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Short fiction recs! June--August 2026

  Very late, but here are some things I loved and read this past summer. Novelettes “The City in White” by Diana Dima in The Deadlands Magazine I’m awake when the quiet of the apartment—radiators whistling and window frames creaking and Zoe’s soft snoring next door—turns into the quiet before snowfall. The space between sounds swells, heavy and soft, until I can barely breathe for pressure, and there’s a thrumming in my ears that grows and grows. The curtains sway and it’s coming for me: the night sky hanging low, silvery grey, the outside flooding in, the creeping cold. Silently, I slip into the City.   A gorgeous, aching story of family, loss, political repression and revolution, and a wintry city of white. Two Romanian sisters, Lia and Zoe, have moved to the city where they lost their parents to political violence years ago. Zoe resents the move; she is too young to remember their parents, and feels no connection to the city where they once lived. It’s Lia who re...
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Quote: From The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (translation by Royall Tyler)

  “Over soft, layered white gowns he had on only a dress cloak, unlaced at the neck, and lying there in the lamplight against a pillar, he looked so beautiful that one could have wished him a woman.” --The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (Penguin Classic Edition, translation by Royall Tyler)
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Review: An Impossibility of Crows by Kirsten Kaschock

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My Locus Magazine book review from July is now available online and free to read! An Impossibility of Crows by Kirsten Kaschock is a mesmerizing Gothic science-fiction horror about a troubled chemist who decides to breed a crow as a large as a horse (and succeeds). You can find the full review here.  
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Short fiction recs! April--May 2026

  Some stories I read and loved from this spring. Selections from Weird Horror Magazine Issue 12 My last round-up featured two stories from this issue of Weird Horror. For this current round-up, I finished reading the issue and have selected three more. Weird Horror lives up to its name with extremely weird, unsettling stories.   “A View from the Window” by Rory Say Laughter from outside sends Mona up from her desk and across the room. She feels the blood in her face grow warm. How often has she told Caleb he’s not to go out to the yard by himself? She has her hand on the window, ready to shout, when all at once her thoughts go blank.   Two boys stand in the yard below, her son and someone else.   A tiny, just-over flash length piece about the fears of motherhood, of losing one’s child. The horror of not knowing if one’s child has actually been lost or not. Primal fears and horror are packed into this strange, unsettling piece.     ...
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Review of SL Huang's The Language of Liars now free to read on the Locus website

  My review of SL Huang’s latest novella, The Language of Liars , is now online and free to read at Locus Magazine!
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Updates: I'm a Locus book reviewer! And Ignyte finalist! And more!

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  Some updates: (1) I’m delighted to say that I am now a book reviewer for Locus Magazine ! My first review appeared in the May 2026 issue, for S.L. Huang's brilliant novella, The Language of Liars. It's about an adorably nerdy (and naive) linguist who infiltrates a mysterious alien race to try to understand their secrets. It's a tautly plotted spy-thriller mystery, and also a sharp and devastating meditation on exploitation, greed, and the power of language.  Here's a screenshot of part of my review below! You can buy the full issue here . Book and short story reviews eventually appear online some time after print publication. I'm delighted to be writing for such a storied publication, the trade journal of the science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction field. I'm also delighted that one of my own stories, "Lotus Dew for the Emperor's Tea," got a shout-out from short fiction reviewer Maria Haskins in her column in the same issue.  (2) Dovetai...
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Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

  Point #1: Does the world need another book review of Project Hail Mary ? No, but you're getting one anyway (adapted slightly from the Goodreads review I posted back in April)  Point #2: I loved the movie. Go see it.    Someone on social media complained that this book is “80% math equations.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the protagonist does spend a lot of time math-ing. I’ve seen people complain that the book is all “science” at the expense of character and literary quality. Yes, there’s loads of science here, and yes, Andy Weir is never going to win acclaim for lyrical prose. In fact, this book is mostly structured as a series of escalating science puzzles to be solved in ingenious ways. Some people will be annoyed by that. Another type of person will eat it up. Turns out I’m the type of person who eats this up. By now, you've probably heard the plot basics of this best seller and basis for the blockbuster movie of the same name. Something is dimm...
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