At Contra Viento, Kimberly Garza writes of the distance between a father and daughter. “Neither of you understands one another without her. Behind you the sun cracks open dark corners of the river and you think how her absence is like that: something so bright it blinds, casts into sharp relief the distance between you.”

From an Iraq-set Frankenstein to an uncanny rendition of The Wizard of Oz, the staff at Tor.com have gathered an intriguing reading list of remixed classics.

Skytalkers is a Star Wars podcast hosted by two diehard fangirls, Charlotte Errity and Caitlin Plesher. They will have lots to talk about this week — with today’s US release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Read a snippet from the first chapter of Ann Patchett’s new novel on Musing, the blog of her Nashville bookstore. The Dutch House follows two siblings over five decades, “from their early years to their exile, by their stepmother, from the childhood home they both cherished.”

James Hannaham and John W. Bateman play a game: one of them texts five random emoji to the other, and the recipient then creates a micro-story. Read some of their collaborations at Electric Literature

Start planning your 2019 reading schedule with Literary Hub’s exhaustive list of exciting future releases — including numerous titles by women writers and writers of color.

“The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse.” At Tor.com, read the prologue from acclaimed sci-fi author John Scalzi’s upcoming “epic space-opera novel,” The Consuming Fire.”

Do you ever feel a tad claustrophobic here on Earth? At Book Riot, Jenn Northington recommends 50 works of speculative fiction set in space “in all its mystifying, occasionally terrifying, really freaking huge glory.”

On Philip Roth’s death: “Now Roth has made the same mistake. He’s no longer here to represent his body of work. It’s up to us to keep reading the books. They are not of this time. They will offend a lot of people. They are some of the very best books I have ever known.”

Phenderson Djèlí Clark on getting political in sci-fi/fantasy: “It informs my writing. It informs my characters. It informs my imagination. It informs my very reason for creating. I guess I’ve always known I was a political writer of SFF. Because there are no ‘non-sci-fi/fantasy issues.’”

Michael Wehunt was writing an imaginary blurb for his not-quite-finished novel when it turned into a short story of its own, a brief but powerful meditation on books and their tremendous power to move us.

“Before they learned to tie their shoes, the boys could loop the long silhouettes of their footie pajamas into nooses. When she took away their craft scissors, they chewed their nails to points, sharpened their teeth on the chipped ceramic edges of the bathtub.”

It’s the well-wrought characters in Cynthia Guenther Richardson’s short fictional piece, “Castoffs” that will grab you and keep you reading.

A story in one hundred words, from Desmond Prize-winning novelist Claire Fuller: “It made me laugh, to see how they believed my joke. But the nag reared up and Lewin fell. There was screaming but no one jumped in to save him. We was all too afeared.”

“I became aware of this phenomenon—people believing fiction is true—some years before this mass delusion about a popular novel swept the nation.” At The Mendocino Humanist, Todd Walton recounts his experiences with audiences who assume his stories are autobiographical.