Our problem is that you only have your own story. One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one hundred stories, you will be strong. If we can show that what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side. We need to collect the

'Even on bad writing days there was something I could spend time finding out' Lots of the rules for writing non-fiction are just the same as they are for writing fiction ("Put one word after another", 20 February). Whether it's biography, history, astronomy or anything else that comes in the category of factual, you need to be at your desk just as early (or at least as long) as if y...

Josh Lacey is taken in by centaurs Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young, who write together as Zizou Corder, had huge success with their first book, Lionboy. Their fifth collaboration, Halo, is a funny and fast-moving adventure set in ancient Greece. The story begins with a baby being washed ashore on a beach on Zakynthos, one of the larger Ionian islands, famous for its pulsating r...

Is it a bad omen to start a challenge (Kate’s revival of the Short Story Challenge) with a book I am not really enthusiastic about? At any case, this long-due discovery of Mavis Gallant is quite a surprise. I knew that she wrote short stories about France and Paris, but somehow I’d thought she was writing about

Just when you thought Twitter was tapped out as a storytelling medium, BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti (pictured) has broken new ground in Twitter Lit--Choose Your Own Twitter Adventure. GalleyCat has reported on Twitter Lit since its earliest days, but we haven't seen anything like this yet. The simple Twitter story lets the reader make choices and move into other links along the Twitter s...

An operatic version of the book is on the way, making me wonder which other novels would lend themselves to orchestral arrangements? Ian McEwan has history when it comes to musical interpretations – back in 1982, he collaborated with composer Michael Berkeley on the anti-nuclear weapons oratorio Or Shall We Die? In 2008, he worked (with Berkeley again) on the opera For You, a story of sexual...

A midcentury design history charts the weird course of progress

1. Submitted a haunted house story (true!) to Strange Horizons. I have no idea how it will be received but giving it a shot makes me feel good. If it doesn't make it, I'll keep trying elsewhere. It's another blend of fact and fiction which is in my comfort zone, but not Alaska or flying so outside it as well. But it's on its way so that's all good. 2. April column is done!...

Helen picked her way back home using the less traveled streets and alleys, avoiding the larger thoroughfares such as Nguyen Hue, where trouble was likely. When she first came to Saigon, full of the country's history from books, it had struck her out little any of the Americans knew or cared about the country, how they traveled the same streets day after day - Nguyen Huge, Hai Ba Trung, Le Loi - wi...

Official Douglas Smith Website Read Excerpts from each Chimerascope story HERE Order Chimerascope HERE about Chimerascope at Chizine Read FBC Review of Impossibilia INTRODUCTION: 2010 has turned out to be the year of awesome collections so far, with "Chimerascope" the 5th superb such that I read this year and 3rd published in 2010, while the other two have been published in late 2009. I have revie...