Wednesday, August 01, 2012

What is Graham Joyce reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Graham Joyce, author of Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

His entry begins:
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury. When a great author dies the best tribute you can pay him or her is to go back and re-read their work. I first read this when I was a teenager and I wanted to see how it looks today. Bradbury was often thought as a science fiction writer but he wasn’t. He was a Fantasist. He was more interested in ideas than science. When people complained that his characters were on Mars in The Martian Chronicles without an explanation of how they could breathe in such an atmosphere his response was, “Don’t be ridiculous: it isn’t real, it’s a story.” I love that confidence. Human beings, not sciences, were the heroes of his stories. When you read – or re-read – Fahrenheit 451 you know deep down that this is an important book. It’s not about censorship, but how the media is controlled and how news is presented to us along with while we are doped with shallow entertainment. It seems...[read on]
About Some Kind of Fairy Tale, from the publisher:
Acclaimed author Graham Joyce's mesmerizing new novel centers around the disappearance of a young girl from a small town in the heart of England. Her sudden return twenty years later, and the mind-bending tale of where she's been, will challenge our very perception of truth.

For twenty years after Tara Martin disappeared from her small English town, her parents and her brother, Peter, have lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. And then suddenly, on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents' home and there, disheveled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It's a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara's story just does not add up. And, incredibly, she barely looks a day older than when she vanished.

Award-winning author Graham Joyce is a master of exploring new realms of understanding that exist between dreams and reality, between the known and unknown. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a unique journey every bit as magical as its title implies, and as real and unsentimental as the world around us.
Learn more about the book and author at Graham Joyce's website.

See Graham Joyce's top ten fairy fictions.

The Page 69 Test: Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

Writers Read: Graham Joyce.

--Marshal Zeringue