It's a Jumble

Five collections/anthologies of short stories that I read and loved in 2023.    Like Smoke, Like Light: Stories by Yukimi Ogawa The title of this collection is apt, for Ogawa’s stories are indeed like light or smoke: delicate, shifting things of beauty; slippery, hard to pin down or grasp, hard to capture into boxes or labels. These are strange, hybrid stories that blend fantasy, folklore, horror, and science fiction. There are wonderful monsters galore, as in “Hundred Eye,” a story about a thief with a hundred eyes on her long arms, and “Rib,” a story about a skeleton woman who helps an orphaned little boy. In “The Flying Head at the Edge of Night,” a head does indeed fly about unconscious each night and must be tracked down by its body each morning. There are misfits and outsiders of all types in these stories, including an artificial intelligence (AI) in “Nini,” who discovers a forgotten goddess in a space station. Some of these misfits are merciless, wreaking a deser...

  He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan is my first great read of the year. I suspect it will be among my top reads of all this year and is in fact one of my favorite reads of all time.   Although “favorite” may seem an odd choice of words here. He Who Drowned the World is dark. Almost unrelentingly dark. It’s the sequel to Parker-Chan’s thrilling She Who Became the Sun , which was also marked by darkness and cruelty as it told the story of Zhu Yuanzhang’s rise to power in a queer, gender-flipped alt-historical and lightly fantastical retelling of the founding of the Ming Dynasty. In the sequel, we follow Zhu and others as they mercilessly plot and fight for the throne. Madam Zhang, the unofficial power behind the powerful Zhang family, is seemingly Zhu’s most formidable threat. In a world where women of her status are expected to be decorative dolls, Madam Zhang takes full advantage of what power she’s allowed, making herself into the most beautiful and entranci...