It's a Jumble

  "I don’t want to reject confessional writing outright, I wrote to you, but it’s a tricky mode for works received as black or feminist texts. . . I’m less interested in “what happened to you” than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, untethered emotion, that’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric discharge.”     --Sofia Samatar, from Opacities

  Kristin Ten expertly entwines humor and dread in this collection of strange, unsettling stories. Paper dolls come to life and take revenge; a computer game teaches a strange, possibly demonic language; a water dragon is entrapped by a cheating card player, and a girls’ volleyball team is caught in a horrifying cult dynamic. Children’s games and folklore form the basis of many of these stories; this book is stepped in the 90s’ milieu. In Ten’s hands, nostalgia takes a sideways turn: the familiar and mundane are just slightly askew, or recast in a dramatically new light. A childhood camp legend comes to life in “Bunny Ears” and childhood games become the basis for officially approved methods of predicting love in “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod.” Ten’s stories explore issues of identity and immigration. Most of all, they examine the experience of girlhood and womanhood in the 90s and beyond: the fierce adolescent need to belong, the anxie...

  This reading round-up is shorter than usual, as I admit that my short fiction reading fell off a cliff these last two months, due to travel and various distractions. Nevertheless, here are seven stories I did read and love.   “The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home” by Renan Bernardo in Reactor   Let me be straight: I’m Adelaide, a space traveler, and I’m a ghost. It took me a while to whisper those words to my ectoplasmic self in the mirror and convince myself of that, so take your time. I wouldn’t believe it easily, were I you. I’m dead and forced to fluster about in the  Sopinha de Feijão , my lovely freighter, previously bound for a moon in the Kepler-32 system but now going back to Earth.   This story is fully as fun as its title suggests. Adelaide is the captain of a space cargo ship. Her dream, after saving up from numerous cargo runs, is to build a street market on a moon in honor of her beloved grandmoth...

  The year’s not yet over, but it’s that time when writers begin posting about their award-eligible work. This year I had five new original short stories published. I also had my first collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists , published by Interstellar Flight press!   New Short Stories   “Sweetest” (dark fantasy/horror, 6640 words) in The House of Illusionists and Other Stories . Published November 2025 (Available from Amazon and other outlets. More book info at the bottom of this post)   A story about clowns in a candy shop. Seriously creepy clowns in a candy shop. It’s also about hunger, loss, old-fashioned treats, shadow-children, and truths that may be too much to bear. This story is original to The House of Illusionists , and I’m so pleased to hear from many readers that it’s one of their favorites in the collection.     “The Space Roads” (science fiction/horror, 3174 words) in  Space Horrors: An Anthology of Horro...

  It's out!! My debut collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists , is officially out in the world! It's available at Amazon , Indiebound , Barnes and Noble online , and direct from publisher .  You can go to my personal dedicated book page for more information (including advance praise and interviews). You can also visit the official publisher website here. 

 Yet we continue to live despite all our suffering --from As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, by the anonymous Heian-era woman known now as "Lady Sarashina," Penguin Classic Edition, translation by Ivan Morris