Phoebe Kildeer, the Short Straws - "The Fade Out Line"

a voice very much like Vaya Con Dios (Dani Klein, the singer)

Ted Chaing - "Stories of your life and others"

first story, "Tower of Babylon", where people are able to get to heaven, after weeks of climbing (the tower was built during generations), and start digging, they think of the biblical floods, install doors to deal with it, but the protagonist still gets swept up... and ends up on Earth.

And realises it's an endless scroll, like a cylinder pressed in clay...

Tami Neilson - "You Were Mine"

Voice and style very similar to Beth Hart, same raw intensity.

"Walk (Back to your arms)" is similar, but also more 60's swing, has that finger-clicking rhythm...!

Predator: Killer of Killers

while some illogical bits, great animation, three eras on Earth, then on the Predator's homeworld, combining viking, Japanese samurai and a world war II pilot.

Kobo Abe - "The Ark Sakura"

one of Japans most established writers... about the human condition.

I couldn't get into it. The characters are all larger than life. Their chats and reactions too weirdly direct.

Jo Harkin - "Tell me an ending"

Amazing book where a company can remove memories.  The story starts when they discover they can get those memories back as they were only blocked. Told from the viewpoint of various people, rotating, it all comes together at the end, without a cheesy or overly sci-fi ending. 

Amazing stuff.

    You see, we're all coded, we're all running programs. The goal is simplicity, elegance, orderly cooperation, to produce an effective and bug-free whole. Obviously, the human brain is more of a challenge. The ultimate challenge. When you don't know the operating rules, problems seem impossible to fix. But they aren't. To understand the underlying system, the rules, like Nepenthe does, and then them to fix a, a malfunction, in this a PTSD response - that's just a ... beautiful concept. Actually I don't think there's anything more beautiful than that.
    (She realized she'd been leaning forward and holding the edge of the desk. She let go; put her hands in her lap.)
    You didn't mention morality, Louise said.
    Well no, Noor said. Health, function - those aren't moral matters. It's not a moral matter when a program isn't working. It's a practical one.
    Louise looked at her for a long time.
    I understand, she said.
    On the train home, Noor, knowing she had the job, was able to find it a little bit funny that she'd thought she might have been asked about Helen of Troy.

Helen, thinks Noor.
    Helena.
    Elena.

The problem with thinking about forgetting things is that it always makes you think about the things you want to forget.

Noor saw the girl sunbathing topless in the garden, one Saturday. She turned away from her naked breast, fiery white in the strong sunlight. A wince on her behalf. Be careful, she wants to say to her. Please look after yourself. Then that night the two of them played drum and bass until four a.m. and she thought: I hope your tits got burnt.

Emily St. John Mandel - "The Glass Hotel"

Yet another beautiful story, about siblings, Vincent and her brother Paul. Vincent becomes the trophy wife of Jonathan Alkaitis, who runs a ponzi scheme. 

Told over v,arious years and decades, with a wonderful curling into itself, tying things up beautifully at the end. hints of ghosts, but could be just hallucinations.

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. "You're so poised," Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That's my job, Vincent didn't say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn't the romance of the century, but it didn't have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone's company, she'd been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don't mind sleeping with the, isn't that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there's respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably.The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.

Arkady Martine - "Rose/House"

meh.  AI house from an "amazing architect" lets only one person in, but a murder has been committed.

Sounds nice, but failed to make me care for it.

Mark Lawrence - "The book that wouldn't burn"

Interesting book where an infinite library, spanning all worlds and times, provides both refuge and danger?

Different species see each other as enemies ("sabbers"), and the library tries to tell them history is only repeating, but that's hard to get.

Good sudden twist where Livira and Evar turn out to be separate species. Her book, which he took into the Mechanism, which is where you can live "inside" books, turns out to create a crack in time.

    "The first librarian, founder of the great library, had a younger brother, Jaspeth. Jaspeth felt that since =.their great-grandparents had lost the gods' good graces by foolishly seeking knowledge, it was hardly a good idea that just three generations later Irad was building a great palace to knowledge where all could come and partake of it. Knowledge, he said, was not wisdom. Irad, he said, was continuing the work that the devil had started. They went to war over it. Though neither of them ended up killing their own brother like their grandfather had. Instead, they formed an uneasy peace. A compromise. The library is that compromise. The knowledge - all knowledge - is there for the taking, waiting on a shelf, ready to be picked up. But it must be found. It cannot be summoned effortlessly from a ring and projected onto a wall. Not unless someone puts in the necessary work and cleverness, and then only for as long as that cleverness is preserved. All that knowledge lies there, as agreed, locked behind thee letters of ever-changing alphabets in the words of ever-changing languages. It sits there among the lies, mistakes, delusions, and untruths of the unwise. It is, to make a long story shorter, never easy."
   

Your Friends & Neighbours

Good series with John Hamm, rich market dude turned thief.

Gangs of London (s3)

Not finished yet, but completely over the top.  Sean Wallace won't die.  Giving birth and fighting off baddies...

Eternaut

Fun short Argentinian sci-fi series where most of the world dies when some mortal snow starts to fall down. 

Then there's b-movie beetles, including a b-movie villain which is a hand with too many fingers?  

Heretic

Proper horror, mostly psychological, about two mormon girls trying to convert Hugh Grant.

Well acted, including how initially I thought one of the girls kinda overacted, but it made all sense in the final part of the film where she starts to turn the table on him in his house of horror.