It's a Jumble

The sun is shining, the world has not yet ended, and I have a free morning to write this. I’m late with my bimonthly list of short fiction recs, but let’s go, shall we? Stories About Family Our relationships with our birth families are often the most fraught of all—these ties we did not choose and cannot sever. The stories that have hit hardest for me of late are the ones that look at these bonds. My Grandmother’s Bones  by S.L. Huang at Daily Science Fiction So much conveyed in such a short flash piece. The gaps between generations, the disappointments and distance and love that endures despite it all. This story is spare, understated, and devastating. I did not know the Chinese term, haau , before I read this, but I think I understand it just a little, now. Of all the “family” stories I’ve picked this month, it’s the one that I most personally connect with. Some Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw in the The Dark Like Huang’s story above, Khaw’s is also ab

The Grace of Kings , the debut novel by famed short story writer Ken Liu, is unlike anything else I’ve read in contemporary fantasy. It is “epic” in every sense of the word, portraying the collapse and rise of empires; huge battle scenes, complicated plot twists and betrayals; intimate small moments and a dizzyingly large cast of characters. It takes place in an intriguing, beautifully realized secondary world setting: the world of Dara, an archipelago of what was once seven separate kingdoms. The geography of this world ranges from tropical beaches to misty forests, deserts, plains, and snowy mountains. There are airships, battle kites, and rainbow-scaled whales with horns. There is a variety of cultures and ethnicities, with people described in a rainbow of skin tones and eye/hair color, yet the overall cultural bedrock is plainly that of ancient China. It’s a work that is soaring, enthralling, heart-wrenching, intricate, and almost astonishingly ambitious. All this said, I wil

Annorlunda Books is a small press specializing in short books (novella length or shorter), including both fiction and non-fiction. The company’s tagline is “Books to inform, entertain, and make you think.” It is a division of Annorlunda Enterprises , which also creates designs for T-shirts, bags, and other print-on-demand projects, and also runs a short ebook review site called Tungsten Hippo. This year I was very lucky to work with Annorlunda Books on the publication of my fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn . All around, it’s been a wonderful experience. I realized that I had a number of questions on what it’s like to start and run a small press, and I figured a number of other writers and readers might be interested, too. Melanie Nelson, founder of Annorlunda Books and Annorlunda Enterprises, was gracious enough to appear on this blog to answer my questions in detail. Okay, first question that popped into my head for this interview: What does the name, “Annorlund