Nonfiction
Reviews: September 2025
Adam-Troy Castro recommends a movie and two new books. Find out what he’s excited about!
Adam-Troy Castro recommends a movie and two new books. Find out what he’s excited about!
Inherent in saving face, there’s a backdrop of protectionism. A fear of losing your community, in losing everything. There’s pressure to be fastidious and appear too powerful to mess with. Many families, mine included, have a history of keeping their heads on a swivel to survive war.
There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1954 called “Baby Buggy Bugs.” Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the one with the extremely short bank robber who disguises himself as a baby and tricks Bugs into taking care of him while he searches for his lost loot.
If there’s one thing I learned this summer, it’s that we need each other more than ever. There are so many terrible things happening, and there’s no way we can survive all of them without a helping hand. We must invest our time and our energy into our relationships.
The thing that got me excited to write this story is the jaded and familiar voice of Bangkok taxi drivers. They’re my biggest driver, literally. Taxis decorated for spiritual protection aren’t such an uncommon sight either. This voice became irresistible when I was playing Cyberpunk 2077.
Archaeology is a method and practice which resurfaces the past. It can help us reconstruct the history and culture of ancient (or not so ancient) people, and give us insight into what it means to be human. Archaeology produces more than museum displays, and it can be used to manipulate and disempower.
People really don’t like confronting the unknown and they really don’t like conflict. So much of this brief window into this couple’s relationship is about avoidance, distance, observation from far away but with no real knowledge gained. And they both know it’s wrong; the Magic 8 Ball didn’t appear for no reason.
Philip K. Dick is not a household name but much of his science fiction is: Hollywood adaptations of his work include Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. He never wrote a vampire or werewolf story, and he almost never played with the common tropes of the horror genre.
Many of us are feeling anxious about what’s going to happen to each other and our beautiful planet. I sometimes lose heart, myself! But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with so many amazing horror writers over the years, it’s that when things get dark, humans have the capacity to come together and shine.
What strikes me about Hannah is she’s not afraid of the bunny-ear kids, by all appearances the most fearsome thing at Colden Hills Music Camp. Instead, her anxieties are laser-focused on walking around in her swimsuit, and having to be social at the ice cream social, and not getting picked up at week’s end.