My newest story, “Abandonware,” is part of Lightspeed Magazine’s 100th issue. Family, memory, video games, deer.…

Ah, Harlots. Rarely has a show about such wretched people been so delightful to watch.…

“Like many other natural resources, sand is finite. Like many other natural resources, it’s in trouble. And as with any other necessary commodity, the industries and governments that need it will do whatever it takes to get more. But this is hardly new; Beiser’s brief history of sand seems designed to make you think about the difficult symbiosis of growth and consumption that creates modern convenience.…

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney brings together compelling glimpses of the history around his story: Couney’s jostling medical predecessors; the classism and racism behind infant care; the spread of eugenics rhetoric; and the rise of the cheap-thrill spectacle add depth to the broad strokes of global events. (Raffel intersperses anecdotes of preemie success stories with reminders that two generations of them were raised into world wars.) Couney, with his fancy suits and warm affect, is an appropriately flashy entry point for all of it, though Raffel quickly seems to become more interested in the conundrum he posed for both fairgoers and doctors.…

You know it’s been a long year when people ask for summer reads and you find yourself recommending Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves — in which Indigenous North Americans band together to escape government hunters in the wake of societal collapse — as a comforting story. (Hey, at least everybody’s banding together.) It can be great to leave the cacophony of the world behind for the length of a book.…

In 1841, small-town parish clerk William Hinton got his first look at an English locomotive in action. Writer Julian Young recorded Hinton’s breathless reaction: “Well Sir, that was a sight to have seen; but one I never care to see again! How awful! I tremble to think of it! I don’t know what to compare it to, unless it be to a messenger … with a commission to spread desolation and destruction over this fair land!…