THE PROBLEM

Epics have lost their charm. It takes ten or twenty years for a writer to finish a series, writing the same book over and over again, piling up the foreshadowing, wearing out characters’ boots to no good purpose. By the time you’re done—whether you’re the reader or the writer—you can’t remember why you started.

That’s where Twenty Epics comes in. Like the neurological anomaly that sparks déjà vu, like the false memories implanted in Blade Runner’s replicants, Twenty Epics shortcuts the repetition and the tedium of reality and goes straight to what we really care about: the subjective emotional and aesthetic experience.

There was a time when you finished an epic. When finishing an epic left you feeling not discontent and exhausted but joyous, melancholy, rejuvenated, satisfied—left you feeling, even (at least for a little while), that you were a better and wiser person for the experience.

These twenty epics will bring back that feeling.

In ten thousand words or less.

The Solution

Christopher Barzak

The Creation of Birds

Paul Berger

The Muse of Empires Lost

Scott William Carter

Epic, The

Alan DeNiro

Have You Any Wool

Stephen Eley

The Dinner Game

Marcus Ewert

Choose Your Own Epic Adventure

Jon Hansen

The Book of Ant

Mary Robinette Kowal

Bound Man

Yoon Ha Lee

Hopscotch

Meghan McCarron

The Rider

Sandra McDonald

Life Sentence

Rachel McGonagill

The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar

Ian McHugh

The Last Day of Rea

Jack Mierzwa

A Short History of the Miraculous Flight to Punt

Tim Pratt

Cup and Table

Benjamin Rosenbaum

A Siege of Cranes

Christopher Rowe

Two Figures in a Landscape between Storms

David Schwartz

Five Hundred and Forty Doors

Zoë Selengut

Smitten

K.D. Wentworth

The Rose War