Tony Volcano Ventura is a streetwise baby. He's 2 when we pick up with him, which immediately puts this in the category of "weird books." "I know people don't usually remember their baby years," young Tony begins his narration, "but I do." Ipso facto, weird book, on account of its being narrated by a toddler, one who rides dogs under moonlight, dodges cops in alleys, and receives enigmatic assignments via the fax machine the moon gave to him.
Karen Russell has built her literary reputation on stories that bend reality without losing emotional grounding. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia!, Russell often blends the strange and the intimate, pairing mythic elements with sharp psychological detail.
If Studio Ghibli movies make you feel like you're in a warm embrace, you have to read Water Moon (or really any Samantha Soto Yambao novel). They're a magical realism trip into completely unique worlds, where the stakes feel high at times, but you know the ending will be happy nonetheless. Her latest, The Elsewhere Express, is high on my TBR.
This perky British kids' movie lists five different people in the writing credits (two of whom chipped in with additional material); this may explain in part why its story beats arrive with such metronomic precision, and the characters feel as if they were grown hydroponically in a lab. Which is of course ironic because the setting is a family-run farm where agronomist-owner Dinah (Golda Rosheuvel) decides to go organic after being inspired by her magical niece Charlie (Priya-Rose Brookwell, adorable)
The Royal Ballet opened its 2025/26 season with the first revival of Christopher Wheeldon's 2022 Like Water for Chocolate; and as season openers go, I can't think of many ballets that would offer an audience more bang for their buck. Bob Crowley's stunning, atmospheric designs, Joby Talbot's sweeping, narrative musical score, magical cookery recipes, rampaging revolutionaries, a vengeful ghost, and an extraordinary coup de theatre finale, all framing a life-long forbidden love affair, plunge the audience into a colourful, exotic, sunlit universe
Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn't begin with technologies of harm, such as flints and spears, but with items of collection and care, such as the wicker basket or, nowadays, the carrier bag. And so, if we make them that way, novels can be gatherings rather than battles.
