#Alex Pheby

[mostlyghostie]

Mordew

Has anyone read this? What did you think?

I think I'm enjoying it, it's certainly a unique world and fulfils my love of ambiguous fantasy settings, but I am finding the bleakness a bit unrelenting.

It might be due to the audiobook reading, which is great, but he makes everyone sound particularly pathetic and whiny and it's getting a bit wearing. Would be interested to hear others' experiences, bearing in mind I'm only about 1/3rd into the book as a whole

(It's not been the best accompaniment to rocking my new child to sleep, the Stephen Fry audible Sherlock Holmes stories were much better when I had my first kid a few years ago!)

[torpublishinggroup]

Release Roundup - 10.24.23

it's the last tuesday before halloween, so check out these two new and fittingly eerie and engrossing titles from Tor!

👇title info below👇

Tor Books

Traitor of Redwinter by Ed McDonald

Malarkoi by Alex Pheby

[hasmoneanbulbasaur]

I just finished reading Mordew by Alex Pheby, the first book in the Cities of the Weft trilogy.

This was a strange book that's like a mix between Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe, and Angela Carter in a weird, unstable blend and it was difficult to rate. There many things I enjoyed, but a lack of interiority from the main character held it back a lot.

My review.

[alberta-sunrise]

Morning

[sorin-sunchild]

I don't know how to describe how happy this inclusivity in Alex Pheby's 'Mordew' made me. Just like...yeah, that's real life.

Btw the context is that many people in this universe are both by magical or semi-magical means and some aren't, warranting a definition of womb-born.

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Reading

Alex Pheby PLAYTHINGS

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

International Non-Binary People's Day

🦇 Good morning, bookish bats! It's International Non-Binary People's Day! Looking to add some great non-binary books to your ever-growing TBR? Here are books from authors who publicly identify as non-binary, starring characters that are non-binary, too! Which are you reading first?

✨ Fiction ✨ 💛 She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan 🤍 Loveless by Alice Oseman 💜 Nettleblack by Nat Reeve 🖤 Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor 💛 Truth & Dare by So Mayer 🤍 X by Davey Davis 💜 Chlorine by Jade Song 🖤 Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee 💛 I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver 🤍 On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden 💜 Pet by Akwaeke Emezi 🖤 The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld 💛 The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey 🤍 The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang 💜 Outlawed by Anna North 🖤 An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 💛 The Heartbreak Bakery by A. R. Capetta 🤍 Bianca Torre Is Afraid of Everything by Justine Pucella Winans 💜 Jamie by L. D. Lapinski 🖤 Mordew by Alex Pheby

✨ Non-Fiction ✨ 💛 In Their Shoes by Jamie Windust 🤍 Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon 💜 Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe 🖤 Gender Euphoria by Laura Kate Dale 💛 A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson 🤍 What’s the T? The No-nonsense Guide to All Things Trans And/or Non-binary for Teens by Juno Dawson 💜 Life Isn’t Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker

[hellgram]

the only other wrapped that matters

favs:

maggie o'farrell, hamnet

mary doria russell, the sparrow (reread)

tom stoppard, rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead

ursula k. le guin, the ones who walk away from omelas

jorge luis borges, the house of asterion

dominique scali, les marins ne savent pas nager

jennifer giesbrecht, the monster of elendhaven (reread)

tom crewe, the new life

vajra chandrasekera, the saint of bright doors

bolded the favs among the favs. saint of bright doors book of the year one million gazillion stars to me. everyone go read the saint of bright doors in 2024

also les marins ne savent pas nager is quite possibly the best most unique queb novel i've ever read, i would recommend it if there was a translation into english but i don't know if it would manage to capture how singularly it uses french for worldbuilding and character in a way that feels so anchored in how we speak it while also giving a historical impression! also literary spec fic (or just spec fic in general. anything that isn't contemporary really) is like non-existent here compared to the english language market so it was sooo refreshing to read something that catered to Me in my own language <3 mwah

LASTLY honourable mention to mordew by alex pheby which didn't quite come through for me in execution but nevertheless was incredibly original and intentional and just something i vibed hard with. also the author mentioned the storytelling of the ffxii hunt board as an influence on some podcast i listened to after reading which like. +10 points alone for ivalice mention

[technicolor-technopath]

"Nine people you want to know better" tag game

tagged by @gryptids, thank you el!! Last Song: i don't uh listen to music and i know this wasn't the last song i heard but my partner was playing Pomegranate Seeds by Julian Moon in the car yesterday Favorite Color: I don't subscribe to the scarcity model of loving colors but I usually say green or purple, unless I'm in a red mood. Last Movie/TV Show: last movie was puss in boots: the last wish which was rad as hell. also working through demon slayer (in the entertainment district arc) and dungeon meshi and loving every second. i thought there was another dm episode out already so i sat down to watch it with my lunch but it doesn't come out til tomorrow :'( Sweet/Spicy/Savory: savoryyyyyyy. i think a lot of people oversweeten sweet foods tbh, and besides that, i'm just overall an umami bitch Relationship Status: five years and counting. fucking wild how long that is Last Thing I Googled: green day tour dates. they're gonna be in boston near my birthday soooooooooooooo

Current Obsession: i'm a genshin gamer now. it's the only game i play and i can't stop. the writing kinda sucks (sometimes--i'm convinced there's several people with varying skill levels) but i'm fascinated by the design, expert application of incentive principles. my mains are tighnari and shogun i'm also perpetually obsessed with the fantasy world in my brain but y'all gotta wait for the book on that one

Last Book: I'm sloooowly working my way through mordew by alex pheby but i also just finished the tombs of atuan by ursula k. le guin. truly she was a genius of the pen and i'm having an incredible time going through her work now

Looking Forward To: clearing out my to-do list so i can have more time to fuck around. i'm hoping i can get all my upkeep chores done on saturday and have time to write after

i don't even really know nine people on this site tbh and i don't like to impose myself on y'alls online experiences so feel free to take or leave this but @sauntervaguelydownward @official-bagpipes @thebiscuitwitch @honeysuckle-venom @goolock @feralplantain @ladyoftheshield @idislikethissite and Free Space Your Advertisement Could Go Here

[suspicious-whumping-egg]

🦚 - Are there any queer books/shows/etc. that you would suggest?

🌼 - If you used any other labels before your current one, what were they?

🦚 - I’m going to go with some recently read books that I haven’t heard other people talking about: Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee (steampunk-ish mesh of fantasy, magic, war, revolution, adventure, and pacifism, nonbinary protag!), Lion’s Legacy by LC Rosen (cute and fun YA with a lot of queer history!), and Mordew by Alex Pheby (intricate, convoluted industrial/urban fantasy with magic and urchins gangs and heists and mystery, and a nonbinary side character who I love so dearly). And then of course Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, but those are very well known and well loved, I just can’t bear not to mention them.

🌼 - I used to use a lot of labels including bisexual, biromantic, demisexual, arospec, genderflux, etc… now I’m just comfortably a faggot. My gender is faggot and my sexuality is queer and that’s all I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bocceclub]

thinking abt mordew & malarkoi again. alex pheby please hurry up with that last leg of the trilogy

[thefrostyknight]

Finished Mordew by Alex Pheby... There were good parts but it was definitely not an easy listen. So much of the plot and world-building is wrapped in the last 1/5th of the novel and I don't think I'm a fan of the narration style.

Like I guess there was some foreshadowing and I guess when viewed as a whole the novel is well-plotted, but. I wish there was a likeable character somewhere.

[torpublishinggroup]

TOR WRAPPED 2023

Books for every Spotify Wrapped listener class! 

VAMPIRE

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Mordew by Alex Pheby

HYPNOTIST

The Library of the Dead by T. L. Huchu

Daughter of Redwinter by Ed McDonald

Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow

ALCHEMIST

The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

SHAPESHIFTER

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

The Warden by Daniel M. Ford

Wolfsong by TJ Klune

FANATIC

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab

TIME TRAVELER

Kinning by Nisi Shawl

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

MASTERMIND

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Exadelic by Jon Evans

COLLECTOR

The Wolfe at the Door by Gene Wolfe

Cassiel’s Servant by Jacqueline Carey

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

[puff0202]

Thank you for responding to my books Ask. I will add the works you cite to my goodreads. I’m also Marxist theory freak. I’ve been making myself read sci-fi and fantasy over the past year, looking for stuff to influence my own endeavours…the genres really appeal to me but not in literature because I’ve always found the writing to be ‘he said, she said’…lacking in anything prosaic. So I turned to book blogs on YouTube. For fantasy, may I suggest Mordew by Alex Pheby; the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman; Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin; Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel (like Circe, but Hindu mythology for brown types like me); Monstress by Marjorie M. Lui; She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan; and there’s a great book of essays on sci-fi by Margaret Atwood called In Other Worlds: SF And The Human Imagination. Check out Samantha Shannon…meant to be very good. Also, sci-fi has recently drawn out a lot more women writers like Emily St. John Mandel, and Octavia E. Butler (Parable Of The Sower/Talents) who are both well worth checking out. Sorry for going on…

omg wow thank you so much i'm going to look into all of this, i was super into his dark materials when i was young and yes i agree most fantasy is totally lacking in prose. i appreciate the suggestions <3

[lucithornz]

14!! :p

14. a book that made you trip on literary acid

There are quite a few, however the most recent one is definitely Mordew by Alex Pheby. There is a 100 page glossary and in that he gives a paragraph long definition for the term "bacon" but three words are spent defining "the eye of god" entry.

This a fantastic book, but it does feel like going into a trance and coming out of it going "wtf" half the time.

That whole book is a trip, and the glossary begs more questions than answers. Book 2 is coming out soon so I am excited!

Bit of an obscure answer, but hopefully that made sense. Thank you for playing <3

[hawkcovatta]

Mordew by Alex Pheby is hands down, by far, one of my favorite books of all time. It is a classic chosen one story set in a beautifully imaginative world filled with greed, sorrow, grief, and longing.

I am, in fact, one of those horrible people that pick books based on the cover and that is exactly how Mordew found it's way to me from the Austin Public Library. Both the front and back cover are decorated in an intricate, thin, pen drawing. Most details are done through the use of hatching and cross hatching, as well as some squiggling, drunken lines. The drawing depicts the city of Mordew, particularly our hero, Nathan Treeves, staring up at the sea wall as a firebird sent by the Mistress of Malarkoi stares back at him. All around Nathan are the various rotting shacks that make up the southern slums where he lives. The merchant city can be seen above the slums, and the Master's Manse above that. The glass road circles the city to connect it all, as the Master wishes.

Mordew also features a map and list of characters at the beginning, as well as a comprehensive glossary of terms at the back. I have included the section I prize the most in this post. I was immediately obsessed with the list of additional unusual things to encounter in the book, and took immense joy from finding the things on the list within the story itself. I see this list as a kind of "drawing prompt challenge". Every item on the list would make its own interesting idea for a small sketch, and I love the idea of drawing out each item to make a collection. The words on the list are so delicious and unique, I just know I have to do something with them. The entire world of Mordew, as well as the other books to come in the series, is immersive, intricate and inspiring.