Five fantasy books about artists & the magic of creativity

Maggie Stiefvater's new novel is Call Down the Hawk.

At Tor.com, she tagged five fantasy books about artists and the magic of creativity, including:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The end of the world has come and gone, illness ravaging the population, and what is left in its wake? In St. John Mandel’s vision of the end of the world: artists. Actors, to be precise. We have ever so many apocalypse stories that show us the ugly side of humanity, but Station Eleven stands out for highlighting the opposite. Yes, there are survivalists with shotguns and ugly truths in this version of the end of the world, but there’s also art, creativity, synthesis, the making of a new culture. This introspective novel follows a Shakespearean troupe across a wasteland and ponders what it means to be a creator in a world that by all rights, should care more about survival than art. In the end, which one really is the more human impulse?

Read about another entry on the list.

Station Eleven is among Mark Skinner's five top literary dystopias, Claudia Gray's five essential books about plagues and pandemics, K Chess's five top fictional books inside of real books, Rebecca Kauffman's ten top musical novels, Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books, M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue