Agent Palmer

“Chasing Black Unicorns: How Building the Amazon of Africa Put me on Interpol’s most wanted list” by Marek Zmyslowski is entertaining, educational, and more vain than you would expect.

It’s equal parts tell-all, vanity press, and fish-out-of-water. This is, after all, the story of a Polish entrepreneur in Nigeria.

Douglas A. Anderson’s collection of stories gathered in Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy appears to be more from before Tolkien’s works were published than “classic stories that inspired the author of The Lord of the Rings” but I can’t fault the publisher for trying to drum up sales.

Of the 21 stories that make up this collection, there were only a handful I enjoyed and four that I truly loved…

I have read the collection of stories known as “The Monster Book of Zombies” edited by Stephen Jones, which is more than just Tales of the Walking Dead as the subtitle suggests. It’s variations on a theme. Perhaps that’s the standard as I’m not often a short story collections reader.

I’m also not much of a horror reader, so to attempt to properly review this collection would be folly. However, I have chosen my favorite short stories from this collection to share with you.

Brad Watson’s short story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives is something of a revelation for a publication released in 2010. The stories contained within could take place from the 1970s through the 2000s, though their relevance and enjoyment seems to be timeless.

That’s the point of stories, particularly short stories – they are supposed to endure with some kind of lesson or sense of purpose either bestowed upon or lost on the reader.

Why Not Me is Al Franken’s 1999 future fiction satire of his run to the White House in the election of 2000. This was years before his actual journey into the realm of public service.

This book may be dated, but not because it was written before the turn of the century or in a different millennium. This book is dated because the line on what works as satire is drawn based around the current events that satire is set against. Why Not Me has moments of clarity that shock, but those are few and far between.