Yuletide Recs: Don't Need to Know Source

[rachelmanija]

This is a special selection of stories which can be read without knowledge of the source, or at least without more than passing knowledge.

Songs for the Jingwei Bird. A Chinese fantasy consisting of nested stories which cleverly fit together, full of magical details and absolutely gorgeously written: a perfect little gem of a story. There are beautiful images which are integral to the story. It doesn’t require any previous familiarity with the source, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling.

Cum Mortuin In Lingua Mortua. An intense, moving short story in which Siegfried Sassoon encounters the ghost of Wilfred Owen, who may or may not exist only in Sassoon’s own imagination. It’s based on the characters as seen in Pat Barker’s (brilliant, highly recommended) WWI novel Regeneration, but all you really need to know is that Owen and Sassoon were friends and poets who met while recuperating from shell shock during WWI. Owen was killed one week before the war ended.

This Puzzle, the New World. A numinous and quietly funny fantasy set in a vivid Washington, DC. Based on Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird, but you don’t need to have read that to enjoy this. It just takes the premise that magic is slowly seeping back into the world.

Lebenswerk. A novelette based on the film Sunset Boulevard. It tells the history of actress Norma Desmond and director Max von Mayerling in nine films, all illustrated with black and white images of the actors who played them, Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim; their stories are based on the true stories of the real actress and director. An impeccably researched, extremely well-written tale of old Hollywood, psychologically acute and often darkly funny. Look for cameos by real and fictional characters.

If you enjoy these or other stories, please consider leaving a comment. There has been very little commenting compared to Yuletides of previous years.

Comments

[mme_hardy]

I have been commenting like a mad thing, but I still have several windows open that I need to leave good comments on.

If you really love a fic, do an AO3 bookmark and add it to the collection "Yuletide 2012". If you do that, after the mods approve it, it's visible to everybody as part of the collection; it can do a lot to raise the visibility of the fic.

Also, everybody needs to read all three of my gift fics, for they are awesome, and friendly to people who don't know the canons.

[kate_nepveu]

I love don't-need-to-know-source recs, thanks. (Ooh! And _Mockingbird_ fic! I've been snagging stories for offline reading and haven't gotten to the "books" section yet.)

[thistleingrey]

Hurray for recs, also, because I went past the Sunset Blvd category because of deep uncertainty about what it'd contain, but I'm glad to have read "Lebenswerk."