The City Born Great

In this standalone short story by N. K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season, the winner of this year's Hugo Award for Best Novel, New York City is about to go through a few changes. Like all great metropolises before it, when a city gets big enough, old enough, it must be born; but there are ancient enemies who cannot tolerate new life. Thus New York will live or die by the efforts of a reluctant midwife...and how well he can learn to sing the city's mighty song. The City Born Great is a Tor.com Original. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a "glorious" story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City. In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out: The Inheritance Trilogy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms The Broken Kingdoms The Kingdom of Gods The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) Dreamblood Duology The Killing Moon The Shadowed Sun The Dreamblood Duology (omnibus) The Broken Earth The Fifth Season The Obelisk Gate The Stone Sky How Long 'til Black Future Month? (short story collection) "A glorious fantasy." —Neil Gaiman

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging." -- Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

Stories by N.K. Jemisin, Dale Bailey, Peter S. Beagle, and more: “Showcases the nuanced, playful, ever-expanding definitions of the genre.” —TheWashington Post Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres—they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories from major award winners, bestsellers, and rising stars, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever- changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view—literary, meta, and adventurous—to the series’ third edition. “Superb…This mostly dystopic, sometimes darkly humorous collection of 20 hard-hitting stories feels timely, confronting contemporary cultural crises.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Killer Cities uses a combination of social theory, polemic and close attention to empirical detail to tell the story of how and why cities cause mass animal death and, in the process, hasten the destruction of the planet. This book is not just a lament, however. It is an attempt to navigate out of this mess of planned and unplanned violence towards a world in which cities no longer act as killers but become aligned with the lives of other beings. It offers pragmatic ways of diminishing the death toll and changing mindsets without ever minimizing the dilemmas that inevitably will have to be faced. Killer cities can be rehabilitated so that they offer brighter paths towards the future - for animals, for human beings, and for the planet. A new urban geography could be within our grasp. Indeed, it has to be, for all of our sakes.

The apocalyptic, pastoral, and urban traditions have fundamentally shaped Western history and influenced American religion, culture, and politics. This book argues that these traditions have not only been decisive in giving form and substance to classic and modern American literature, but have been appropriated by contemporary science fiction. As a loosely connected set of cultural narratives, the Cross, the Plow, and the Skyline have through the medium of science fiction and fantasy provided a bold vista on the future grounded in an emergent ecological imagination. In the expanded second edition of the original 2001 publication, the author argues that a significant shift has taken place in contemporary Anglo-American science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) from twentieth-century SF/F critically analyzed in the first edition’s critical inquiry. Avantgarde works in twenty-first century speculative fiction--extensively examined in representative works in interludes separating the slightly revised original chapters--have become: darker in their visions of the possible future; more focused on slowness over breakneck speed; more amenable to gender, racial, and global diversity in authorship, plot, and subgenre creation; less attached to anchor concepts like the city, wilderness, and the domesticated landscape in plot development; more prone to dystopian and critical dystopian tropes; simultaneously more open toward, but critical of, Young Adult fiction; and more supportive of the breakdown of borders and antagonisms between science fiction and fantasy and SF/F and literary fiction. Ensconced in the cultural, social, and political zeitgeist of the New Millennium’s first two decades, these features of twenty-first century science fiction and fantasy may yet settle into and inform emergent and pluralistic varieties of ecological politics spreading across the globe and confronting the Earth’s social and environmental crises of our times and coming decades.

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com