention: the fictional protagonist…
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Odd Angles
Rjurik Davidson’s debut novel Unwrapped Sky is set in the fictional city of Caeli-Amur, a complex mixture of ancient Rome, steampunk industry, H. P. Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh, and Davidson’s native Melbourne. Unwrapped Sky is urban fantasy, which redeploys the pastoral and heroic conventions of traditional fantasy in a city context. The human and…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
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Queer Magic
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek both use magic to imagine solutions to childhood anxieties: What do you do when your family doesn’t feel like one? What kind of alternate kinship is available to a kid disempowered by age, obedience, and dependence? How might…
