en-US Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:27:55 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 203956643 A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors� (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”]]> 257 Mariana Enríquez 0593733258 Anna 4 3.80 2024
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: Anna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: short-story-collections, horror
review:
4/5 stars - great collection of short horror stories.
]]> 60069352
The collection includes:

Track 2: Canon Alberics Scrap-Book
Track 3: Lost Hearts
Track 4: The Mezzotint
Track 5: The Ash-tree
Track 6: Number 13
Track 7: Count Magnus
Track 8: Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Track 9: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
Track 10: A School Story
Track 11: The Rose Garden
Track 12: The Tractate Middoth
Track 13: Casting the Runes
Track 14: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
Track 15: Martin's Close
Track 16: Mr Humphrys and His Inheritance
Track 17: The Residence at Whitminister
Track 18: The Diary of Mr Poynter
Track 19: An Episode of Cathedral History
Track 20: The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
Track 21: Two Doctors
Track 22: An Evening's Entertainment
Track 23: A Warning to the Curious
Track 24: A View From a Hill
Track 25: A Neighbour's Landmark
Track 26: The Uncommon Prayer-Book
Track 27: The Haunted Dolls' House
Track 28: Wailing Well
Track 29: There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard
Track 30: Rats
Track 31: After Dark in the Playing Fields
Track 32: The Experiment
Track 33: The Malice of Inanimate Objects
Track 34: A Vignette
Track 35: The Fenstanton Witch
Track 36: Appendix]]> M.R. James Anna 0 4.16
author: M.R. James
name: Anna
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: short-story-collections, to-read
review:

]]> 13657
This method - changing planes - enables Sita to visit fifteen societies not found on Earth. She will encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. And many other exotic landscapes whose denizens are fundamentally human...]]> 239 Ursula K. Le Guin 0441012248 Anna 3 3.86 2003
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Anna
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: sci-fi-ness, short-story-collections, fantastically-fantastical
review:
3/5 stars - more vignettes than story, but interesting imagining different species and different planets
]]> 33998355 This new, expanded edition of Miracle and Other Christmas Stories features twelve brilliantly reimagined holiday tales, five of which are collected here for the first time.

Christmas comes but once a year--which is too bad, because the stories in this dazzling collection are fun to read anytime. They put a speculative spin on the holiday, giving fans of acclaimed author Connie Willis a welcome gift and a dozen reasons to be of good cheer.

Brimming with Willis's trademark insights and imagination, these heartwarming tales are full of humor, absurdity, human foibles, tragedy, joy, and hope. They both embrace and send up many of the best Christmas traditions, including the Christmas newsletter, Secret Santas, office parties, holiday pageants, and Christmas dinners (both elaborate and spare). There are Rockettes, the best and worst Christmas movies, modern-day Magi, Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come--and the triumph of generosity over greed. Like the timeless classics we return to year after year, these stories affirm our faith in love, magic, and the wonder of the season.

Stories included:
- Miracle
- All About Emily
- Inn
- All Seated on the Ground
- In Coppelius's Toyshop
- Adaptation
- deck.halls@bought/holly
- Cat's Paw
- Now Showing
- Newsletter
- Epiphany
- Just Like the Ones We Used to Know]]> 518 Connie Willis 0399182349 Anna 4 3.94 2017
author: Connie Willis
name: Anna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: sci-fi-ness, short-story-collections, christmas
review:
4/5 stars - Black mirror meets an author with a love of Christmas. Great collection of sci-fi stories related to Christmas that I will look forward to reading again next year!
]]> 75293507
Norris Black, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, Phoenix Boudreau, Cherie Dimaline, Carson Faust, Kelli Jo Ford, Kate Hart, Shane Hawk, Brandon Hobson, Darcie Little Badger, Conley Lyons, Nick Medina, Tiffany Morris, Tommy Orange, Mona Susan Power, Marcie R. Rendon, Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Andrea L. Rogers, Morgan Talty, D.H. Trujillo, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Richard Van Camp, David Heska, Wanbli Weiden, Royce Young, Wolf Mathilda Zeller.

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce listeners to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples� survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.]]> 400 Shane Hawk 0593468465 Anna 3 3.90 2023
author: Shane Hawk
name: Anna
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: horror, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 58844849 Five harrowing novellas of horror and speculative fiction from the singular mind of the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

Josh Malerman is a master weaver of stories--and in this spine-chilling collection he spins five twisted tales from the shadows of the human soul:

A sister insists to her little brother that "Half the House Is Haunted" by a strange presence. But is it the house that's haunted--or their childhoods?

In "Argyle," a dying man confesses to homicides he never committed, and he reveals long-kept secrets far more sinister than murder.

A tourist takes the ultimate trip to outer space in "The Jupiter Drop," but the real journey is into his own dark past.

In "Doug and Judy Buy the House Washer(TM)," a trendy married couple buys the latest home gadget only to find themselves trapped by their possessions, their history . . . and each other.

And in "Egorov," a wealthy old cretin murders a young man, not knowing the victim was a triplet. The two surviving brothers stage a savage faux-haunting--playing the ghost of their slain brother--with the aim of driving the old murderer mad.]]> 387 Josh Malerman 0593237862 Anna 2 3.35 2023
author: Josh Malerman
name: Anna
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves: horror, netgalley, short-story-collections, willie-will-like
review:
2/5 stars - This didn't really feel like a short story collection as much as it did a "novella" collection. That being said, there are 5 stories/novellas, and they mostly missed for me. "Half the House is Haunted" was sort of interesting, but it was too drawn out and a bit boring to really get anywhere for me. "Argyle" was also sort of interesting, but it just felt like a lot of nothing went on. The ones that stood out the most for me were "Doug and Judy Buy the House WasherTM" -- this one was inventive and disturbing and fascinating. It moved quickly enough and had enough happening that I was fascinated, and it lingers. The other is "The Jupiter Drop" -- because what a crazy and implausible idea that would never happen but holy weirdness! If you're moneybags-McGee and feel like it, I guess (aka deep-sea submersible billionaires), then you can live in a one room glass box for 2 months while it "drops" through Jupiter? in space? but avoids the magma core? and there may or may not be forms out there in the planet layers that somehow seem like glowing, swirling, wormhole type visuals? Claustrophobic, like the "House Washer" tale, and also memory-rabbit holes, but it was so weird I liked it.
]]> 182506465
Four devastating tales from a master of modern horror...

This Skin Was Once Mine
When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolized while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago by her venomous mother. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret in her family's past--a secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known to be true about her beloved father and, more importantly, herself. It's only natural to hurt the things we love the most...

ł§±đ±đ»ĺ±ôľ±˛Ô˛µĚý
A young man’s father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother's body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist—the inside of the wound as black as onyx and as seemingly limitless as the cosmos. He is even more unsettled when he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction. The young man becomes obsessed with his father’s new wounds, exploring the boundless insides and tethering himself to the black threads that curl from inside his poor father...

Prickle
Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences...

All the Parts of You That Won't Easily Burn
Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction...]]> 240 Eric LaRocca 1803366648 Anna 3 3.51 2024
author: Eric LaRocca
name: Anna
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: horror, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
2.5/5 stars - An interesting collection of short stories that deal in a lot of body horror. I haven't read a ton of LaRocca, just one other short story collection, but this collection didn't really wow me. Nothing quite stands out, apart from a general disturbing quality that was clearly woven throughout.
]]> 142392376 Get Out, Us, and Nope, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions, curates this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation.

A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and—like his spine-chilling films—its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.

Featuring stories by: Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull.]]> 387 Jordan Peele 059324379X Anna 4
"Reckless Eyeballing" - N.K. Jemisin (Black cop Carl sees eyes on car headlights, which leads him to suspect that the driver is guilty of a crime.)

"Eye & Tooth" - Rebecca Roanhorse (Siblings act as supernatural job-for-hires, accept a job in rural Texas from a woman with a supernatural creature problem.)

"Wandering Devil" - Cadwell Turnbull (Man who moves from town to town meets woman who wants him to settle down. But something is off.)

"Invasion of the Baby Snatchers" - Lesley Nneka Arimah (Aliens impregnating humans and trying to take over Earth; detective lead is trying to track them down/eliminate/study them.)

"The Other One" - Violet Allen (Woman can't let go of her ex, keeps thinking about him, texting him sometimes with no response, then someone begins messaging him with weird then alarming things to lure the woman to the sender. Things get creature-strange.)

"Lasirèn" - Erin E. Adams (Three sisters are tempted by a siren, despite warnings from their parents.)

"The Rider" - Tananarive Due (2 sisters try to get to Montgomery, Alabama during the Freedom Riders movement.)

"The Aesthete" - Justin C. Key (Futuristic/sci fi story where a being finds out he's The Chosen One living in a futuristic USA that might or might not declare him legally a person.)

"Pressure" - Ezra Claytan Daniels (Written in 2nd person with main person the only half-black cousin in a mainly white family during a family reunion.)

"Dark Home" - Nnedi Okorafor (A single Nigerian-American woman's father dies and she travels to Nigeria where she violates customs during the funeral to keep a token to remember her father by. Something follows her home.)

"Flicker" - L.D. Lewis (Four friends try to survive in a world that's gone crazy because of unexplained blips of pure darkness that last increasingly long.)

"The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" - Nalo Hopkinson (A woman confronts the beast that terrorizes her village in a coastal cave/tidal pool, but instead, the beast becomes part of her.)

"The Norwood Trouble" - Maurice Broaddus (A young girl experiences a lynch mob in the years before civil rights in the U.S. but she's in a kind of magical town where the orchard guards against would-be white infiltrators.)

"A Grief of the Dead" - Rion Amilcar Scott (A man grieves the death of his twin brother who dies during a mass shooting at a concert, then struggles with wanting to follow him in the same way. The horror in this one was minimal and more about the horror of guns and continued mass shootings in the US.)

"A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree" - Nicole D. Sconiers (Two young women are killed on a dangerous stretch of road in different decades. Their spirits are bound there, where they kill misbehaving male motorists to pass the time.)

"An American Fable" - Chesya Burke (A black military veteran is traveling to Chicago from the south after serving in World War 1 - he experiences all manner of racism from the whites around him, for whom his service to his country means nothing b/c he's black, and when he becomes under attack, a lone young black girl leads him to another place.)

"Your Happy Place" - Terence Taylor (A man who works at a prison moving prisoners to some kind of lab wants to find out more about what's happening, only to discover some unsavory things about himself. Futuristic, sci-fi horror.)

"Hide & Seek" - P. Djèlí Clark (2 young siblings must hide when their mother comes searching for them. The house belonged to their grandfather who practiced Hoodoo, and their mother and dead father also practiced magic that turned on them. Their mother is like two people, monster and teacher.)

"Origin Story" - Tochi Onyebuchi (This was probably a least favorite, just because I couldn't really understand it all. It's written like a play where 4 white boys become aware of their caricature nature and that they're fictional characters in a play, turning into an examination of whiteness as boys.)]]> 3.77 2023
author: Jordan Peele
name: Anna
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves: horror, short-story-collections
review:
4/5 stars - This was a great anthology with many heavy-hitter favorite authors, and a few new discoveries for me. Some stories didn't work for me, like any short story collection, but most were great. N.K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Nnedi Okorafor can do nothing wrong - amazing storytellers. I loved P. Djeli Clark's novel "Ring Shout" but hadn't read anything else by them. And Violet Allen and L.D. Lewis are new to me and wrote my other favorites of this collection. Okorafor's story was my absolute favorite of the whole collection.

"Reckless Eyeballing" - N.K. Jemisin (Black cop Carl sees eyes on car headlights, which leads him to suspect that the driver is guilty of a crime.)

"Eye & Tooth" - Rebecca Roanhorse (Siblings act as supernatural job-for-hires, accept a job in rural Texas from a woman with a supernatural creature problem.)

"Wandering Devil" - Cadwell Turnbull (Man who moves from town to town meets woman who wants him to settle down. But something is off.)

"Invasion of the Baby Snatchers" - Lesley Nneka Arimah (Aliens impregnating humans and trying to take over Earth; detective lead is trying to track them down/eliminate/study them.)

"The Other One" - Violet Allen (Woman can't let go of her ex, keeps thinking about him, texting him sometimes with no response, then someone begins messaging him with weird then alarming things to lure the woman to the sender. Things get creature-strange.)

"Lasirèn" - Erin E. Adams (Three sisters are tempted by a siren, despite warnings from their parents.)

"The Rider" - Tananarive Due (2 sisters try to get to Montgomery, Alabama during the Freedom Riders movement.)

"The Aesthete" - Justin C. Key (Futuristic/sci fi story where a being finds out he's The Chosen One living in a futuristic USA that might or might not declare him legally a person.)

"Pressure" - Ezra Claytan Daniels (Written in 2nd person with main person the only half-black cousin in a mainly white family during a family reunion.)

"Dark Home" - Nnedi Okorafor (A single Nigerian-American woman's father dies and she travels to Nigeria where she violates customs during the funeral to keep a token to remember her father by. Something follows her home.)

"Flicker" - L.D. Lewis (Four friends try to survive in a world that's gone crazy because of unexplained blips of pure darkness that last increasingly long.)

"The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" - Nalo Hopkinson (A woman confronts the beast that terrorizes her village in a coastal cave/tidal pool, but instead, the beast becomes part of her.)

"The Norwood Trouble" - Maurice Broaddus (A young girl experiences a lynch mob in the years before civil rights in the U.S. but she's in a kind of magical town where the orchard guards against would-be white infiltrators.)

"A Grief of the Dead" - Rion Amilcar Scott (A man grieves the death of his twin brother who dies during a mass shooting at a concert, then struggles with wanting to follow him in the same way. The horror in this one was minimal and more about the horror of guns and continued mass shootings in the US.)

"A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree" - Nicole D. Sconiers (Two young women are killed on a dangerous stretch of road in different decades. Their spirits are bound there, where they kill misbehaving male motorists to pass the time.)

"An American Fable" - Chesya Burke (A black military veteran is traveling to Chicago from the south after serving in World War 1 - he experiences all manner of racism from the whites around him, for whom his service to his country means nothing b/c he's black, and when he becomes under attack, a lone young black girl leads him to another place.)

"Your Happy Place" - Terence Taylor (A man who works at a prison moving prisoners to some kind of lab wants to find out more about what's happening, only to discover some unsavory things about himself. Futuristic, sci-fi horror.)

"Hide & Seek" - P. Djèlí Clark (2 young siblings must hide when their mother comes searching for them. The house belonged to their grandfather who practiced Hoodoo, and their mother and dead father also practiced magic that turned on them. Their mother is like two people, monster and teacher.)

"Origin Story" - Tochi Onyebuchi (This was probably a least favorite, just because I couldn't really understand it all. It's written like a play where 4 white boys become aware of their caricature nature and that they're fictional characters in a play, turning into an examination of whiteness as boys.)
]]> 203956677 A thrilling collection of thirteen short stories that span the worlds of the New York Times bestselling author of the Scholomance Trilogy, including a sneak peek at the land where her next novel will be set.

From the dragon-filled Temeraire series and the gothic, magical halls of the Scholomance trilogy to the fairy tale worlds of Spinning Silver and Uprooted, this stunning collection takes us from fairy tale to fantasy, myth to history, and mystery to science fiction as we travel through Naomi Novik’s most beloved stories.

In Buried Deep, we move from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and the Black Death, and into the modern era. We meet Mark Antony, Sherlock Holmes, and Elizabeth Bennet, in ways we have never seen them before. We visit exotic fantasy cities and alien civilizations among the stars.

Though the stories are vastly different, there is a unifying theme: the act of finding and seizing one’s destiny, and the lengths one will go to achieve that—be it turning pirate, captaining a fighting dragon, or shifting from marriage to seek your destiny with a sword.

And in the two tales original to this collection, we first reenter the remade Scholomance in the wake of El’s revolution and see what life is like for the new crop of students. Then, we get a glimpse at the world of Novik’s upcoming series, a deserted land, populated only by silent and enigmatic architectural behemoths whose secrets are yet to be unlocked.]]> 430 Naomi Novik 0593600355 Anna 0 3.98 2024
author: Naomi Novik
name: Anna
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/17
shelves: to-read, fantastically-fantastical, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,� Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,� a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,â€� a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.Ěý

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Anna 0 3.98 2022
author: Claire Keegan
name: Anna
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 492459 Antarctica, have been acclaimed by The Observer to be "among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English."

In "Antarctica," a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. "Love in the Tall Grass" takes Cordelia down a coastal road on the last day of the twentieth century to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. "Stay Close to the Water's Edge" tells of a young Harvard student who is pitilessly humiliated by his homophobic stepfather on his birthday. Keegan's writing has a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. The stories are often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, and the reader feels that something "big" is going on in each of these carefully sculpted tales.

The award-winning Antarctica, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, and recipient of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize, and the Martin Healy Award, is a haunting debut.]]> 224 Claire Keegan 0802139019 Anna 0 3.86 1999
author: Claire Keegan
name: Anna
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 62919399 A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,� a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,� and in “Candy Pink,� a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.]]> 154 Agustina Bazterrica 1668012669 Anna 3 3.11 2020
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Anna
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/27
date added: 2023/09/28
shelves: horror, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
3/5 stars - Perhaps like most short story collections, the stories aren't all great. In fact, most of them were a bit too esoteric to fully get into, stymied by the phrasing and loftier literary verbiage. But some of them were great - perfectly succinct, strange, disturbing, visceral. If you're a fan of "Tender is the Flesh" and don't mind a short story, give it a shot and know that you can enjoy the ones you like and skim past the ones you don't.
]]> 2524702
A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals eking out their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of Ireland’s greatest talents, and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.]]> 168 Claire Keegan 0802170498 Anna 3 short-story-collections In any short story collection! She continues to be a new favorite author to watch.

pp. 38 "How strange it is to be alive."]]> 4.02 2007
author: Claire Keegan
name: Anna
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2023/06/03
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
2.5-3/5 stars -- some of these stories were delightful in the sense that Keegan writes atmosphere, landscape, and insights SO brilliantly. Some I just couldn't get into, but that's to be expected
In any short story collection! She continues to be a new favorite author to watch.

pp. 38 "How strange it is to be alive."
]]> 62617701 From the fun of the fair to the depths of hell, experience sixteen more curses in this sequel to the bestselling Cursed: An Anthology. A blend of traditional and reimagined curses from fairy-tales to Snow White, from some of the best names in fantasy.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Take a trip to a terrifying carnival and uncover the secrets within, solve a mysterious puzzle box and await your reward, join a travelling circus and witness the strangest ventriloquist act you've ever seen.

In this follow-up to the bestselling Cursed: An Anthology, you'll unearth curses old and new. From a very different take on Snow White, to a new interpretation of The Red Shoes, the best in fantasy spin straw into gold, and invite you into the labyrinth.

Just don't forget to leave your trail of breadcrumbs�

Featuring stories from: Joanne Harris Neil Gaiman Joe Hill Sarah Pinborough Angela Slatter M. R. Carey Christina Henry A. C. Wise Laura Purcell Katherine Arden Adam L. G. Nevill Mark Chadbourn Helen Grant Kelley Armstrong A. K. Benedict L. L. McKinney]]> 316 Marie O'Regan Anna 4 3.80 2023
author: Marie O'Regan
name: Anna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/31
date added: 2023/05/31
shelves: horror, fantastically-fantastical, creative-re-tellings, short-story-collections
review:
3.5/5 stars - a good collection of horror stories ranging from creepy to gory horror, from original or fairy tale inspired retellings. Glad to have some heavy hitter authors in here, like Katherine Arden and Joe Hill.
]]> 18759705
**Includes the short story Border, now a major film**

Whatever happened to Oskar and Eli? And what became of the beleaguered families in Handling the Undead? Find out in Let the Old Dreams Die.

In other tales from this collection, a woman finds a dead body and decides to keep it for herself, a customs officer has a mysterious gift that enables her to see what others hide, and a man believes he knows how to deceive death.

These are the stories of John Ajvide Lindqvist's rich imagination. They are about love and death, and what we do when the two collide and the monsters emerge.]]> 518 John Ajvide Lindqvist 0857385518 Anna 0 3.87 2011
author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
name: Anna
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read, horror, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 60779461 In this stunning new collection of four horror stories, award-winning author Rachel Harrison explores themes of body image, complicated female friendship, heartbreak, and hauntings.

In “Reply Hazy, Try Again,� an indecisive young woman finds a mysterious Magic 8 Ball that might just have the answers she’s been looking for...or might lead her down a path of self-destruction.

In “Bachelorette,� a bridesmaid attends her childhood best friend’s bachelorette weekend, only to discover the itinerary may demand more than she’s willing to sacrifice.

In “Goblin,� an unusually brutal dieting app wreaks havoc on the life of an insecure woman preparing to attend her ex’s wedding.

In “Bad Dolls,� after a death in the family, a wayward young woman comes into possession of a strange porcelain doll that could offer a connection to her lost sister.

These dark tales navigate the complexities of modern life with humor, insight, and the occasional blood sacrifice…]]> 132 Rachel Harrison 0593548523 Anna 4 3.68 2022
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Anna
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/22
date added: 2023/01/22
shelves: a-bit-creepy, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
3.5/5 stars - an unconventional horror story collection with the nuance of introspection, guilt of lapsed relationships and female friendships, and an examination of what it means to grow. Feminist in the sense that these stories were female-centered with an overarching “Why?� tied to each set of expectations, each bout of self-destruction, each clash with uncomfortable emotions. All 4 were still decidedly creepy, and each asks what it means when we embrace the darkness that overtakes us.
]]> 56648660 Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.]]> 251 Bora Chung 1916277187 Anna 0 3.76 2017
author: Bora Chung
name: Anna
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/30
shelves: to-read, feminist, horror, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 60243188 A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages

What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.]]> 228 Ling Ma 0374293511 Anna 4
(Update: Read “Severance� and loved it!)]]> 3.91 2022
author: Ling Ma
name: Anna
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/26
date added: 2022/10/04
shelves: netgalley, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:
3.5/5 stars - I’ll start by saying that short stories aren’t my preferred reading format, and so I tend to find them more difficult to connect with. But these stories were really impactful in the subtly horrific ways they pointed towards loneliness, various relationship complexities, and how people, especially Asian people, tolerate everyday racism and digs at their humanity day after day. I will also say these stories and their mastery make me extremely interested in “Severance,� which I’m sad to say I never read!

(Update: Read “Severance� and loved it!)
]]> 62157138 Alma Katsu, the visionary author of The Fervor, The Hunger, and The Deep, brings readers a terrifying short story about monsters among men—and the thin lines that divide them.

Germany, 1945. In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis have been all but defeated. Uwe Fuchs, never a fighter, feels fortunate to have avoided the front lines as he cared for his widowed mother.

But Uwe’s fortune changes when Hans Sauer, the village bully, recruits him to join a guerilla resistance unit preparing for the arrival of Allied soldiers. At first, Uwe is wary. The war is lost, and rumor has it that Hans is a deserter. But Hans entices him with talk of power, brutality, and their village’s ancestral lore: werewolves.

With some reluctance, Uwe joins up with the pack and soon witnesses their startling transformation. But when the men’s violent rampage against enemy soldiers takes a devastatingly personal turn, Uwe must grapple not only with his role in their evil acts but with his own humanity. Can he reclaim what this group of predatory men has stolen from him?

Or has he been a monster all along?]]> 79 Alma Katsu 1662507658 Anna 0 3.88
author: Alma Katsu
name: Anna
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves: to-read, horror, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 60133975
A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires.Ěý

A couple isolate themselves on a remote island in an attempt to recover from their teenage son’s death, when a mysterious young man knocks on their door during a storm�

And a man confronts his neighbour when he discovers a strange object in his back yard, only to be drawn into an ever-more dangerous game.

Three devastating, beautifully written horror stories from one of the genre’s most cutting-edge voices.

What have you done today to deserve your eyes?]]> 283 Eric LaRocca Anna 4 3.18 2022
author: Eric LaRocca
name: Anna
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/29
date added: 2022/08/29
shelves: horror, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
4/5 stars. This was a deliciously horrific set of horror novellas/stories. Creative to a degree I've not read in quite a while, and all deeply unsettling. As someone who loves to read unsettling, unnerving, creepy tales, I appreciate voices I've not yet found. While I'm of the opinion that horror does not need animal murder/gruesome animal deaths, and generally avoid those authors, the moments of yuck related to that in these tales were momentary enough for me to skim past. (But seriously, why do we have to have this in horror books, just bc Stephen King loves a beloved pet murder? Let's change that, please and thank you!) Apart from some yuck, the creepy vibes had me consuming this book in a couple of hours in one sitting. I will definilty be seeing what else this author has written.
]]> 52296 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection ever printed of her short fiction, featuring the pioneering feminist masterpiece of the title, her stories contemporary with The Yellow Wallpaper, the fiction from her neglected California period (1890-95), and her later explorations of "the woman of fifty." Together, these impressive works throw new light on Gilman as a writer of fiction.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.]]> 332 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0192834800 Anna 5 4.04 1995
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Anna
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/12/26
shelves: feminist, crazyness-mind-blowing-whoa, canonical-should-reads, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 54610996 From the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie, a novella collection in which every story reveals a sinister secret about a mysterious small town

Goblin seems like any other ordinary small town. But with the master storyteller Josh Malerman as your tour guide, you'll discover the secrets that hide behind its closed doors. These six novellas tell the story of a place where the rain is always falling, nighttime is always near, and your darkest fears and desires await. Welcome to Goblin. . . .

A Man in Slices: A man proves his "legendary love" to his girlfriend with a sacrifice even more daring than Vincent van Gogh's--and sends her more than his heart.

Kamp: Walter Kamp is afraid of everything, but most afraid of being scared to death. As he sets traps around his home to catch the ghosts that haunt him, he learns that nothing is more terrifying than fear itself.

Happy Birthday, Hunter!: A famed big-game hunter is determined to capture--and kill--the ultimate prey: the mythic Great Owl who lives in Goblin's dark forests. But this mysterious creature is not the only secret the woods are keeping.

Presto: All Peter wants is to be like his hero, Roman Emperor, the greatest magician in the world. When the famous magician comes to Goblin, Peter discovers that not all magic is just an illusion.

A Mix-Up at the Zoo: The new zookeeper feels a mysterious kinship with the animals in his care . . . and finds that his work is freeing dark forces inside him.

The Hedges: When his wife dies, a man builds a hedge maze so elaborate no one ever solves it--until a little girl resolves to be the first to find the mysteries that wait at its heart.]]> 416 Josh Malerman 0593237803 Anna 4 3.34 2017
author: Josh Malerman
name: Anna
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/18
date added: 2021/05/18
shelves: horror, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
This was an entirely unnerving collection of horror stories all set in or around the town of Goblin. The stories are horrific to varying degrees, and deeply unsettling. "The Hedges" might just be my favorite of the six stories - the idea of such strangely horrible beings as the Goblin Police was just so fascinating. They seemed a bit like the Librarians of "Welcome to Nightvale." I also really liked "Kamp" about a man trying so hard to avoid being scared to death that he removes every barrier in his apartment so as not to be startled and sets alarms and video cameras to check. "Presto" was also fascinating with enough subtlety and mystery to keep you as in the dark as the members of the audience for a magic show unlike any other. Josh Malerman is a master of the strange, weird, disturbing, and unsettling, and I look forward to his future works.
]]> 54496117 Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date

In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children’s game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear.Ěý

With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires—for intimacy, atonement, comfort—bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed—and so do her readers.ĚýThe Souvenir MuseumĚýshowcases the talents of one of our finest contemporary writers as she tenderly takes the pulse of our collective and individual lives.]]> 256 Elizabeth McCracken 006297128X Anna 4 3.43 2021
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Anna
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/27
date added: 2021/04/01
shelves: short-story-collections, lit-er-a-ture, netgalley
review:
This was a lovely collection of short stories. At times, defined by setting and place, and at times defined by character relationships and the passing of some years, these stories provide a range of emotional engagement that I found thoroughly enjoyable.
]]> 45691884
Alexei Remizov was one of the greatest writers of the Russian symbolist movement of the early twentieth century. In the thirteen stories collected in this volume, Remizov's exceptional stylistic achievements are on full display. Equally drawing on rural colloquial speech, the language of Russian fairy tales, and the customs of the Old Believers and Russian Orthodoxy, they transport the reader into a mysterious world in between uncanny folktales and encroaching modernity. The Little Devil and Other Stories includes works from across Remizov's career encompassing his thematic preoccupations and stylistic experimentation. Antonina W. Bouis's translation captures Remizov's many registers to offer English-language readers a sampling of a remarkable Russian writer.]]> 336 Aleksei Remizov 023118381X Anna 3 3.77
author: Aleksei Remizov
name: Anna
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/19
date added: 2021/03/19
shelves: pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections, russian-tales, netgalley
review:
This collection of short stories is certainly Russian, but less folkloric or fairy tale Russian, and more old world history and socio-economic issues Russian. I found this to be far more challenging to read, as someone not well-versed in Russian history but fascinated by the folklore and fairy tales that have come from Slavic and Russian culture. I was hoping for more fictional oddity and was met with much more serious storyline, which was actually very well put together and well-written, just not my expectation nor my preference. I do think someone more prepared and appreciative of general Russian history will be much more inclined to enjoy this collection of tales. And I can certainly see it being a very useful tool for a university course on Russian literature or even to add a literary approach to Russian history.
]]> 53746821
Originating in the folktale and with an occasional infusion of gothic horror or fantasy, A. E. Coppard’s stories still feel fresh and surprising today. Coppard came to the short story later in life but left an indelible mark on it. Staunch in his belief that the short story was a distinctive form with little relation to the novel, he wove his tales out of the substance of life in the English countryside, with its memorable and distinctive characters. Reissued with a new preface from award-winning and bestselling author Russell Banks, and including classic tales like “The Black Dog,â€� “The Handsome Lady,â€� and “The Higgler,”Ě� The Hurly Burly Ěýrestores this enormously important writer to the position he deserves and introduces him to a new generation of readers.]]> 336 A.E. Coppard 0063054167 Anna 3 4.00
author: A.E. Coppard
name: Anna
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2021/02/16
date added: 2021/02/16
shelves: netgalley, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:
This collection of short stories was okay, but not great. I didn’t find myself wowed by any of the stories, and they are very slow paced and have a generally old-time vibe of a time in the early 1900s. I do appreciate well written and more contemplative narrative story from time to time, and it may simply be that this collection is meant to be savored over a long and languishing period rather than rushed through with each story read back to back. For a short story collection to keep me reading more short stories, I must admit I tend to need a bit more “something� than these were able to provide. In fact, some of the stories did begin to feel like complete novels when recollecting them, but this serves to make the prospect of continuing to read a whole new story a bit more daunting than I was looking for, as well.
]]> 56552361
Robson’s stories are noted for their compassion, humanity, humor, rigor, and joy. This volume includes the chilling gothic horror “A Human Stain,� winner of the 2018 Nebula Award; the madcap historical fantasy “Waters of Versailles,� which was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards; and science fiction stories such as the touching “Intervention,� chilling “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill,� obscene “What Gentle Women Dare,� heartbreaking “Two-Year Man,� and many others.

These fourteen stories showcase Robson’s whip-smart richness of invention, brilliant storytelling, deep worldbuilding, and devilish sense of humor.

Kelly Robson grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, and as a teenager was crowned princess of the Hinton Big Horn Rodeo. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine and spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. Kelly consults as a creative futurist for organizations such as UNICEF and the Suncor Energy Foundation. She and her wife, writer A.M. Dellamonica, live in downtown Toronto.]]> 420 Kelly Robson 1645240258 Anna 4 3.67 2021
author: Kelly Robson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/16
date added: 2021/02/16
shelves: netgalley, queer-lit, sci-fi-ness, short-story-collections
review:
This was an interesting collection of sci-fi short stories with a focus on leading women; gender roles and their place in futuristic societies on other planets; the question of motherhood, regardless of whether a woman is bearing the child or a child is created in a lab; and the future of our planet, humanity’s survival, and the disappearing of our natural environment. As with most short story collections, some hit more pleasingly than others, but I really enjoyed all of the places, through space and time, that this author carried me for the duration of this collection.
]]> 53205891 A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for The Independent Buzzfeed The Nerd Daily

When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.

In Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes crosses borders and genres with stories of fierce women at the margins of society burning their way toward the center. This debut collection introduces readers to a fantasist in the vein of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, with a voice all her own.

Emma Goldman--yes, that Emma Goldman--takes tea with the Baba Yaga and truths unfold inside of exquisitely crafted lies. In Among the Thorns, a young woman in seventeenth century Germany is intent on avenging the brutal murder of her peddler father, but discovers that vengeance may consume all that it touches. In the showstopping, awards finalist title story, Burning Girls, Schanoes invests the immigrant narrative with a fearsome fairytale quality that tells a story about America we may not want--but need--to hear.

Dreamy, dangerous, and precise, with the weight of the very oldest tales we tell, Burning Girls and Other Stories introduces a writer pushing the boundaries of both fantasy and contemporary fiction.

With a foreword by Jane Yolen]]> 336 Veronica Schanoes 1250781507 Anna 3 something that I couldn't quite grasp - than there are stories I could connect with and feel pulled by. The ones I couldn't get into were more stylistically strange, attempting to be more stream of consciousness conversations with the reader than stories being told, and I just don't care for that kind of story. But of the ones that were really powerful and strange-yet-actual stories, my favorites were:

"Among the Thorns," "Phosphorus," "Ballroom Blitz," and "Burning Girls"

I really enjoyed how the author so seamlessly wove in historical moments, such as the matchgirls' strike of 1888 in London in "Phosphorus." I will forever be haunted by the visual of jawbones rotting from the faces of these poor women and girls. ]]> 3.91 2021
author: Veronica Schanoes
name: Anna
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/01/09
date added: 2021/01/12
shelves: fantastically-fantastical, netgalley, short-story-collections, feminist
review:
This is a collection of intense, powerful, historical, and very strange stories. I'm rating it 3 stars because there are more very VERY strange stories - so strange they are more experimental meditations on something that I couldn't quite grasp - than there are stories I could connect with and feel pulled by. The ones I couldn't get into were more stylistically strange, attempting to be more stream of consciousness conversations with the reader than stories being told, and I just don't care for that kind of story. But of the ones that were really powerful and strange-yet-actual stories, my favorites were:

"Among the Thorns," "Phosphorus," "Ballroom Blitz," and "Burning Girls"

I really enjoyed how the author so seamlessly wove in historical moments, such as the matchgirls' strike of 1888 in London in "Phosphorus." I will forever be haunted by the visual of jawbones rotting from the faces of these poor women and girls.
]]> 51620347
Wicked, solemn, and chilling, the circus is ready for your visit - just don’t arrive late.

Other short story collections by Jane Yolen in this series
The Emerald Circus (9781616962739): 2018 World Fantasy Award winner
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale (978-1-61696-306-4): 2019 Anne Izard Storytellers� Choice Award]]> 256 Jane Yolen 1616963409 Anna 3
Jane Yolen can brood and present brooding dark people, no doubt. My rating is more about the collection as a whole and my surprise at it being so so different from what I expected/wanted.]]> 3.69 2020
author: Jane Yolen
name: Anna
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/11/11
date added: 2020/11/12
shelves: short-story-collections, fantastically-fantastical, a-bit-creepy, netgalley
review:
This collection was not at all what I expected. For example, the stories are certainly not circus themed or dark-carnival themed in any way. Rather, this is a collection of dark stories. Dark, in that humans are dark, brooding, violent, harmful, etc. This collection was "Human Nature Dark," which is fine, if that's a collection you're expecting to read. I think I would have rather known that going in than to have been faced with this particular collection. It reminded me a bit more of the "Monserland" episodes on Hulu right now - vaguely supernatural/paranormal/spooky/beasts, etc., but more "humans are monsters and it sucks."

Jane Yolen can brood and present brooding dark people, no doubt. My rating is more about the collection as a whole and my surprise at it being so so different from what I expected/wanted.
]]> 53325342 Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century; her final novel, Fledgling; and her collected short stories.

In Kindred, Dana, a Black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre–Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own. Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.

A woman wakes up covered in burns in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened to her. In time she discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her. Among the long-lived Ina, though, Shori is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her brown skin and the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Part murder mystery, part fantasy thriller, Fledgling is Butler’s incomparable take on the vampire novel.

This Library of America volume also includes eight short stories and five essays—including two previously uncollected—as well as a newly researched chronology of Butler’s life and career and helpful explanatory notes by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler’s friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.]]> 789 Octavia E. Butler 1598536753 Anna 5
Titles included in this collection --
NOVELS:
Kindred
Fledgling

COLLECTED STORIES:
Childfinder
Crossover
Near of Kin Speech Sounds
Bloodchild
The Evening and the Morning and the Night
Amnesty
The Book of Martha

ESSAYS:
Lost Races of Science Fiction
Furor Scribendi
The Monophobic Response
Preface to Bloodchild and Other Stories]]> 4.57 2021
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Anna
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/02
date added: 2020/11/02
shelves: netgalley, sci-fi-ness, short-story-collections
review:
This was an excellent collection of Octavia Butler works (see table of contents at the end of this review) and perfect for long time fans and readers new to Butler. Prior to reading this collection, I had only read "Parable of the Sower," though "Kindred" had long been on my TBR shelf. I felt as though I read the full range of Butler in this collection. I'll leave my full reviews of "Kindred" and "Fledgling" with their respective full titles, but know that both are masterful explorations of race, gender, and power dynamics with elements of science fiction. "Kindred" involves mysterious time travel, and "Fledgling" involves vampires. The short stories are all wonderful, and each felt like they were seedlings for full blown novels. I am in awe of Butler's creative and imaginative mind, from alien creatures to post-apocalyptic worlds to stories of cultural heritage and family and mind reading. And the essays were the icing on the cake! Reading the collection in exactly the order presented was absolutely PERFECT, and the essays brought full illumination to Butler's mind and interior workings. She actually mentions in one essay that short stories were always her least favorite to write, finding them difficult to separate from novel projects. She also provides "afterword" for each of the stories, further illuminating where the idea sparked from or what the story was actually about, not leaving it to critics to find something that might not be there. From her autobiographical essay, we learn that Butler has always been painfully shy, finding it difficult to gain a foothold in the world. She also struggled with writer's block at varying parts of her life, and poverty, working odd jobs to piece together a survival. The book is a must read for any fan of Science Fiction - her essay on race in the genre was brilliant! Especially in today's world of continued racial issues and the book world movement to bring writer's of color and diverse voices to the publishing world en masse. Her mind was such a powerhouse, and I feel so lucky to have been able to read this wonderful collection.

Titles included in this collection --
NOVELS:
Kindred
Fledgling

COLLECTED STORIES:
Childfinder
Crossover
Near of Kin Speech Sounds
Bloodchild
The Evening and the Morning and the Night
Amnesty
The Book of Martha

ESSAYS:
Lost Races of Science Fiction
Furor Scribendi
The Monophobic Response
Preface to Bloodchild and Other Stories
]]> 52580386 404 Joyce Carol Oates 0802157998 Anna 3 3.63 2020
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Anna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/23
date added: 2020/10/23
shelves: dark, it-s-a-mystery, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
A breathy collection of short novellas by Oates, these are less "novellas of suspense" and more novellas of gendered trauma and building fears of violence and loss. Intensely dark and ultimately depressing, Oates illuminates the trauma of puberty, of loss of parents, of the creeping and leering gaze of males in positions of power, all through the lens of women and girls. Like many of her other works, Oates shows us the world of women and girls and makes us wonder how any of us are so lucky to get out alive.
]]> 51168664 In this witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive "feminine" passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millennia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.]]> 288 Aoko Matsuda 1593766904 Anna 5 3.77 2016
author: Aoko Matsuda
name: Anna
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/21
date added: 2020/10/21
shelves: a-bit-creepy, short-story-collections, feminist, creative-re-tellings, pleasantly-strange
review:
A masterful collection of classic Japanese ghost stories and folktales retold with contemporary approaches to gender roles, the female body, and general gender expectations vs. realities. The titular story was probably my favorite, but there really isn't a bad story in the entire collection. Quiet, unsettling at times, ghostly and ethereal, while also witty and sharp, these stories are perfect. Being less than familiar with the classic Japanese stories, I also greatly appreciated the summaries of classics in the last chapters, which really brought the stories into sharper contrast.
]]> 54568968
Since his debut novel, the modern classic The Ghosts of Belfast, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has published eight other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fiction’s great living writers.

Now for the first time Neville offers readers a collection of his short fiction—twelve chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror, and speculative fiction, and which bring the history and lore of Neville’s native Northern Ireland to glittering life. The collection concludes with the longawaited novella The Traveller, the companion piece to The Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion.

Complete with a foreword from Irish crime fiction legend John Connolly, this volume is the perfect indulgence for fans of ghost stories and noir, and is a must-have for devotees of Neville’s prizewinning Belfast novels.]]> 323 Stuart Neville 1641292032 Anna 5 4.00 2020
author: Stuart Neville
name: Anna
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/23
date added: 2020/09/24
shelves: horror, short-story-collections, netgalley, dark
review:
I am not familiar with Stuart Neville, and I cannot BELIEVE it! This was a phenomenal collection of short stories. They were dark and noir, but also incredibly unsettling and otherworldly. I most enjoyed the first half of the collection, grouped under "Monsters," but the second half was also good, just more noir than supernatural. Neville writes children suuuuuuper eerily and perfectly. The mastery of this collection is the incredible atmospheric quality he creates, with grit, chill, dark, and eeriness, almost Gothic without the historical feel. Even when his stories are more about a gritty mobster underbelly of this Northern Ireland setting, something just feels perfectly, darkly "off" and unsettling. I will definitely be adding Stuart Neville to my must-read authors.
]]> 34066621
Snapshot is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by “The Phoenician,� a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap.

A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero’s island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in Aloft.

On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails—splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. Rain explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world.

In Loaded, a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning.]]> 432 Joe Hill 0062663119 Anna 0 3.83 2017
author: Joe Hill
name: Anna
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/18
shelves: to-read, horror, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 54820546
Shut Up You're Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.]]> 5 TĂ©a Mutonji 1773055593 Anna 4
It is a raw, poignant, heartbreaking collection, refreshingly unafraid to look the realities of growing girls, poverty, and the emergence and ownership of one's own sexuality, right in the eye. It is unflinching in its approach to the realities of what a somewhat untethered and wild girl might do to come into herself and how she might perceive the world and its possibilities to her. The collection also embraces a Congolese heritage placed in America and confronts relationships between girls and their mothers, girls and other girls as friends, and girls and other girls as sources of intimacy. It also addresses sexuality imposed on girls and women by the world at large, and specifically how men treat the female body as a source of pleasure, worship, and target of brutality.

Tea Mutonji is a beautiful writer, honing in with piercing accuracy on all of these moments and observations. I look forward to her continued publications.]]> 3.23 2019
author: TĂ©a Mutonji
name: Anna
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/14
date added: 2020/09/14
shelves: feminist, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
This is a collection of stories connected by one character and moving across moments in time.

It is a raw, poignant, heartbreaking collection, refreshingly unafraid to look the realities of growing girls, poverty, and the emergence and ownership of one's own sexuality, right in the eye. It is unflinching in its approach to the realities of what a somewhat untethered and wild girl might do to come into herself and how she might perceive the world and its possibilities to her. The collection also embraces a Congolese heritage placed in America and confronts relationships between girls and their mothers, girls and other girls as friends, and girls and other girls as sources of intimacy. It also addresses sexuality imposed on girls and women by the world at large, and specifically how men treat the female body as a source of pleasure, worship, and target of brutality.

Tea Mutonji is a beautiful writer, honing in with piercing accuracy on all of these moments and observations. I look forward to her continued publications.
]]> 43801817 480 Joe Hill 0062200674 Anna 5
I’ve been hit or miss with Hill, but this collection feels like mastery on display. ]]> 4.00 2019
author: Joe Hill
name: Anna
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/10/05
date added: 2020/09/11
shelves: frackin-scary, horror, short-story-collections, netgalley, willie-will-like
review:
Holy. Frickin. Moly. This might be one of the best collections of short stories out there, and definitely the best proof of Joe Hill’s talent as a writer. The range of stories is perfect - taking you from horror, to steampunk fantasy, to fairy-tale-gone-wrong, to zombies, to horrors of real life (i.e. war). Folks thinking this will be a purely horror collection may be disappointed in that fact, but the quality and creativity and awesomeness of all of these stories will hopefully help you get past that fact. I loved the allusions to circus-carnival-horror story vibes, and the tall grass story was amazing (excited to learn in the afterword that it’s already en route to Netflix streaming!). The fairy land hunting story felt like a new and original Dr. Moreau (though not really related, just my brain reaching for connections), and the same with the crazy freaky carousel (I felt “Needful Things� with zero connection or similarity, it just gave me the same FEELING if that makes sense).

I’ve been hit or miss with Hill, but this collection feels like mastery on display.
]]> 218659 Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.]]> 269 Flannery O'Connor Anna 0 4.24 1965
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Anna
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/08
shelves: to-read, lit-er-a-ture, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 14475669 Moscow But Dreaming showcases singular and lyrical writing that will appeal to fans of slipstream and magical realism, as well as those interested in the uncanny and Russian history.]]> 288 Ekaterina Sedia 1607013622 Anna 4 3.76 2012
author: Ekaterina Sedia
name: Anna
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2015/09/22
date added: 2020/08/21
shelves: fantastically-fantastical, short-story-collections, back-and-forth-reading, russian-tales
review:
I don't know if I was just not tuning in until the last third of the book, but some of the last stories were suddenly hitting all the right buttons. I particularly liked the weird and strangely heart-tugging "A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets", the nicely creepy twisting a reincarnation-tale "A Taste of Wheat", the awesomely shudder-worthy "Cherrystone and Shards of Ice" (loved this one), and the Irish-sad-classic-tale reimagined "Seas of the World".
]]> 50984842
These outstanding stories examine masculinity, male power and broken relationships, while revealing � with astonishing insight and clarity � those moments of misunderstanding that can have life-changing consequences. And there is an unexpected violence, ever-present but unseen, in the depiction of the complicated interactions between men and women, and families. Subtle, sophisticated and displaying an extraordinary understanding of human behaviour, these stories are unforgettable.]]> 288 Emma Cline 0812998642 Anna 4 3.32 2021
author: Emma Cline
name: Anna
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/04
date added: 2020/06/04
shelves: netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
First, I consumed this collection of stories in a day. Each story was a long-form story, which I felt was perfect for the pace and purpose of each little "vignette." I felt we got excellent character development and depth, and that depth helped build the framework of the setting, and by that time, a full story has bloomed. Each story felt like something was hidden, unsaid, just outside the frame of the picture, which I thought was really smart and evocative. It left me wondering about these people, and actually left my mind to continue building the story after it had finished. The writing was excellent, and I really just appreciated most everything about this collection. I actually had to go back and see if I'd read "The Girls" - I read so many books that I often find my mind pushes out older books to make way for new, but apparently I really enjoyed that first novel as well :-) Looking forward to more from Emma Cline.
]]> 43565364 False Bingo, we watch as sinister forces (some supernatural, some of this earth, some real, and some not) work their ways into the mundanity of everyday life. In "Strange Loop," an outcast attempting to escape an unnamed mistake spends his days taxiderming animals, while in "Delivery," a family watches as their dementia-addled, basement-dwelling father succumbs to an online shopping addiction. "Dont Let's" finds a woman, recently freed from an abusive relationship, living in an isolated vacation home in the South that might be haunted by breath-stealing ghosts. Fueled by paranoia and visceral suspense, and crafted with masterful restraint, these seventeen stories explore what happens when our fears cross over into the real, if only for a fleeting moment. Identities are stolen, alternate universes are revealed, and innocence is lost as the consequences of minor, seemingly harmless decisions erupt to sabotage a false sense of stability. False Bingo is a collection of realist fables exploring how conflicting moralities can coexist: the good, the bad, the indecipherable.]]> 240 Jac Jemc 0374538352 Anna 3 3.68 2019
author: Jac Jemc
name: Anna
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/05/16
date added: 2020/05/16
shelves: a-bit-creepy, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 43317570
Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me , he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh , Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods , a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods.

A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle� of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead.

In story after story, which have appeared in magazines ranging from the Virginia Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine to McSweeney’s and Ploughshares , Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.]]> 196 Benjamin Percy 1644450062 Anna 4 possible . And the last story/novella "The Uncharted" was super cool and engaging. I look forward to other writing by Benjamin Percy.]]> 3.63 2013
author: Benjamin Percy
name: Anna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/18
date added: 2020/04/21
shelves: a-bit-creepy, short-story-collections
review:
This was a pretty great collection of short stories. I didn't care for some of the animal-related gore, but mustered the courage to get through the few stories/sections with that in it to find the stories themselves quite good. "The Balloon" was especially, eerily close to the current pandemic situation but ramped up to super heightened place. It was the kind of story that, given our current world situation, the whole thing became quickly, and shockingly possible . And the last story/novella "The Uncharted" was super cool and engaging. I look forward to other writing by Benjamin Percy.
]]> 51938808 Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Richard Ford presents a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss.

“Displaced� returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to console the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up� follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of his life. “The Run of Yourself,� a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare� follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Replete with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.]]> 272 Richard Ford 0062969803 Anna 3 3.57 2020
author: Richard Ford
name: Anna
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/13
date added: 2020/04/14
shelves: contemplative, netgalley, short-story-collections
review:
This was a nice, quiet collection of short stories about, above all things, reflecting on one's life and situation. The book of stories takes us from Louisiana, to Maine, to Chicago, to New York, to Ireland, and all felt very atmospheric and contemplative. Many of the stories weren't particularly happy, but, then again, I suppose life in general is not exactly happy on the whole. There are bumps and hitches along the way, and that is true of this collection as well. I think the overall feel was a bit sad, and left me a bit thoughtful about life in general and the paths it takes, and where that end of the road might be.
]]> 41888678 208 Brian Evenson 1566895480 Anna 4
And to provide a reference point, I actually really enjoy open-ended, subtle-creep stories, so I don't NEED it to be all shocking and gross to enjoy it. I love Shirley Jackson, for example. If you need all gore all the time, then I'm not sure this book will be for you, and maybe just go read about serial killers. ]]> 3.88 2019
author: Brian Evenson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/07
date added: 2020/03/11
shelves: a-bit-creepy, short-story-collections
review:
This was a great collection of stories. Definitely "a bit creepy" applies to all, though some are a bit more horror/murdery than others. Having just read a NYTimes bestselling and all-the-accolades-given collection of short stories ("Exhalation") and finding myself unenthusiastic, bored, and a bit stupid, if I'm honest, this book was a breath of fresh air. Some stories are longer, because the creepy takes longer to establish, and there's more of an arc happening, but these longer stories are paced well enough that you don't feel overburdened by ridiculously long short stories in a short story collection -sometimes when that happens I think, is this collection just like a book-preview or something?? I'd be actually really excited to read a full book by this author, since he obviously knows what he's doing.

And to provide a reference point, I actually really enjoy open-ended, subtle-creep stories, so I don't NEED it to be all shocking and gross to enjoy it. I love Shirley Jackson, for example. If you need all gore all the time, then I'm not sure this book will be for you, and maybe just go read about serial killers.
]]> 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]> 368 Ted Chiang Anna 3 4.27 2019
author: Ted Chiang
name: Anna
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/03/04
date added: 2020/03/04
shelves: sci-fi-ness, short-story-collections
review:
A good, solidly science fiction collection of short stories - emphasis on the "science." These stories were very scientifically "philosophical," if that makes sense. A lot more hypothetical, "what if this technology made this happen?" or "what if we believed this about our origins?" Often these stories were a bit too heavy on the science, for me, with bit enough storytelling to make the science engaging at times. A very "smart" collection of stories.
]]> 43404387 The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami's breakout success, comes a new novel full of charm, subtlety, and style by an author whose readership in Japan numbers in the millions.

Each woman in this book has succumbed, even if only for an hour, to that seductive, imprudent, and furtively feline man who managed to glide so naturally into their lives. But who really was Mr. Nishino?

Still clinging to the vivid memory of his warm breath, his indecipherable silences, and his nonchalance, ten women who have loved him tell their stories as they attempt to recreate the image of the unfathomable and seemingly unattainable Mr. Nishino. Through accounts that are full of humor, intelligence, and the bittersweet joys of love, these women evoke Nishino's image but reveal themselves. Each perspective is both captivating and sensual, droll but important, and each is a variation on themes of love and identity.]]> 172 Hiromi Kawakami 1609455339 Anna 2 short-story-collections 3.46 2003
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Anna
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2020/02/10
date added: 2020/02/10
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
I actually found this book incredibly boring. I just couldn’t connect to the characters and situations, and when I began to get closer, the story would be over. Not for me.
]]> 45991174
Miniature catastrophes --
The rope barrier --
Coed picnic --
Winners --
Grocery story --
Garden party --
Arranged marriage --
American interiors --
A house for living --
The dance --
The nearby place --
Invitation --
Doorstop --
Imaginary museums --
Your shining trapdoor --
Slovak sceneries --
Sabbatical --
Flowers for Angelika --
Thursdays at Waterhouse --
The seamstress --
How to eat well --
Owls fall in Nitra --
Library of lost things --
Girls I no longer know --
Guest books --
Field notes --
Rest in pieces --
Pets I no longer have --
The squinter's watch --
Love language]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 159376586X Anna 0 3.64 2020
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Anna
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/02
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 4772110
A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap� his talent . . .

Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of the two—determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp.

An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed works of fiction.]]> 221 Kazuo Ishiguro 0307397874 Anna 2 3.52 2009
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Anna
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2020/01/15
date added: 2020/01/15
shelves: short-story-collections, lit-er-a-ture
review:
As some others have said, the pacing of the book is lacking. The first story was quite enjoyable and compelling, but I have trouble recalling much of the rest of the stories. Not my favorite collection.
]]> 373915
Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945....

Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town....

Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing....

John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead....

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past...]]> 316 Joe Hill 0061147974 Anna 0 3.94 2005
author: Joe Hill
name: Anna
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/13
shelves: to-read, haunted-houses, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 31451255 A singular debut that “marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent� (Kevin Barry)

Daisy Johnson’s Fen, set in the fenlands of England, transmutes the flat, uncanny landscape into a rich, brooding atmosphere. From that territory grow stories that blend folklore and restless invention to turn out something entirely new. Amid the marshy paths of the fens, a teenager might starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl and grow jealous of her friend. A boy might return from the dead in the guise of a fox. Out beyond the confines of realism, the familiar instincts of sex and hunger blend with the shifting, unpredictable wild as the line between human and animal is effaced by myth and metamorphosis. With a fresh and utterly contemporary voice, Johnson lays bare these stories of women testing the limits of their power to create a startling work of fiction.]]> 208 Daisy Johnson 155597774X Anna 4 short-story-collections 3.58 2016
author: Daisy Johnson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/31
date added: 2019/09/03
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
This was a great collection of stories - twisty, magical, dark, and alluring. Looking forward to reading other publications by this author.
]]> 36758510 0 Lauren Groff 0525626107 Anna 4 short-story-collections 3.61 2018
author: Lauren Groff
name: Anna
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/05/24
date added: 2019/05/28
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
A hazy, dreamy collection of Florida-inspired stories. This collection was a bit heavy, but not in an off-putting way, just more in a contemplative way. Mostly about women and struggles, and Florida. I enjoyed the internal dialogue and contemplation the characters of most of the stories experienced.
]]> 18090141
And in the title story, selected for The Best American Short Stories, two film school buddies working on a doomed project are left sizing up their own talent, hoping to come out on top—but fearing they won't.

In What's Important Is Feeling, Adam Wilson follows the through-line of contemporary coming-of-age from the ravings of teenage lust to the staggering loneliness of proto-adulthood. He navigates the tough terrain of American life with a delicate balance of comedy and compassion, lyricism and unsparing straightforwardness. Wilson's characters wander through a purgatory of yearning, hope, and grief. No one emerges unscathed.]]> 224 Adam Wilson 0062284789 Anna 3 short-story-collections 3.49 2014
author: Adam Wilson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2019/03/30
date added: 2019/03/30
shelves: short-story-collections
review:

]]> 40539045
You Know You Want This brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean�; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter� who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.�

Bad boy --
Look at your game, girl --
Sardines --
The night runner --
The mirror, the bucket, and the old thigh bone --
Cat person --
The good guy --
The boy in the pool --
Scarred --
The matchbox sign --
Death wish --
Biter --
Acknowledgments]]> 225 Kristen Roupenian 1982101636 Anna 4 short-story-collections 3.62 2019
author: Kristen Roupenian
name: Anna
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/07
date added: 2019/03/07
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
A bit crazy and strange - a bit poignant and right on the nose, these stories are something to behold.
]]> 39720095
In this retrospective collection of her finest work—previously only available in limited editions—Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.]]> 432 Caitlín R. Kiernan 1616963026 Anna 3 4.01 2019
author: CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan
name: Anna
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/02/01
date added: 2019/02/01
shelves: fantastically-fantastical, short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
An interesting collection of stories, with the general feel of hazy, historical eeriness, sometimes with a Lovecraftian feel. I couldn't get into many of them, perhaps the lengths were a bit prohibitive for me - I like a short story that gets to the point in a timely way, and doesn't do too much lingering and building, otherwise I tend to lose my focus. These stories were a bit long in the tooth - so many with multiple sections, sometimes changing times or characters from section to section, to where it just sort of became exhausting to keep reading on to the next story.
]]> 36144557
A woman being written into her boyfriend’s fiction is at first flattered to be his muse, but then finds her real life literally consumed and overtaken by his. A desperate young woman makes a prayer to the Saint of Sidewalks, but the miracle she receives isn’t what she expected. A painter spies a naked man, crouched by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, transform into a beautiful white bird and decides to paint him, and becomes involved in his curse. Jeanne, a duelist and a sacred blade for God and Her holy saints, finds that the price of truth is always blood. And in the novella “Once, Future� Howard reimagines the Arthurian romance on a modern college campus as a story that is told, and told again, until the ending is right.]]> 368 Kat Howard 1481492152 Anna 0 3.88 2019
author: Kat Howard
name: Anna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/01/22
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections, fantastically-fantastical
review:

]]> 33375622 Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

The husband stitch --
Inventory --
Mothers --
Especially heinous --
Real women have bodies --
Eight bites --
The resident --
Difficult at parties]]> 248 Carmen Maria Machado 155597788X Anna 4 3.85 2017
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Anna
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/01/13
date added: 2019/01/13
shelves: short-story-collections, feminist
review:
This was an incredibly compelling collection of short stories. All at once unusual, painful, intense, and, at times, confusing. There were a few that didn't resonate, as I find happens with all short story collections. For example, the Law and Order SVU one was a bit structurally odd - the segmenting sort of broke my concentration and was more like a prose poem, in a sense, yet it was still a bit haunting - those ghost women with bells for eyes will stay with me. I think my favorite story was the first one, with the incredibly interesting incorporation of age old ghost stories (about women) woven into this retelling of the tale about the woman who wears the forbidden ribbon round her neck. The story was always about a man's need to possess every aspect of the woman - she always eventually removes it, acquiescing to his need, with such sadness and disappointment, and this story is no different, but feels more pointed with the other tales woven in. And the story about the fading women was also haunting ... Such an eerily sad set of tales ultimately about the ways in which women's bodies are not our own, even when we think they are.
]]> 22208260 A new story collection from Edith Pearlman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award for her last collection, Binocular Vision.

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Binocular Vision, Honeydew further solidifies Edith Pearlman's place among the likes of all-time great story writers such as John Updike, Alice Munro, Frank O'Connor, and Anton Chekhov.

Pearlman writes about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, but the real excitement comes from the intricate attention Pearlman devotes to the interior life of young Emily, who wishes she were a bug. In "Sonny," a mother prays for her daughters to be barren so they never have to experience the death of a child. "The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets-and a surprise stowaway.

In prose that is as wise as it is poetic, Pearlman shines light on small, devastatingly precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life. She maps the psychological landscapes of her exquisitely rendered characters with unending compassion and seeming effortlessness.

Both for its artistry and for the lives of the characters it presents, Honeydew is a collection that will pull readers back time and again. These stories demonstrate once more that Pearlman is a master of the form and that hers is a vision unfailingly wise and forgiving.]]> 277 Edith Pearlman 0316297224 Anna 3 short-story-collections 3.57 2015
author: Edith Pearlman
name: Anna
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2019/01/12
date added: 2019/01/12
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
A generally nice collection of short stories about very normal people, largely in a town outside Boston. The stories sometimes resonated and sometimes didn't, and were all very quiet, literary-type tales. All were a good length, however, which isn't always the case with short story collections.
]]> 36236163 Twelve interlocking stories set in Los Angeles describe a broken family through the homes they inhabit.

In her first collection since the Pulitzer Prize finalist Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet presents a web of stories that explore what it means to be home. A real estate broker is the first character and moral center of a larger narrative about a fractured family reconnecting in unexpected ways. Warm romantic relationships, shocking tragedy, and a satisfying plot are infused, as usual, with Millet’s blistering wit, dazzling intellect, and sometimes surreal touch. Fight No More introduces an eclectic cast: strong-minded female narrators beset by hapless male relations, myopic businesspeople contending with unexpected setbacks, beastly men doing beastly things. Fresh off the critical triumph of Sweet Lamb of Heaven (longlisted for the National Book Award), Millet is pioneering a new kind of satire—hilariously brutal in its depiction of modern American life, but compassionate toward those caught up in its tidal forces.

Libertines --
Breakfast at Tiffany's --
Bird-head monster --
Self-expression and leadership --
The fall of Berlin --
The men --
Fight no more --
I knew you in this dark --
Stockholm --
I can't go on --
God save the queen --
Those are pearls --
Oh child of Earth]]> 209 Lydia Millet 0393635481 Anna 4
On grief: "She was in her well and thought she’d never get out. And he had to admit, it was distinctly possible. A nurturing-type person would probably cluck like a chook and reassure her, but he didn’t have that in him. He could barely say regular things. He’d rather tell her the truth, anyway: a well was deep and true and had its own cylindrical perfection. It gave good shelter because its walls weren’t thin; they were as thick as the earth was round. When you were in a well the walls went on forever. From the solitude of a well, if you were fortunate, you could look up now and then and see a circle of sky. That circle might as well be the world, or the span of a life in it—clouds passed in the blink of an eye, no matter how immense they were. Stars greater than the sun shone down, as small as pins, from infinite remove. Course, you couldn’t say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide."

"It wasn’t fair, Lexie had thought when she listened to Jun’s parents tell her adoption story at their dinner table once, how those adopting parents had to pass a gazillion tests to get a kid to take care of, but people pumping out their own babies didn’t have to pass jack shit. You had to take a bunch of tests to help a kid that needed you, but not to make a brand-new kid you’d warp for twenty years. Or more."]]> 3.95 2018
author: Lydia Millet
name: Anna
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/07/23
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
A masterful collection of interconnected short stories, with women at their core. Sometimes strong, sometimes weak; broken and fractured; found but also still lost - these women explore what it means to be whole, oneself, aware, afraid, determined, and existing. A truly thoughtful look at the head space of women and their sense of place, both within themselves and in their physical environments.

On grief: "She was in her well and thought she’d never get out. And he had to admit, it was distinctly possible. A nurturing-type person would probably cluck like a chook and reassure her, but he didn’t have that in him. He could barely say regular things. He’d rather tell her the truth, anyway: a well was deep and true and had its own cylindrical perfection. It gave good shelter because its walls weren’t thin; they were as thick as the earth was round. When you were in a well the walls went on forever. From the solitude of a well, if you were fortunate, you could look up now and then and see a circle of sky. That circle might as well be the world, or the span of a life in it—clouds passed in the blink of an eye, no matter how immense they were. Stars greater than the sun shone down, as small as pins, from infinite remove. Course, you couldn’t say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide."

"It wasn’t fair, Lexie had thought when she listened to Jun’s parents tell her adoption story at their dinner table once, how those adopting parents had to pass a gazillion tests to get a kid to take care of, but people pumping out their own babies didn’t have to pass jack shit. You had to take a bunch of tests to help a kid that needed you, but not to make a brand-new kid you’d warp for twenty years. Or more."
]]> 26831729
In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls� from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In “Gun Accident,� a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In “Equatorial,� set in the exotic Galapagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults upon her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her.

In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination� that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.]]> 317 Joyce Carol Oates 0802124887 Anna 4 3.42 2016
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Anna
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/10
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, a-bit-creepy, netgalley
review:
Great set of short stories, ranging from mildly disturbing/creepy to very unnerving. Really the only story falling into the "horror" genre is the title story, but still pretty good. There were several really great stories that felt much like reading a great mystery novel, but we're masterfully written to fit in a short-story space. I recommend, but don't expect this to rally get you "horror" like Steven King or the like.
]]> 25810500 Ěý
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation?]]> 325 Helen Oyeyemi 1594634637 Anna 2 3.65 2016
author: Helen Oyeyemi
name: Anna
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2016/03/05
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, pleasantly-strange, netgalley
review:
Firstly, let me say that I love Helen Oyeyemi's writing, and have read every one of her books. That being said, this collection of stories just didn't do it for me. The writing is still great, description-wise, but it felt really disjointed and I had a lot of trouble keeping track of characters who showed up again in other stories, even though they aren't all connected. It just felt like she wasn't sure what kind of book she wanted to write and was feeling it out more than really creating a good set of short stories. Her previous book felt similarly disjointed to me, and perhaps she is moving into a period of writing that doesn't speak to me in the way her earlier books did, and that's okay, because if she's an artist in it for the duration, then I would expect growth and change in styles and themes, and I look forward to reading her next book.
]]> 30079724 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.

But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Bettering myself --
Mr. Wu --
Malibu --
The weirdos --
A dark and winding road --
No place for good people --
Slumming --
An honest woman --
The beach boy --
Nothing ever happens here --
Dancing in the moonlight --
The surrogate --
The locked room --
A better place]]> 294 Ottessa Moshfegh 0399562885 Anna 5
Some sections I highlighted in the Ebook:

Location 700
"But the spirit of the place made me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it—I’ve never been very clear on that distinction."

Location 774
"I went to a very dark place. The oceanic emptiness in my gut churned. I pictured my old body rotting in my coffin. I pictured my skin wrinkling and turn� ing black and falling off my bones. I pictured my rotting genitals. I pictured my pubic hair filling with larvae. And after all that, there was infinite darkness. There was nothing."

Location 908
"My poor wife. I didn’t know how little I loved her until she was dead."

Location 1050
"I slept on the couch that night, the TV flickering like a flame over my shoulder, the succulents creeping in cups and saucers across the mantle, the coffee table, all the window sills, the whole house full of them, my perfect little children."

Location 1057
"The trashiness of the town was comforting, like an old black‑and‑white movie."

Location 1150
"“Whom do I pay?� I said to the gaggle of women sitting on the front steps. They all had the same flat, long, brown hair, the same pinched eyes, bulbous mouths, and throats like frogs. Their bodies were so fat, their breasts hung and rested on their knees. They pointed to the matriarch, a huge woman sitting on a piano bench in the shade of a large oak. Her left eye was swollen shut, bruised yellow, black, and blue. I gave her the money. Her hand was tiny and plump, like a doll’s, fingernails painted bright red. She stuffed the bill I gave her in the pocket of her worn cotton housedress, pulled a sucker from her mouth, and smiled, showing me—not without some hostility—a lone bottom row of teeth rotted down to stubs, like a baby’s teeth. She was probably around my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean‑spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of her obese offspring would soon overtake her throne, I imagined, and preside over the family’s abject state of existence, the beating hearts of these young women pointlessness personified. You’d think that, sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all go out of their minds."

Location 2168
"It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man."

Location 2184
"She folded her arms. Her mouth, as she waited for my answer, was a heavy, wilted rose."]]> 3.63 2017
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Anna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2017/02/13
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
This was a fantastic collection of short stories. They are set in very normal places and situations, for the most part, but the author uses masterful descriptions and focuses on things that are a bit off. They are realistic, gritty, mucking around in the belly of life experiences and the weirder parts of the human brain. I will be looking for more from Moshfegh.

Some sections I highlighted in the Ebook:

Location 700
"But the spirit of the place made me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it—I’ve never been very clear on that distinction."

Location 774
"I went to a very dark place. The oceanic emptiness in my gut churned. I pictured my old body rotting in my coffin. I pictured my skin wrinkling and turn� ing black and falling off my bones. I pictured my rotting genitals. I pictured my pubic hair filling with larvae. And after all that, there was infinite darkness. There was nothing."

Location 908
"My poor wife. I didn’t know how little I loved her until she was dead."

Location 1050
"I slept on the couch that night, the TV flickering like a flame over my shoulder, the succulents creeping in cups and saucers across the mantle, the coffee table, all the window sills, the whole house full of them, my perfect little children."

Location 1057
"The trashiness of the town was comforting, like an old black‑and‑white movie."

Location 1150
"“Whom do I pay?� I said to the gaggle of women sitting on the front steps. They all had the same flat, long, brown hair, the same pinched eyes, bulbous mouths, and throats like frogs. Their bodies were so fat, their breasts hung and rested on their knees. They pointed to the matriarch, a huge woman sitting on a piano bench in the shade of a large oak. Her left eye was swollen shut, bruised yellow, black, and blue. I gave her the money. Her hand was tiny and plump, like a doll’s, fingernails painted bright red. She stuffed the bill I gave her in the pocket of her worn cotton housedress, pulled a sucker from her mouth, and smiled, showing me—not without some hostility—a lone bottom row of teeth rotted down to stubs, like a baby’s teeth. She was probably around my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean‑spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of her obese offspring would soon overtake her throne, I imagined, and preside over the family’s abject state of existence, the beating hearts of these young women pointlessness personified. You’d think that, sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all go out of their minds."

Location 2168
"It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man."

Location 2184
"She folded her arms. Her mouth, as she waited for my answer, was a heavy, wilted rose."
]]> 35412384 Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion, to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt.

Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise.]]> 144 Christine Schutt 0802127614 Anna 2 something there, but just not enough for me.]]> 2.96 2018
author: Christine Schutt
name: Anna
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2017/10/17
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
I had a lot of trouble connecting to these stories, and the narrative felt just too wandering for me to follow it all feel like I was understanding the point. I enjoyed the first one, until it just kept going and going and going, then I think it went back or forward in time? I'm not sure, but it lost me. So I tried the next one, and while it was shorter, it still didn't bring me in. I will say that these stories had an overarching feeling of melancholy about them, though I'm not exactly sure why. Fleeting time? Dimming light? Beach days sped up until the nostalgia of beach vacations with too much sun and chilling sand after a long day seep in. So there was some feeling transmitted on the whole, but not enough for me to want to recommend the collection, unfortunately. There's something there, but just not enough for me.
]]> 35575912 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Between the hallucinogenic, weird, imaginative wordplay and the brilliant mathematical puzzles and social satire, Alice has been read, enjoyed, and savored by every generation since its publication. Datlow asked eighteen of the most brilliant and acclaimed writers working today to dream up stories inspired by all the strange events and surreal characters found in Wonderland.

Featuring stories and poems from Seanan McGuire, Catherynne M. Valente, Delia Sherman, Genevieve Valentine, Priya Sharma, Stephen Graham Jones, Richard Bowes, Jeffrey Ford, Angela Slatter, Andy Duncan, C.S.E. Cooney, Matthew Kressel, Kris Dikeman, Jane Yolen, Kaaron Warren, Ysbeau Wilce, and Katherine Vaz.

Table of Contents:

“Gentle Alice� Kris Dikeman
“My Own Invention� Delia Sherman
“Lily-White & the Thief of Lesser Night� C. S. E. Cooney
“Conjoined� Jane Yolen
“Mercury� Priya Sharma
“Some Kind of Wonderland� Richard Bowes
“Alis� Stephen Graham Jones
“All the King’s Men� Jeffrey Ford
“Run, Rabbit� Angela Slatter
“In Memory of a Summer’s Day� Matthew Kressel
“Sentence Like a Saturday� Scanan McGuire
“Worrity, Worrity� Andy Duncan
“Eating the Alice Cake� Kaaron Warren
“The Queen of Hats� Ysabeau S. Wilce
“A Comfort, One Way� Genevieve Valentine
“The Flame After the Candle� Catherynne M. Valente
“Moon, and Memory, and Muchness� Katherine Vaz
“Run, Rabbit, Run� Jane Yolen]]> 336 Ellen Datlow 0765391074 Anna 4 3.48 2017
author: Ellen Datlow
name: Anna
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/11/01
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: creative-re-tellings, short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
A good collection of stories for fans of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass". Like most short story collections, there were a handful I couldn't get into, but the ones that I liked were quite fantastic, for a range of reasons. There was fantasy, drama, character-building, mad-hatter-esque strangeness, dungeons, strange theme parks, and more. I quite enjoyed: "Lily-White and the Thief of Lesser Night" by C.S.E. Cooney, "Mercury" by Priya Sharma, "Alis" by Stephen Graham Jones, "In Memory of a Summer's Day" by Matthew Kressel, "Sentence Like a Saturday" by Seanan McGuire, "The Flame After the Candle" by Catherynne M. Valente, and "Moon, and Memory, and Muchness" by Katherine Vaz. This is the first anthology-type short story collection gathered on a theme that I've actually completed - quite telling of the quality of work presented.
]]> 33931042 A collection of one of our most powerful intellectual's short fiction

Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art--made more urgent by the passage of years--await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.]]> 320 Susan Sontag 0374100756 Anna 2 3.41 2017
author: Susan Sontag
name: Anna
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2017/11/14
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, lit-er-a-ture, back-and-forth-reading, netgalley
review:
I've always wanted to read Susan Sontag, or felt that I should, and thought this collection might be a good way to start. However, as the editor described in the collection overview: "The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode." This means that there was little to no cohesion for the entirety of the collection except for the fact that they seem not to fit in any other format/genre. It was difficult to grasp whether I was reading fiction, non-fiction, essay, or merely idea fragments, and it made it enormously difficult to get into or want to return to. That being said, the writing itself is masterful, and Sontag clearly has a way with words that makes me believe her larger works must be quite good. I abandoned the collection at exactly halfway, though I may return when I have more time. I most enjoyed "Project for a Trip to China" and "The Dummy" from the first part of the collection.
]]> 35135343 The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.

Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

The largesse of the sea maiden
The starlight on Idaho
Strangler Bob
Triumph over the grave
Doppelganger, poltergeist]]> 207 Denis Johnson 0812988639 Anna 2 3.95 2018
author: Denis Johnson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2017/12/20
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
This is the first time I've read anything by Denis Johnson, and he's not quite my style. His stories have a gritty, floor-scraped feel. Characters are often recovering alcoholics, in prison, losing their minds, or just reflecting on the criminal actions of friends and/or family. My first thought on who these stories remind me of is a kind of Hunter S. Thompson, Donald Ray Pollack combination. Great if you're into grit.
]]> 34079359 Untouchable and Half World comes a new, breathtaking short story collection in the tradition of Annie Proulx’s Close Range and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

A young musician trapped beneath a collapsed building. A teenage bicycle thief searching for a kidnapped boy. An aging actor fighting against the erasure of his past.

This science-fiction collection follows a diverse cast of characters struggling to live under the weight of their demons. As their lives intersect, they desperately seek escape and redemption from their own earthbound circumstances. Juxtaposing moments of wrenching tragedy with humanity and grace, Thalassa is a stunning and unflinching work that questions our very existence.]]> 256 Scott O'Connor 1507204051 Anna 5 3.93 2018
author: Scott O'Connor
name: Anna
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/01/16
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
This short story collection was truly masterful, and made me feel SO MUCH. The stories ranged from fairly brief to a bit longer, varied in plot and style, and were somehow truly piercing. The first story, "Hold On," was intense, and you got the sense of being inside the man's head with him, as he traverses a new world in which he is the sole survivor of a collapsed building during an earthquake. He's grieving for something, for who he was? the world he was in before? the him he was before he was a survivor? But you feel, with him, that what's happening externally is alien, unknown, bad in some unknowable way, but making him feel something. The second story, "It Was Over So Quickly, Doug," was brilliant. I'm still confused about feeling simultaneously irritated and saddened and shocked. Told only through broken alternating dialogue and thoughts of 3 different people, it provides a setting, a rushed morning feeling, an irritation of customer privilege, a build up of irritation, then a climax, and it all unravels. All from dialogue and thoughts gone on not more than 3 pages. Amazing. The third story, "Jane's Wife," is a bit longer, but equally devastating in its simplicity and ability to hone right in beyond the extraneous to the meat. "Golden State" was longer, written to describe the pure expansive, somewhat lonely, feel of L.A./California suburbs, about connection within this vastness of empty space. "Interstellar Space," "In the Red," "Flicker," and "Soldiers" were longer, and more emotionally raw and 'violent' in this rawness. Hard to describe, but they didn't resonate quite as much as the first 4 stories. And the last story, "Colnago Super," was long, and similar in feel to "Golden State," with a bit more freedom and speed interwoven.
]]> 36795976
In A Prize for Every Player, a man is nominated to run for president by the customers of a big box store, while he and his family do their weekly shopping. At a conference on genocide(s) in the title story, old friends rediscover themselves and one another - finding spiritual and physical comfort in ancient traditions. And in Hello Everybody and She Got Away, Homes revisits a Los Angeles family obsessed with the surfaces and frightened of what lives below.

In the nearly three decades since her seminal debut collection The Safety of Objects, Homes has been celebrated by readers and critics alike as one of our boldest and most original writers, acclaimed for her psychological accuracy and "satire so close to the truth it's terrifying" (Ali Smith). Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is a major new addition to her body of visionary, fearless, outrageously funny work.

Brother on Sunday --
Whose story is it, and why is it always on her mind? --
Hello everybody --
All is good except for the rain --
National cage bird show --
Your mother was a fish --
Last good time --
Be mine --
A prize for every player --
Omega point --
She got away]]> 304 A.M. Homes 0670025496 Anna 2 3.42 2018
author: A.M. Homes
name: Anna
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2018/08/01
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: lit-er-a-ture, short-story-collections, netgalley
review:

]]> 40228877 Are you living in a simulation?

If you aren’t now, you soon will be. The technology is fast approaching, and within our lifetimes the vast majority of humanity may be plugged into their own private worlds, living out dreams indistinguishable from reality.

It sounds like a paradise. But even paradise has its price.

Restricted Fantasies is a collection of short stories about lives lived inside and outside of virtual reality. The advent of simulated realities raises questions of philosophy and technology that drive at the core of our nature as humans—and in the tradition of classic sci-fi, the stories in this collection wrestle with these questions and with the shape of things to come.

You’ll meet a child protective services agent tasked with rescuing children being raised by Neo-Nazis in an illegal simulation of their own darkest fantasies.

You’ll meet a man who discovers the cheat code to our reality—and watch as it all goes horribly wrong.

You’ll go on a futuristic Rumspringa with an Amish woman who lives it up in virtual reality for a few years before deciding whether to go home to the last unplugged community on Earth.

You'll peek into the lives of virtual reality addicts, aliens, and mad billionaires.

And you’ll journey into Sim-Sing, a simulated prison with a very unpleasant jailer.

Whether you’re a fan of classic sci-fi or not, if you’ve ever wondered whether the things around you are real, whether The Matrix was just a movie, and where the line is between reality and fantasy, you’ll love this glimpse into a future that may yet come—and that may already be here.

Author Kevin Kneupper is an attorney and writer of various books, screenplays, and webcomics, including the bestselling They Who Fell series and Argonauts.
]]> 284 Kevin Kneupper Anna 4 3.88 2018
author: Kevin Kneupper
name: Anna
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/05
date added: 2019/01/07
shelves: a-bit-creepy, dark, short-story-collections, netgalley
review:
As described, this book of short stories reads delightfully and disturbingly like episodes of "Black Mirror" on Netflix. The difference with these is that they are all about altered realities via simulated universe/virtual reality scenarios. I was so impressed that one author could write so many varied-yet-well-written stories about a basically same device. While I do wish there were some variance from the VR scenario, they were good enough that I only grew a little weary by the last one or two stories. And maybe the best ones were at the first third of the book, but that's still pretty good for a collection of stories. Off you like this kind of tech sci fi, don't let the slightly self-published-looking cover away you from this sci fi gem (there are so many poorly written sci fi collections, I realize).
]]> 20949662 My Only Wife is a brilliant, haunting, and heartbreaking debut that explores themes of loss and love."�Largehearted Boy

A thief steals the air from a room. Children invent a nursery rhyme to make sense of their fate. A band of girls rot from the outside in. These characters stumble through joy and murder and confusion, only to survive and wait for the next catastrophe to arrive. Moments so brief and disturbing you can't afford to look away. Jac Jemc's affecting stories mine the territory between what is real and the stories we tell to create understanding.]]> 184 Jac Jemc 1936873532 Anna 4 short-story-collections
From “The Dark Spot� - “I had tried to turn the weekend into a science, to make it into a game I could learn the rules for, to escape the cliche of it being difficult to be home for the holidays. If you asked me who I loved most in the world, the people I would list were under that roof, but spending four days with their adult selves, with the spouses they’d chose and the children they’d wrought and the opinions they’d formed where curiosity once lived, was more than I could manage.
Alone in the furnace room, I thought of a person trying to remember a phone number while someone else shouted random numbers in their ear. I thought if trying to sync three clocks perfectly with only two hands. I thought of impossible pulses.
There are times I know I’m a part of something, even when I’m not actively adding to that thing. Like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, I can feel the other sections buzzing around me, and I know people can make sense of the words, because the light of the working parts is enough.�

From “Somebody Else’s� - “I refused to admit my behavior was not normal. The outside world and I were like cracked magnets. We had been one and the same, but we’d broken apart and could now do nothing but resist. Every time I thought about leaving my home, I wondered what could be waiting for me out there and never came up with an attractive enough answer. It wasn’t even fear. That’s what I keep telling myself.�

From “The Tackiness of Souls� - “Bobby isn’t interested because Minnie isn’t a conventional bombshell and she doesn’t have the confidence that must support strange beauty. Minnie isn’t interested because she’s talked to Bobby before and finds nothing beyond his jawbone appealing. There is no sexual tension. The jokes are lame on both sides.�

From “The Things Which Blind Us� - “I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone. A conundrum. ... At that point, I’d been confused for days, like trying to see through dense foliage. I hoped it was just the mescaline wearing off. When that effect faded, suddenly, random birds began falling from the sky every few minutes, and when I looked for them near the ground, they were nowhere.�

The last “story� was like a fun love poem, called “Let Me Be Your Tugboat King� - it opens with, “Listen, I’m ready for you to come right over here, darling, and dance with me. We’re pulling in the weight of what we’re waiting for. Dance it down for me. Let me see your sequins shimmer and shake.”]]> 3.64 2014
author: Jac Jemc
name: Anna
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/28
date added: 2018/10/28
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
Ranging from a single page, to several pages, the 42 stories that fill the pages of this collection are strange and poetic. Some of the stories were more prose poems than stories, but the collection is so packed and varied that one moves right into the next. It is clear that Jac Jemc is wordsmith of the highest order, whether or not I understand every word. I came to this collection after reading “The Grip of It� and needing more. I have “My Only Wife� to read next. Fair warning: if you seek a story that is traditional in its beginning, middle, and end, this collection is not going to be the one for you.

From “The Dark Spot� - “I had tried to turn the weekend into a science, to make it into a game I could learn the rules for, to escape the cliche of it being difficult to be home for the holidays. If you asked me who I loved most in the world, the people I would list were under that roof, but spending four days with their adult selves, with the spouses they’d chose and the children they’d wrought and the opinions they’d formed where curiosity once lived, was more than I could manage.
Alone in the furnace room, I thought of a person trying to remember a phone number while someone else shouted random numbers in their ear. I thought if trying to sync three clocks perfectly with only two hands. I thought of impossible pulses.
There are times I know I’m a part of something, even when I’m not actively adding to that thing. Like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, I can feel the other sections buzzing around me, and I know people can make sense of the words, because the light of the working parts is enough.�

From “Somebody Else’s� - “I refused to admit my behavior was not normal. The outside world and I were like cracked magnets. We had been one and the same, but we’d broken apart and could now do nothing but resist. Every time I thought about leaving my home, I wondered what could be waiting for me out there and never came up with an attractive enough answer. It wasn’t even fear. That’s what I keep telling myself.�

From “The Tackiness of Souls� - “Bobby isn’t interested because Minnie isn’t a conventional bombshell and she doesn’t have the confidence that must support strange beauty. Minnie isn’t interested because she’s talked to Bobby before and finds nothing beyond his jawbone appealing. There is no sexual tension. The jokes are lame on both sides.�

From “The Things Which Blind Us� - “I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone. A conundrum. ... At that point, I’d been confused for days, like trying to see through dense foliage. I hoped it was just the mescaline wearing off. When that effect faded, suddenly, random birds began falling from the sky every few minutes, and when I looked for them near the ground, they were nowhere.�

The last “story� was like a fun love poem, called “Let Me Be Your Tugboat King� - it opens with, “Listen, I’m ready for you to come right over here, darling, and dance with me. We’re pulling in the weight of what we’re waiting for. Dance it down for me. Let me see your sequins shimmer and shake.�
]]> 37821672 A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form.

At times raucously hilarious, at times charming and delightful, at times as solemn and mysterious as a pond at midnight, Deborah Eisenberg’s stories gently compel us to confront the most disturbing truths about ourselves—from our intimate lives as lovers, parents, and children, to our equally troubling roles as citizens on a violent, terrifying planet.

Each of the six stories in Your Duck is My Duck, her first collection since 2006, has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable but utterly unpredictable logic and her almost uncanny ability to conjure the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through her characters—a tormented woman whose face determines her destiny; a group of film actors shocked to read a book about their past; a privileged young man who unexpectedly falls into a love affair with a human rights worker caught up in an all-consuming quest that he doesn't understand.

In Eisenberg’s world, the forces of money, sex, and power cannot be escaped, and the force of history, whether confronted or denied, cannot be evaded. No one writes better about time, tragedy and grief, and the indifferent but beautiful universe around us.]]> 240 Deborah Eisenberg 0062688774 Anna 1 short-story-collections 3.59 2018
author: Deborah Eisenberg
name: Anna
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2018/10/12
date added: 2018/10/15
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
Unfortunately, this short story collection fell flat for me. There was one single story I thought was okay - "Merge." But the others just didn't connect for me. I think part of the issue was the length. A short story that is too long causes me to lose interest fairly quickly - this book-length volume only has 6 stories! They felt more like pieces of novellas than actual stories. Disappointing.
]]> 38480851 A major new anthology of great Japanese short stories introduced by Haruki Murakami.

This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story collection, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable practitioners writing today. Curated by Jay Rubin (who has himself freshly translated several of the stories) and introduced by Haruki Murakami this is a book which will be a revelation to many of its readers.

Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included - Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, Yoshimoto - but also many surprising new finds. From Tsushima Yuko's 'Flames' to Sawanishi Yuten's 'Filling Up with Sugar', from Hoshi Shin'ichi's 'Shoulder-Top Secretary' to Yoshimoto Banana's 'Bee Honey', The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty and comedy.]]> 774 Jay Rubin 014139563X Anna 0 4.14 2018
author: Jay Rubin
name: Anna
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/09/09
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 17934654 Karate Chop, Dorthe Nors's acclaimed story collection, is the debut book in the collaboration between Graywolf Press and A Public Space. These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.]]> 104 Dorthe Nors 1555976654 Anna 4 short-story-collections 3.66 2008
author: Dorthe Nors
name: Anna
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/29
date added: 2018/01/05
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
These stories are very short, but very succinct, often piercing, perceptive, and sharp. Because they're so short, they require a certain kind of concentrated attention to truly appreciate, but once you're in the groove, you slip right through them.
]]> 34637340 A slyly political collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles.

Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcon's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In -The Thousands, - people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in -The Bridge.- A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in -The Ballad of Rocky Rontal.- And in the tour de force novella, -The Auroras-, a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

The thousands --
The ballad of Rocky Rontal --
The king is always above the people --
Abraham Lincoln has been shot --
The provincials --
Extinct anatomies --
RepĂşblica and Grau --
The bridge --
The lord rides a swift cloud --
The auroras]]> 256 Daniel AlarcĂłn 1594631727 Anna 0 3.48 2009
author: Daniel AlarcĂłn
name: Anna
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/11/03
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections, lit-er-a-ture
review:

]]> 33844793 The first collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster� to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail� (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,� a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist.

Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

Complainers --
Air mail --
Baster --
Early music --
Timeshare --
Find the bad guy --
The oracular vulva --
Capricious gardens --
Great experiment --
Fresh complaint]]> 285 Jeffrey Eugenides 0374203067 Anna 0 3.59 2017
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Anna
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/10/31
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 28957353 Home Alone seems like a playground romp. An antique bookseller and a mob enforcer join forces to retrieve the Atlas of Hell. Postapocalyptic survivors cannot decide which is worse: demon women haunting the skies or maddened extremists patrolling the earth.

In this chilling twenty-first-century companion to the cult classic Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Ellen Datlow again proves herself the most masterful editor of the genre. She has mined the breadth and depth of ten years of terror, collecting superlative works of established masters and scene-stealing newcomers alike.


“Introduction� Ellen Datlow
“Shallaballah� Mark Samuels
“Sob In The Silence� Gene Wolfe
“Our Turn Too Will One Day Come� Brian Hodge
“Dead Sea Fruit� Kaaron Warren
“Closet Dreams� Lisa Tuttle
“Spectral Evidence� Gemma Files
“Hushabye� Simon Bestwick
“Very Low-Flying Aircraft� Nicholas Royle
“The Goosle� Margo Lanagan
“The Clay Party� Steve Duffy
“Strappado� Laird Barron
“Lonegan’s Luck� Stephen Graham Jones
“Mr. Pigsny� Reggie Oliver
“At Night, When the Demons Come� Ray Cluley
“Was She Wicked? Was She Good?� M. Rickert
“The Shallows� John Langan
“Little Pig� Anna Taborska
“Omphalos� Livia Llewellyn
“How We Escaped Our Certain Fate� Dan Chaon
“That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love� Robert Shearman
“Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)� Caitlín R. Kiernan
“Shay Corsham Worsted� Garth Nix
“The Atlas of Hell� Nathan Ballingrud
“Ambitious Boys Like You� Richard Kadrey]]> 422 Ellen Datlow 1616962321 Anna 0 3.55 2016
author: Ellen Datlow
name: Anna
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/08/31
shelves: to-read, a-bit-creepy, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 31450925
Forced to navigate these bizarre scenarios, the characters search for solutions to the problem of how to survive in an irrational, infinitely strange world. In dystopias that are exaggerated versions of the world in which we live, these characters strive for intimacy and struggle to resolve their fraught relationships with each other, with themselves, and with their place in the natural world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a rowdy, moody crew of college students who resolve the energy crisis, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers--and we see that no one is quite who they appear.]]> 224 Helen Phillips 1250132185 Anna 3 3.56 2016
author: Helen Phillips
name: Anna
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2017/08/15
date added: 2017/08/15
shelves: short-story-collections, sci-fi-ness
review:
The stories are hit or miss. Some are really great - some didn't really work for me. The good ones give you a "Black Mirror" (tv show) vibe.
]]> 22929586 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.]]> 406 Lucia Berlin 0374202397 Anna 4 short-story-collections
Some excerpts I liked:

Angel's Laundromat
p. 3 "For months, at Angel's, the Indian and I did not speak to each other, but we sat next to each other in connected yellow plastic chairs, like at airports. they skidded in the ripped linoleum and the sound hurt your teeth.
He used to sit there sipping Jim Beam, looking at my hands. Not directly, but in to the mirror across from us, above the Speed Queen washers."

Point of View
p. 53 "I'm having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness."

Carpe Diem
p. 106 "Most of the time I feel all right about getting old. Some things give me a pang, like skaters. How free they seem, long legs gliding, hair streaming back. Other things throw me into a panic, like BART doors. A long wait before the doors open, after the train comes to a stop. Not very long, but it's too long. There's no time.
And laundromats. But they were a problem even when I was young. Just too long, even the Speed Queens. Your entire life has time to flash before your eyes while you sit there, a drowner."

Toda Luna, Todo Ano
p. 112 "In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives/ at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre."

Grief
p. 179-180 "The people who were content with each other spoke as little as those who bristled with resentment or boredom; it was the rhythm of their speech that differed, like a lazy tennis ball batted back and forth or the quick swattings of a fly."

B.F. and Me
p. 377 "B.F. was holding on to the wall and to the banister, gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside, catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away."

Wait a Minute
p. 380 "Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in the surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid restlessness of time."]]> 4.22 2015
author: Lucia Berlin
name: Anna
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/15
date added: 2017/06/07
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
A great collection, all really revolving around death, alcoholism, and a kind of untethered feeling. After reading the author bio at the end it's clear that much of the fodder for her stories comes from real life which is ... well ... intense. A very vibrant, descriptive style of writing - which I LOVE. She hones in on the "somethingness" of something with succinct wording and clipped phrases. Like the aimless sadness of Sundays; what happens to time when someone dies, and our awareness of death; what makes an interaction memorable even in its simplicity. Amazed I never read this sooner!

Some excerpts I liked:

Angel's Laundromat
p. 3 "For months, at Angel's, the Indian and I did not speak to each other, but we sat next to each other in connected yellow plastic chairs, like at airports. they skidded in the ripped linoleum and the sound hurt your teeth.
He used to sit there sipping Jim Beam, looking at my hands. Not directly, but in to the mirror across from us, above the Speed Queen washers."

Point of View
p. 53 "I'm having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness."

Carpe Diem
p. 106 "Most of the time I feel all right about getting old. Some things give me a pang, like skaters. How free they seem, long legs gliding, hair streaming back. Other things throw me into a panic, like BART doors. A long wait before the doors open, after the train comes to a stop. Not very long, but it's too long. There's no time.
And laundromats. But they were a problem even when I was young. Just too long, even the Speed Queens. Your entire life has time to flash before your eyes while you sit there, a drowner."

Toda Luna, Todo Ano
p. 112 "In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives/ at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre."

Grief
p. 179-180 "The people who were content with each other spoke as little as those who bristled with resentment or boredom; it was the rhythm of their speech that differed, like a lazy tennis ball batted back and forth or the quick swattings of a fly."

B.F. and Me
p. 377 "B.F. was holding on to the wall and to the banister, gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside, catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away."

Wait a Minute
p. 380 "Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in the surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid restlessness of time."
]]> 6670287 Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction� (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.]]> 733 Lydia Davis 0374270600 Anna 0 4.26 2009
author: Lydia Davis
name: Anna
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/05/15
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 25716567
In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad simultaneously skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance, and delivers a tender and moving depiction of a lovably difficult young woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform. As caustically funny as it is heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction.]]> 212 Mona Awad 0143194798 Anna 4 short-story-collections 3.09 2016
author: Mona Awad
name: Anna
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/04/20
date added: 2017/04/20
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
This was a great collection of connected short stories about a very difficult topic. While some people feel confident, connected to their bodies, powerful, and happy, regardless of their size, definitely not all women feel this way, and this collection is really a zoom-in on what that's like over the course of a life. It covers childhood and teenage years as a heavy person, complete with a heavy, weight-conscious mother and a slightly slimmer, more confident friend; relationships as an adult and eventual marriage; weight loss and the effects of a "new" body on self image those around her; and the effects of divorce and death of parents and beginning to think differently about her body. There are those of us who feel like our bodies should be constantly apologized for, even after physical weight is shed, and we always carry a psychological weight around. This psychological weight really messes with our lives, even when we feel great. There are those of us who feel that eating in front of others is embarrassing, no matter our size - perhaps it goes with the unspoken constant apology of our physical selves. In any case, this book covers all of this, and more, and I think it's important no matter your size or confidence levels.
]]> 15798118
Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Step right up and prepare to be dazzled by this delightful debut from Claire Battershill, winner of the CBC Literary Award, co-winner of theĚý Canadian Authors Association’s Emerging Writer Award, and finalist for the inaugural PEN International/New Voices Award. As they transport us from a crowded airport departure lounge to the stillness of the British Museum, and from the spectacle of the Winter Olympics to the modesty of a local Miniatureland, these radiant stories explore the often surprising things we’re willing to do for love and human connection. Fed up with his long history of failed blind dates, a shy English bureaucrat gives himself thirty-one days to find love on the Internet. A father buys his daughter a blue plastic tent to ready her for outdoor adventure, but neither is prepared when the tent becomes a neighbourhood sensation. The world of competitive sports provides the backdrop for a young man’s coming of age in “Two-Man A Love Story.â€� And in the award-winning title story, the granddaughter of a former circus performer (who played the role of a man-wrestling bear) finds herself grappling with the capriciousness of life and love.

At once witty, tender-hearted, and profound, these stories are filled with a memorable and all-too-human cast of characters on the cusp of enormous change � whether they’re ready or not. Written in spare yet startling language, Circus is a beautiful reminder that sometimes everyday life can be the greatest show on Earth.]]> 224 Claire Battershill 0771012780 Anna 0 3.56 2014
author: Claire Battershill
name: Anna
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/04/17
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 13425393
Soon after Sh*t My Dad Says began to take off, comic writer Justin Halpern decided to propose to his then girlfriend. But before doing so, he asked his dad's advice, which was very, very simple (and surprisingly clean): "Just take a day to think about it." This book is that day. Crossing the warmth of The Wonder Years with the candour and observational humour of David Sedaris, this follow-up to the hottest comedy debut of last year is a hilarious, toe-curlingly true book about life, and love.]]> 4 Justin Halpern 0062123742 Anna 3 3.75 2012
author: Justin Halpern
name: Anna
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/10/11
shelves: memoir, short-story-collections
review:
Pretty good - not amazing, but has several funny moments and moves the time along!
]]> 24611893 Little Red Riding Hood, the gingerbread house that lures Hansel and Gretel, the beauty asleep in her castle—these fables represent some of our deepest, most primeval fears and satisfy our longing for good to win out over evil (preferably in the most gruesome way possible).

In this captivating new collection, critically acclaimed author Jean Thompson takes the classic fairy tale and brings it into the modern age with stories that capture the magic and horror in everyday life. The downtrodden prevail, appearances deceive, and humility and virtue triumph in The Witch, as lost children try to find their way home, adults cursed by past unspeakable acts are fated to experience their own horror in the present, and true love—or is it enchantment?—conquers all.

The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told is a haunting and deeply entertaining collection, showcasing the inimitable Thompson at the height of her storytelling prowess.

The witch --
Inamorata --
Candy --
Faith --
Three --
The curse --
Your secret's safe with me --
Prince]]> 272 Jean Thompson 0147516986 Anna 0 3.16 2014
author: Jean Thompson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/10/06
shelves: to-read, creative-re-tellings, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 22500611 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction following Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things--which includes a never-before published American Gods story, "Black Dog," written exclusively for this volume.

In this new anthology, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath. Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013--as well "Black Dog," a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.

Trigger Warning explores the masks we all wear and the people we are beneath them to reveal our vulnerabilities and our truest selves. Here is a rich cornucopia of horror and ghosts stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry that explore the realm of experience and emotion. In "Adventure Story"--a thematic companion to The Ocean at the End of the Lane--Gaiman ponders death and the way people take their stories with them when they die. His social media experience "A Calendar of Tales" are short takes inspired by replies to fan tweets about the months of the year--stories of pirates and the March winds, an igloo made of books, and a Mother's Day card that portends disturbances in the universe. Gaiman offers his own ingenious spin on Sherlock Holmes in his award-nominated mystery tale "The Case of Death and Honey". And "Click-Clack the Rattlebag" explains the creaks and clatter we hear when we're all alone in the darkness.

A sophisticated writer whose creative genius is unparalleled, Gaiman entrances with his literary alchemy, transporting us deep into the realm of imagination, where the fantastical becomes real and the everyday incandescent. Full of wonder and terror, surprises and amusements, Trigger Warning is a treasury of delights that engage the mind, stir the heart, and shake the soul from one of the most unique and popular literary artists of our day.]]> 368 Neil Gaiman 0062330292 Anna 2 4.00 2015
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Anna
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2016/08/27
date added: 2016/08/27
shelves: a-bit-creepy, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:
This was an okay collection of stories. I listened to this book, and sometimes with short stories on audio it's difficult to find the distinction between stories, and I found that to be the case with many of these. There just weren't many that stuck out to me. The Dr. Who episode was great, and I'm pretty sure I saw that one, and could just exactly picture David Tennant as Doctor Who speaking all his lines. There were several that just didn't land at all, as often happens with short story collections (the "Click Clack Rattlebag" story had so much 'Babaganook'-potential, but just ended up being pretty boring). I think the best story was probably the last one with Shadow Moon in a small creepy town. Perhaps I long stories work better for Gaiman that short ones -- I have too many Shirly-Jackson-expectations when it comes to creepy short story collections, and that's more my issue than Gaiman's, I fully realize. (Just looked up the last story, and found that it's the foundation for American Gods, which I guess I might have to try and read now, so that's something!). I also enjoyed the fairy tale sort of story, with Maleficent of the Sleeping Beauty tales
]]> 4138 Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview—a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing.]]> 304 David Sedaris Anna 4 4.10 1997
author: David Sedaris
name: Anna
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2016/04/07
date added: 2016/04/07
shelves: hilarity, short-story-collections, memoir
review:

]]> 25734319 A sharp, funny, delightfully unhinged collection of stories set in the dark world of domesticity, American Housewife features murderous ladies who lunch, celebrity treasure hunters, and the best bra fitter south of the Mason Dixon line.

Meet the women of American Housewife: they wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam, from the gallery opening of a tinfoil artist to the fitting room of a legendary lingerie shop. Vicious, fresh, and nutty as a poisoned Goo Goo Cluster, American Housewife is an uproarious, pointed commentary on womanhood.]]> 3 Helen Ellis 0399565698 Anna 2 short-story-collections 3.29 2016
author: Helen Ellis
name: Anna
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2016/04/07
date added: 2016/04/07
shelves: short-story-collections
review:
Sharp and edged are probably the best words I can think of to describe this collection. Some stories are better than others, some are too tech-y, some are too sci-fi ... just didn't feel like a grounded "set" really. I should note that I listened to the audiobook version of this collection, and feel like something was lost there, being given a voice with various emphases and tones that I might have liked better had I read it to myself.
]]> 4136 Us and Them); the difficulties of explaining the Easter Bunny to the French (Jesus Shaves); what to do when you've been locked out in a snowstorm (Let It Snow); the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations (Six to Eight Black Men); what Halloween at the medical examiner's looks like (The Monster Mash); and a barnyard secret Santa scheme gone awry (Cow and Turkey).]]> 176 David Sedaris 0316191299 Anna 4 3.92 1997
author: David Sedaris
name: Anna
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2016/04/05
date added: 2016/04/06
shelves: hilarity, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 4143 National Enquirer, Sedaris’s collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves.

David Sedaris made his debut on NPR’s Morning Edition with “SantaLand Diaries�, recounting his strange-but-true experiences as an elf at Macy’s, and soon became one of the show’s most popular commentators. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behavior. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life, and anything can happen.

Parade --
Music for lovers --
The last you'll hear from me --
My manuscript --
Firestone --
We get along --
Glen's homophobia newsletter vol. 3, no. 2 --
Don's story --
Season's greeting to our friends and family!!! --
Jamboree --
After Malison --
Barrel fever --
Diary of a smoker --
Giantess --
The curly kind --
SantaLand diaries]]> 196 David Sedaris 0316779423 Anna 3 3.80 1994
author: David Sedaris
name: Anna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2016/04/04
date added: 2016/04/04
shelves: short-story-collections, hilarity
review:

]]> 23848124 The Hours. A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar.

In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away, the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.

Re-imagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.]]> 134 Michael Cunningham 0374290253 Anna 0 3.66 2015
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Anna
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/10/30
shelves: to-read, creative-re-tellings, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 17568818 Nine Months and Baby comes a daring new collection that seethes with alienation, lust and rage. Bomer takes us from hospitals, halfway houses, and alleyways, to boarding schools and Park Avenue penthouses, exploring the complex relationships girls have with their bodies, with other girls, and with boys.ĚýThe title novella tracks the ins and outs of an outsider’s life: her childhood obesity and kinky sex life, her toxic relationships, whether familial or erotic, and her various disappearing acts, of body and mind.]]> 240 Paula Bomer 1616953098 Anna 3 3.51 2013
author: Paula Bomer
name: Anna
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/09/01
shelves: short-story-collections, dark, heavy-like-whoa
review:

]]> 22237215 Single, Carefree, Mellow is that rare and wonderful thing: a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.

In “Cranberry Relish� Josie’s ex—a man she met on Facebook—has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In “Blue Heron Bridge� Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she’s sleeping with her running partner. And in “The Rhett Butlers� a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.

In snappy, glittering prose that is both utterly hilarious and achingly poignant, Katherine Heiny chronicles the ways in which we are unfaithful to each other, both willfully and unwittingly. Maya, who appears in the title story and again in various states of love, forms the spine of this linked collection, and shows us through her moments of pleasure, loss, deceit, and kindness just how fickle the human heart can be.]]> 221 Katherine Heiny 0385353634 Anna 4 3.52 2015
author: Katherine Heiny
name: Anna
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/29
date added: 2015/08/31
shelves: contemplative, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 23398781 A fresh, honest, and darkly funny debut collection about family, friends, and lovers, and the flaws that make us most human.

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves.
Ěý
In “Desert Hearts,� a woman takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embark on the law career she pursued only for the sake of her father. In “Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love,� a woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit bull—and herself—to the neurotic foreign fling who won’t decamp from her apartment. In “How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?� a daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother to resell there, wondering whether her personal mission—to come out—is worth the same effort. And in “Barbara the Slut,� a young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex navigates her high school’s toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes.
Ěý
With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.]]> 272 Lauren Holmes 1594633789 Anna 3 3.54 2014
author: Lauren Holmes
name: Anna
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/24
date added: 2015/08/25
shelves: short-story-collections, feminist
review:

]]> 24044142
Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves�Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.]]> 382 China Miéville 110188472X Anna 0 3.63 2009
author: China Miéville
name: Anna
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/21
shelves: to-read, a-bit-creepy, dark, post-apocalyptic-futuristic, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 23746546 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR � From the renowned author of “The Lottery� and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings.

Features “Family Treasures,� nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.

As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.

Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.

For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.

This volume includes a foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.]]> 448 Shirley Jackson 0812997662 Anna 0 4.08 2015
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Anna
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/08/01
shelves: pleasantly-strange, to-read, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 17262213
Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange� ( People ), “richly imagined and bittersweet� ( Vanity Fair ), and “full of provocative ideas� ( The Boston Globe ). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities� ( The Wall Street Journal ).

In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.

In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.]]> 222 Aimee Bender 0385534892 Anna 4 3.83 2013
author: Aimee Bender
name: Anna
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/21
date added: 2015/02/21
shelves: pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 22543938
Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies.

Here, too, are stories culled from religion and Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream.

Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.]]> 304 Steven Millhauser 0385351593 Anna 0 3.58 2015
author: Steven Millhauser
name: Anna
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/02/11
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections, pleasantly-strange
review:

]]> 219562 448 Richard Christian Matheson 1887368248 Anna 0 3.79 2000
author: Richard Christian Matheson
name: Anna
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/01/05
shelves: back-and-forth-reading, short-story-collections, utopias-dystopias, dark, horror, pleasantly-strange, post-apocalyptic-futuristic, to-read
review:

]]> 20763852 The Wilds. In these genre-bending stories, teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, Elliott’s language-driven fiction uses outlandish tropes to capture poignant moments in her humble characters� lives. Without abandoning the tenets of classic storytelling, Elliott revels in lush lyricism, dark humor, and experimental play.
]]> 370 Julia Elliott 1935639927 Anna 0 3.80 2014
author: Julia Elliott
name: Anna
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/10/17
shelves: to-read, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 22429563
In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle � and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.]]> 288 Margaret Atwood 1408857162 Anna 0 3.96 2014
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Anna
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/10/09
shelves: to-read, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 22271826 112 Ron Koertge 1597095443 Anna 0 3.90 2014
author: Ron Koertge
name: Anna
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/10/07
shelves: to-read, pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:

]]> 13641208 Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

In the taut opening, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antique store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders' signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov's dictum that art should "prepare us for tenderness."]]> 251 George Saunders 0812993802 Anna 4 3.98 2013
author: George Saunders
name: Anna
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2014/10/07
date added: 2014/10/07
shelves: pleasantly-strange, short-story-collections
review:
A good set of short stories with a pleasant undercurrent of "strange" ...
]]> 20563988
Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road on a Greek island, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.]]> 242 Hilary Mantel Anna 0 3.42 2014
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Anna
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/09/29
shelves: short-story-collections, to-read
review:

]]> 11012 I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne.' James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation in Ireland'.

Joyce's aim was to tell the truth � to create a work of art that would reflect life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of the country.

Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners � a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled � and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.]]> 352 James Joyce Anna 0 3.86 1914
author: James Joyce
name: Anna
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1914
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/09/02
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections, canonical-should-reads
review:

]]>