It’s quiet and thoughtful without being heavy, the magic is subtle and understated, and the two protagonists are thoroughly rendered and deeply explored. There are plenty of djinni stories, and plenty of golem stories, but this one manages to do something unique and interesting with both those commonplace fantasy beings.
Theseus and Romulus Review
We are closer in time to the great inventors of the Renaissance than Plutarch was in time to his first two subjects.
The War in the Air Review
Though the narrator makes some gestures to the human toll and tragedy attendant to the war in the air, the downward spiral precipitated by the first battles is holistically depicted with a kind of solemn glee
Job Review
The framing story in Job asks this question; Job’s resultant suffering is meant to test his righteousness in the absence of reward – that is, will he continue to be selfless if the selfish reasons for doing so are removed?
Assyria Review
As Frahm points out, the Assyrian Empire is as much a part of our cultural heritage as the Greeks, though they receive far less attention for their contributions.
Esther Review
Alternatively, we could treat it as it is, without worrying too much about what we cannot know about it, and read Esther as a brief chronicle of a peculiar incident in the history of the relationship between the Jews and the Achaemenids.
Perfume Review
Grenouille’s olfactory abilities fit the trope of the defining superhero trait, as does his tragic backstory, his painful and challenging training arc, and his inability to fit into normal society, but he is no hero, protecting eighteenth century Paris from crimes with his beyond-bloodhound sniffer as some manner of odor-based vigilante.
Metropolitan Strata Release Post and Author’s Note
This story is closer to a classic time travel story, despite there being no time travel, and it’s written differently from how I usually write stories.
The Forme of Cury Review
After being forced to scroll past dozens of nearly identical, overly sappy stories on various food blogs in order to reach anything relevant about the recipe, I decided to go old school and instead picked up a cookbook from the fourteenth century.
Counting Languages
Far from being a modern phenomenon, the declining diversity of language owes more to broad, civilizational factors, like the onset of agriculture and settlement of large city-states, than it does to the dominance of English in the current international system.
