Speculative short stories. I’ve known Link’s name and reputation for years but never read anything by her before…well, I should say I have never read any entire books by her before, because I realized part way through listening to this one that I had encountered one of the stories somewhere else, though I don’t remember …
Contemporary fiction. Short stories. All of them centre Black women, I think particularly Black women in or from the US South, in a range of relations with faith and family and love and friendship and desire. Short, readable, and engaging. Generally speaking, when I read short fiction, I prefer it to be either genre or …
Sci-fi short stories, plus three essays about the genre. Translated from Chinese. The stories cover a real range of kinds of science fiction and kinds of writing, so it is hard to make any general statements about the book, and the introduction by the editor/translator quite rightly warns against reductive Orientalist readings of their Chinese-ness. …
Speculative short stories, mostly set in worlds close to but distinct from our own. Quietly weird, often unsettling or vaguely sad. The writing wraps around and immerses you, doesn’t spoonfeed, so there were some I didn’t understand, but the collection as a whole was definitely to my taste and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Originally posted by Scott on …
Literary fiction. Short stories, mostly centred on characters who are Black girls and young women living in Florida. Relationships, loss, embodied messiness in everyday life and in those few-in-a-lifetime moments when everything changes. The stories were more distinct from each other than you often find in an early-career collection like this, while still having a …
Short stories, most with some element of the science fictional or fantastical or speculative. A very quick read. Protagonists are mostly Black women, in fact mostly queer Black women. A worker employed to do the nightly retrieval of scooters for a bike share-style company encounters scooters that have achieved sentience. A pregnant woman in the …
Literary fiction. From an author based in Argentina, and translated from Spanish. Short stories. Mostly quite dark. Some drift towards, and some into, the fantastical. Abducted children who mysteriously return, sort of. Teen Ouija board sessions gone awry. A family whose neighbourhood mistreats a homeless man and then becomes terribly unlucky. A tired ghost in …
Science fiction. Short stories. I’ve known Delany’s name since I was a sci-fi-devouring teen, and I read and loved a memoir by him almost a decade ago, but this was my first time picking up any of his fiction. It certainly wasn’t the case in his writing about his own life, but I’d always had …
Short stories. Speculative fiction. From Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer authors. A range of kinds of stories, writing, and tones in what is a relatively short collection. Most, though, start in one way or another from a recognition that for many the apocalypse has already happened and is still happening, and that survival towards a more liveable …
Another collection of weird, fantastical short stories. (I certainly seem to have a type when it comes to short fiction, don’t I?) I first encountered this author a couple of years ago when she was the only person with two stories in a “best of” collection that I read, and they were also two of …