It's a Jumble

I have a new story out today! "The Shadow Catchers" is a dark fantasy about a lake full of shadows, and the children who catch them. It marks my fifth appearance in The Future Fire, and this month's lineup is filled with wonderful writers I know. I'm very pleased to appear alongside them.
You can find my story here And the full issue here 

I normally post these short fiction recommendations on a bimonthly basis, but--gestures helplessly at the world around us now--I found my focus a bit lacking earlier this spring, and didn't get as much reading done as usual. Last month was a bit better, and as a bonus you get a longer rec list covering the last three months.


Fantastical worlds and alternate realities in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
“The Ordeal” by M. Bennardo
His father had told him of Alpinia’s trials by ordeal, but he had thought they must have certainly disappeared with so many other superstitious customs in so many other places at the dawning of the rational twentieth century.
In his work, Bennardo has often used fantastical worlds and situations to explore serious philosophical and ethical questions. In this latest story, he spins an alternate-history story of a young American man on his Grand Tour of Europe. While passing through the (fictitious) country of Alpinia to visit his father’s friend, the Grand Duke, young …

For a number of years now, R.B. Lemberg has been exploring in stories and poems a magical world known as Birdverse. This is a richly textured world where multiple cultures coexist and interact; it’s a world of deserts and traders, of weavers and scholars and magic-workers. There are flying carpets and fallen stars, assassins and tyrants and powerful sorcerers. There are also people without magic, who are no less important. In this complex world, there are a multitude of family structures and customs and beliefs, yet all are united in their belief in a deity known as Bird.
The Four Profound Weaves is Lemberg’s first printed book in the Birdverse universe. It revisits characters that appear in an earlier novelette, the Nebula Award-nominated “Grandmother-Nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds,” and takes place about a month after the events of that story, but a reader does not need knowledge of that previous story to understand and appreciate The Four Profound Weaves. This is a book that can stand …

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/lockdown, 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 curi…

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…