LETRAS

“The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises. Women can’t lie or fall in love. Fathers feed their children ghost preserves. Souls chase one another through animal incarnations. Yet these stories are grounded deeply in our reality. Out of these stories’ weirdness emerges the cruelty of border enforcement, the horror of legislation restricting reproductive freedom, the frightening pace of AI. The result is a stunning, immersive, intensely felt experience, showing us less of what the world is, and more of what it could be.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy. Published on the heels of This Side of Paradise, the story of the Harvard-educated aesthete Anthony Patch and his willful wife, Gloria, is propelled by Fitzgerald’s intense romantic imagination and demonstrates an increased technical and emotional maturity. The Beautiful and Damned is at once a gripping morality tale, a rueful meditation on love, marriage, and money, and an acute social document. As Hortense Calisher observes in her Introduction, “Though Fitzgerald can entrance with stories so joyfully youthful they appear to be safe—when he cuts himself, you will bleed.”

Something magical is happening inside this museum. . . . Jean’s life is the same day in and day out. Frozen in time by his painter father, the legendary Henri Matisse, Jean observes the ebb and flow of museum guests as they take in the works of his father and other masters like Renoir, Picasso, and Modigliani. But his world takes a mesmerizing turn when Claire, a new museum employee, enters his life. Night after night, Claire moves through the gallery where Jean’s painting hangs, mopping the floors, talking softly to herself to stem her loneliness, and gazing admiringly at the masterpieces above. The alluring man in the corner of the Matisse—is he watching her? Why does she feel a deepening pull to him, like he can see her truest self, her most profound secrets? Did he just move?

When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections and enslaved great minds. Immerse yourself in the twenty-four maneuvers and strategies of the seductive process, the ritual by which a seducer gains mastery over his target. Understand how to “Poeticize Your Presence,” “Keep them in Suspense – What Comes Next” and “Master the Art of the Bold Move”. Every bit as essential as The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction is an indispensable primer of persuasion that reveals one of history’s greatest weapons and the ultimate form of power.

The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France, as Napoleon sets forth a violent master plan to become emperor of the world. As institutions are challenged and toppled in unprecedented fashion, ripples of change ricochet through our characters’ lives as they are left to reckon with the future and a world they must rebuild from the ashes of war.

Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century's greatest chroniclers of childhood, and of all his works his beloved novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer most enchantingly and timelessly captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy. Tom Sawyer is as clever, imaginative, and resourceful as he is reckless and mischievous, whether conning his friends into painting a fence, playing pirates with his pal Huck Finn, witnessing his own funeral, or helping to catch a murderer. Twain’s novel glows with nostalgia for the Mississippi River towns of his youth and sparkles with his famous humor, but it is also woven throughout with a subtle awareness of the injustices and complexities of the old South that Twain so memorably portrays.