Useful website of the week: Fantastic Fiction

Last week I discussed Stop, you’re killing me!, a useful website for readers of crime fiction. This time around the useful website is for all kinds of fiction, and if an author has also written non-fiction, that is included as well. The site has bibliographies for over 20 thousand authors with works in English.

Fantastic Fiction offers searches by author and book title, and if you go to the Preferences page, you can also search by short story title and ISBN. As with Stop, you’re killing me!, this website is only for books published in English, and doesn’t seem to include information on untranslated works (conclusion is based on a sample of Icelandic authors with both translated and untranslated books).

Putting in an author’s full name will take you directly to that author’s page, while searches by first or last name will bring up all authors in the database who share the name. A title search will bring up all the books that share the title word, or if the title is unique it will take you to a page with different editions of the same book.

Each author page contains a short bio, information about that author’s latest and upcoming books, and books classed by series, along with other information, such as prices from different online shops.

This is a commercial site, so you will see some (unintrusive) banner ads, but they mostly seem to derive their income from linking to online bookstores and collecting incentives from them.

Other features include:
An awards page with listings of the winners of numerous awards (hasn’t been updated for 2008)
A New Books page
A Coming Soon page
Most popular listings (seems to be a listing of most searched-for titles on the site)
Top authors (seems to be a listing of most searched-for authors on the site)
Series
Listings of authors who were born or died, by year
A preference page, so you can see, for example, the most popular titles or authors depending on what country you’re in

Comments

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

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How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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