ABOVE US ONLY SKY: An Interview With Author Michele Young-Stone

Prudence Vilkas was born with wings in 1973 Nashville. The doctors said they were a birth defect and her wings were surgically removed leaving small scars on her shoulders. But the ghost of her wings remains and ties her to generations of winged women across the sea. Author Michele Young-Stone and CS Peterson sit down to talk about winged women, historic horror, transcendence and the craft of writing.

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"The Buried Giant": A Quest to Remember

Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel, The Buried Giant, follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, as they travel through a vaguely Arthurian landscape of ogres, pixies, and a mist that makes everyone forget—which, given the generations of bloodshed between Britons and Saxons, may not be such a bad thing. Unbound Writers Lisa Mahoney, Theodore McCombs, CS Peterson, and Mark Springer debate whether the novel is, you know, good.

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Neil Gaiman's TRIGGER WARNING: Ghost Stories Fit for Summer Campfires

Neil Gaiman’s most recent collection of short stories are calculated to chill to the bone. The collection is appropriately titled Trigger Warning. Triggers, Gaiman says in the introduction, refer to “those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane, world into a place much more dark and less welcoming.” So, beware. The book is chock full of stories that would do well at a summer camp for adults, sitting around the campfire, engaged in a friendly competition to frighten each other to jelly before bedtime.

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Contemporary Hero's Journey: The Post-Campbell Post

Join the Unbound Writers on a few hero's journeys as we illustrate a classic quest with Luke Skywalker, then diverge to follow Garth Nix's Clariel and Moira Young's Saba across The Dustlands.  

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