The best world-building is participatory, a collaboration between artist and audience. Artist Julie Buffalohead creates narrative images layered with personal meaning, both playful and serious. At the same time, she invites the viewer in, leaving of room for the mysterious.

Image: Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), A Little Medicine and Magic, 2018. Oil on canvas; 52 x 72 in. Courtesy of Julie Buffalohead and Bockley Gallery. Image courtesy of Julie Buffalohead and Bockley Gallery

Parenting is risky business, more so when ghosts take an uninvited co-parenting role.

Writer Gabino Iglesias’ new book Coyote Songs hit book stores this week. Check out this interview for ideas about writing, the horror of murder and living interstitially.

In the world of Japanese anime you can slip from the ordinary to the magical at any moment.

Fiction Unbound’s Gemma Webster chats with UK writer Priya Sharma.

Head into the swamps with some fallen families and wild grotesques in Part 2 of our Southern Gothic extravaganza.

An exploration of Southern Gothic speculative literature.

Wild, raging girls seem to be everywhere these days, from movies like Logan to books like The Girl with All the Gifts. 

In honor of Ishiguro's Nobel lecture last night, we revisit our woolly musings on 2015's The Buried Giant.

Everybody loves SF/F adaptations these days. We'd like to see these.

What do Logan, the noir-Western superhero film featuring the classic brooding antihero of the X-Men, and Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir by J.D. Vance, have in common? Put on some Jonny Cash, pour yourself a bourbon and let's talk.

An Unbound writer comes back from the Clarion SF/F Writers Workshop and into a dystopian moment.

Steven Millhauser's short story "Phantoms” invites readers to consider the phantoms that haunt them.  Jon considers his phantoms and how they expose his complicity in perpetuating prejudice against trans people.

At the cultural crossroads of Cambodian folklore, belief and speculative literature, with emerging author Kay Chronister

After a politically tumultuous 2016, Jon seeks solace in the fantasy worlds of Beth Cato and V.E. Schwab.

Gem and Jon wade through the tired tropes that television can’t get enough of.

Is the world ready to say goodbye to the docile black man trope?

Lisa Mahoney looks for common themes in Bhutanese folktales and finds... the phallus town.

The ambitious cosplay of devoted fans, contrasted to the quiet insecurities of blockbuster writers. 

Panelists at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's LitFest '16 debate “The Resurrection of Dystopian Lit,” and The Unbound Writers speculate.

An ambitious masterpiece of Chinese science fiction, reviewed.

Speculative fiction’s disruptive potential, and an Unbound dispatch from #AWP16

Time travel novels Kindred and The River of No Return question how the evolving ethics of society shape our sense of self.

In "Revolt 1680/2180," an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, artist Virgil Ortiz explores a post-apocalyptic world informed by the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, where the future echoes the past.

Questions of corruption and its ability to change and control us take center stage in Naomi Novik's latest, Uprooted, which reminds us how easy it can be to forget to see the (evil) forest for the (evil) trees.

How the abortion debates of the 20th century delivered a new Gothic aesthetic

How does the modern Gothic novel stack up against 1797's finest? Fiction Unbound uncovers some dark secrets.

The Musical Brain, a new collection by Argentine avant-gardist César Aira, reviewed. With monkeys.

After reading Sarah Boxer's article "Why are all the Cartoon Mothers Dead?" in The Atlantic, Fiction Unbound urges authors of speculative fiction to break the pattern of orphans and buddy-buddy fathers. Bring on the power moms!