Welcome to Litsy!

"It seems that somehow the hearts of human beings and trees are connected."

- The Princess and the Nutmeg Tree ??❤️?

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

"The ghost stories and strange tales that make up this book are set in the ancient Japanese province of Shinshu, or Shinano (now Nagano Prefecture), located in the center [sic] of Japan's main island of Honshu, a region intersected by three mountain ranges, mist-covered streams and a number of large and fast-flowing rivers."

At about ½ way through, the blurb descriptors of spine-chilling, spooky & terrifying ??

Bertino‘s follow up to Beautyland is this very interesting collection of stories, ranging from realistic to heavy on the magical realism. I think it‘s a really good collection and can‘t point to a single story I didn‘t like.

Went by the used bookstore today and traded in quite a few to get these beauties (+2 for my kid not pictured) more or less half off. Whee! I love these old sff covers so much. And what a gorgeous edition of The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Illustrations by Charles Vess in that one.
#bookhaul #noshelfcontrol #noregrets

Melanie- i love New Orleans so much!! I love Cafe Du Monde and was actually thinking about their coffee recently 💙Thanks for the #staycationintimeswap to bring me there in spirit! This was a great package- and those perfumes are so perfect!!!! Thank you again and I love it all!
Thank you Sharon for co hosting! I could not do any of this without your help 💙

It's telling that one of the oldest books in the world contains so many of the themes that continue being repeated in fiction right through today. Stories, after all, were overheard by man from the gods and quickly spread like a virus, marking the beginning of the age we still live in. Stories invade us, weave themselves into the fabric of our beings, until its hard to know where "we" end and the stories begin. Sophie says, "Whoa!"

The blurb says that these are traditional stories of yokai, spectral apparitions of varied kinds, which Wada retells in "spine-chilling" & "terrifying" fashion ?
Some I'm partially familiar with (the Snow Woman, the kappa, & the tengu ?) but I'm hoping to encounter lots of ghosts that are new to me ?
The book is copiously illustrated by the author's daughter, Haruna Wada, who really deserves a cover credit.
I think I'm going to enjoy this one!

(2023) I picked up this collection of stories shortly after finishing “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke“ with a weird mixture of “WTF did I just read“ and “I'd like some more please.“ And this delivers: body horror, with an aesthetic more of dread than splatter, about love and cruelty and the things we know we shouldn't do and we do them anyway