It's a Jumble

I have a new story out today. “The Breaking” appears in Issue 13 of Mithila Review, alongside stories and poems from so many wonderful writers.
“The Breaking”is an apocalypse-story that, yes, feels weirdly resonant in these current times, in ways that I certainly didn’t anticipate when I wrote it a year ago. There is no virus, no plague, in my story. But it’s about people who refuse to see what’s in front of them, about those who won’t hear what is clear to others. It’s about an unbridgeable gap in perceptions, one that I’ve felt since fall 2015 in my country. And “The Breaking” is also about family. It’s about the gap between generations, and the care-taking that occurs within families, and the responsibility a sister feels for her brother.
I also mention food in the story, because I almost always mention food! This story stars two Thai-American siblings and is one of the rare instances in which I’ve explicitly written Thai-American characters. The Thai-style omelet, khai jiao, is feat…

These are strange times, to put it mildly.
Again and again on Twitter I see people posting something along these lines: In these times of social distancing/quarantine/lock down, so many of us are streaming movies/television, listening to music, and reading books to get though the day. Don’t ever say again that art is useless.
Some of the art I’ve been consuming:
TV
I remain obsessed with the Chinese fantasy drama The Untamed (which I wrote about at the end of my last post here). I am still losing myself in this rapturous, epic love story; still watching fanvids, still swooning over the beauty of this show and grieving over the terrible losses the characters endure. If you want to be swept into another world, into other lives, to feel intensely and cry over problems that are not your own—this is the show for you.
Music
I’d never paid much attention to K-pop, but when BTS released their latest album, Map of the Soul:7, I clicked on the performance music video of their song “On,” out of cur…

It’s the end of February, and I am only now writing up my recs for December and January. It seems that I’m always struggling to stay atop the flood of great short fiction being published these days, but that feeling was particularly strong this winter. I missed a lot these few months, preoccupied with other things. But here’s a sample of some lovely short stories (and more!) that I did find.
Augur Magazine
Augur Magazine has quickly become one of my favorite publications. This magazine offers dreamy, gorgeous fiction and poetry that plays in a liminal space between the “literary” and speculative fiction genres. Issue 2.3 (the latest as of this post) is particularly strong, and although I’ve selected only two stories here, the entire issue is well worth reading. 
“Remembrance of Worlds Past” by Andrew Wilmot in issue 2.3
One day a new planet appears on the edge of the solar system, a planet that’s twice the mass of Jupiter but moves through other planets, asteroids, and debris like a ghost…

It's nearly the end of December, and I'm only now writing up this post. I binge read books this fall, and read less short fiction than usual. But here's some of what I did read, and love, in October and November.
Magic, beauty, gentleness, and love
"The Sloppy Mathematics of Half-Ghosts" by Charles Payseur in Strange Horizons
Aboard the ghost ship Nine Lives there are the living, the dead, and a great many cats.
This is a story that lives up to its name, and presents a world like none I've seen before: a weird, wild, wonderful world of ships that sail between the stars, powered by ghost-passengers and crewed by both humans and cats. It's a rollicking story of a race to ferry a dead Emperor to paradise, with wishes (wishes for anything!) as the prize. It's the story of Jourdain, a half-ghost haunted by trauma. And it's a story, ultimately, of joy and beauty, told amidst dazzling world-building.
“The Boy on the Roof” by Francesca Forrest at Fireside
In…