Here’s one from the archives today:
The Troll (A Tale Told Collectively)
“Because Aunt Margit knows that the stories must be told.”
Tag: short story glory
I like a Gershwin tune; how about you?
So it turns out there’s a lot of stuff I like. I like our new dishwasher and how it sings a happy song when it’s done–oh, I am unreasonably gleeful about that dishwasher. I like the fact that strawberries are in season. But that’s not why I’m doing these round-up posts–I’m doing an every-so-often post of short stories I’ve read and liked, that you might like too. Or you can link things you’ve liked in the comments! Up to you.
Two of these are not short stories. One is a project–my friend Hanne is doing a crowdfunded food and domestic thought project that should be interesting. I subscribed to the last round of A Girl’s Gotta Eat, and it was full of recipe and food essay goodness. The other is a poem: a May poem my friend Peg wrote.
Okay, but on with the short stories:
Monkey King, Faerie Queen, by Zen Cho (in Kaleidotrope)
The Snake-Oil Salesman and the Prophet’s Head, by Shannon Peavey (in BCS)
Remembery Day, by Sarah Pinsker (in Apex)
Sun’s East, Moon’s West, by Merrie Haskell (in Lightspeed)
Rounding up
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’ve been linking to more short stories I’ve enjoyed lately. Or maybe not; Twitter is an ever-flowing stream, easy for individual Tweets to merge into the shuffle. But even if you hadn’t noticed, I had. This is deliberate.
There are lots of short stories out there. Lots. Whether you’re invested in the awards a genre has to give or not, short stories are almost as easy as Tweets to lose in the shuffle. I’d been setting my standards wayyyy too high on talking about short stories, essentially only bringing them up if they were life-changing, mind-blowing, THE VERY BEST OF MY LIFE. But the problem is that Octavia Butler doesn’t write short stories any more, and also I’m not 20 any more, so…other writers who write good, interesting stories still deserve to have their work read and discussed. So I’m going with that instead, and I’m going to try to remember not only to Tweet about stories in the moment but to round up those links from time to time in a more permanent location.
Here’s what I recommended lately:
The Ways of Walls and Words, by Sabrina Vourvoulias (Tor.com).
The Migratory Pattern of Dancers, by Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus).
A Beautiful Memory, by Shannon Peavey (Apex).
City of Salt, by Arkady Martine (Strange Horizons).
The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, by Usman Malik (Tor.com).
You’ll notice, if you look, that Katherine Sparrow’s story is from a few years back. That’s because my main focus is not to get people awards (although, hey, if the people who vote on awards like stuff I like, lovely). It’s to get people and stories together. I’m not pretending that I read everything–even the stuff I mean to keep up on, I often haven’t yet. So go ahead and recommend things you like in the comments, or talk about the stories, or both. Yes, even if it’s the same issue of a magazine as a story I’ve already linked to–I am rarely systematic about these things, so not mentioning something doesn’t mean that I have JUDGED IT UNWORTHY DOOM DOOM DESPAIR. I just…want to be louder about liking the things I like.