Previous | Next What a beautiful, tragic human tale Nadia Bongo tells! "Born a Ghost" follows a small ghost girl's life from birth until her twelfth year. This story is a kind of ontology of the ghostly life across this period, a magical tale that hides reality under a thin layer of fiction. It's not... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #126 – Nothing of Value by Aimee Ogden
In "Nothing of Value," Aimee Ogden renders a future in which teleportation throughout the Solar System has become commonplace. What are the ethical and moral implications of what is called "transit" and involves the translation of information across vast amounts of space, information rearranged in just the way it was sent out in the first... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #123 – Maladaptive Camouflage by Ann LeBlanc
Previous | Next I discovered "Maladaptive Camouflage" thanks to a tweet by Angela Liu (whose excellent story "The Last Gamemaster in the World" I reviewed last week). What a great find this short story is--a blending of first and second-person narrative at a critical moment in three people's lives. One of them, at first glance,... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader # 119 – The Parts That Make Me by Louise Hughes
Previous | Next Here's an interesting piece of flash fiction, one that looks to the ties that bind the individual to who they are. Louise Hughes tells a familiar story in a new way from the perspective of an old freedom-fighter: We shouldn’t have existed as we did. Universal law decreed it, but in the... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #117 – Homecoming by Wen Yu Yang
Previous | Next A skeleton pig dreams of spring in the depths of winter. In its search for heat, it meats a butcher - and finds heat in the least likely of places. I read this in a particularly melancholy mood while listening to joik music (recommended me by a friend), and snow has covered... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #113 – Wet, Dry, Bitter by Leah Ning
Previous | Next Guilt is a bitter pill to swallow. Normally, I'd write something flippant after this, say, "Not as bitter as acid, but still." Only, I can't, because Leah Ning's haunting piece about guilt - and the inability to live with it - makes a persuasive case about just how acrimonious a taste this... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #108 – Hole World by J.S. Breukelaar
Previous | Next J. S. Breukelaar portrays an apocalypse whose horror is two-fold: on the one, the terror of witnessing the world end; on the other, the terror of captivity and servitude to the slimy, hungry creatures that brought about the apocalypse. Justin, the protagonist, has been a cog of a grisly machine for six... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #107 – The Design by China Miéville
Previous | Next "The Design" reads like a Lovecraftian story if Lovecraft could write. Unlike Lovecraft's fiction, however, this piece is firmly rooted in the world. It has historical particularity. From the first line, you know this is set in the past; you know, too, that the speaker is well-educated. I couldn't quite decide, at... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #105 – The Junket by China Miéville
Previous | Next A script writer's latest action schlock becomes a defining cultural moment that awakens adoration and loathing across the political spectrum. "The Junket" is told from the perspective of a pop culture journalist who might be getting a little sick of being a glorified promoter. When Daniel Cane's new film comes out, the... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #103 – Covehithe by China Miéville
Previous | Next The sea is no black hole. Just because we discard something in the vastness of our planet's oceans, we shouldn't assume that it won't come back ashore. So Mieville tells us in this melancholy story of oil rigs turned sentient, multiplying through some unknowable method and leaving their spawn on dry land.... Continue Reading →