Subliminal Tales
What you see is never the whole.
Books
A coming-of-age story wrapped in modern magical realism.
New Edition is coming.
A series exploring the tropes that appear across genres and shape the stories we read. Available here.
Blog
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The Science of Suspense: How Prose Triggers a Visceral Response
The creak of a floorboard in an empty house, the unnerving glint of an unknown figure in the shadows, or the chilling certainty that something is about to go terribly wrong – these are the hallmarks of suspense. As readers, we crave this sensation, willingly…
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Fiction Trends for 2026: What Readers Want Next (With Book Recommendations)
Predictions and early announcements about fiction trends for 2026 – according to what publishers, industry analysts, and book bloggers are anticipating – centre on deeply human, high-quality physical and community experiences as an answer to AI-generated fluff. Readers are being attracted by high-concept hybrids while…
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Do SMART Goals Work for Creative People Like Writers?
The SMART method has been praised as infallible. For some, however, it’s like the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. But if the method is so good, why does it often fail creative tasks? It’s not that SMART goals are bad; it’s that they are designed for predictable environments.…
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How to Maintain a Reading Habit When Life Gets Busy
There’s a peculiar irony about the times when we most need the mental escape that reading fiction provides. Holiday season, house moving, travelling, or a particularly demanding period at work are precisely the moments when our carefully maintained reading habits tend to collapse entirely. But…
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Holiday Season Reading: 25 Christmas Short Stories in the Public Domain
For a lot of people, the Holiday season is usually the hardest time to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, like reading good stories. That’s why we’re finishing our Holiday Season Reading series with 25 Christmas short stories: bite-sized tales that can be finished in…
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Holiday Season Reading: 12 Translated Christmas Books from Around the World
Finding translated full-length Christmas books and novels is genuinely challenging, but we did our best to bring you some of the finest stories from other cultures for part III of our Holiday Season Reading. This list leans heavily on ‘The Very Christmas’ anthology series, and…