New Books In Literature

Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to gods and options for shareholders. As he explains in the podcast, Gladstone traces his initial inspiration for his Craft Sequence to, among other things, his several years teaching English in rural China, where he saw children of subsistence farmers grow up to become engineers and international bankers. “The thought that that’s really the kind of range that exists in the modern world sort of blew my mind open,” he says. When he came back to the U.S., Gladstone experienced a kind of culture shock. “Coming back to billboards and advertising campaigns and bank account statements and all of that was this huge shock so I was forced to fall back on interpretive tropes from fantasy and science fiction … to grok it all.” Another influence on his writing was the financial collapse o