6 reviewed books
ReviewConjure WifeFritz Leiber was a brilliant chess player, a preacher, a college teacher, a champion fencer, a Shakespearian actor, and even appeared on screen with Greta Garbo. And, yes, let's not forget, one of the finest storytellers of his day....→ReviewFritz Leiber at 100The term magical realism didn't exist back in the 1930s and 1940s, but Fritz Leiber could very well have trademarked it long before the Latin American literary lions turned it into a Nobel Prize-winning style.→ReviewSwords and DeviltryMany later authors have attempted to mix elements of myth and magic with everyday realism - in time a whole genre, known as magical realism, would emerge from this provocative combination - but no writer of Leiber's generation handled the recipe with more aplomb.→ReviewThe Big TimeIn a famous quip, Anton Chekhov claimed that if a gun appears on the stage in Act One, it will be fired before the conclusion of the play. But what if an atomic bomb shows up in the drawing room at the start of the drama? Does it blow up or get defused?→ReviewThe Great San Francisco Magical Realism NovelFritz Leiber, in his late sixties and a legend within the world of genre fiction, was forced to write his stories on a manual typewriter propped over a sink in his cramped San Francisco quarters.→ReviewThe WandererIn this expansive work, Leiber advances 15 separate plots, changing scenes every few paragraphs. The closest counterpart in the literary canon is Don DeLillo's Underworld, a similarly fragmented novel published to much acclaim ageneration later...→