5 Short Story Collections from 2023

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 deserved and cathartic revenge on humans who mistreat them. But for the most part these monsters are kind, despite their unsettling appearances. These are tales of a delightful creepiness, lightened with tenderness and warmth, where monsters and misfits reach for connection with humans and with one another.

 

Some of my favorite stories in this collection are the “colorful-island tales,” as writer Francesca Forrest calls them in the forward to this book. These are tales set on a nameless island where many of the inhabitants are born with strikingly colorful eyes, hair, and skin patterns. Once the inhabitants of these islands didn’t think much about their beautiful colors; they saw no status differences between those with the brightest colors and those who are “colorless” i.e. people who would look simply normal in our own human society. But the island has been discovered by foreign tourists who are enamored of the people’s bright colors, and the island has shifted to a tourist economy that caters to foreigners; the most strikingly colored islanders are now considered the most beautiful and highest status, and the “colorless” are now of lowest status. “The Colorless Thief” is the first such tale in this collection, and perhaps the most powerful. In it, an orphaned young woman finds that when she gets hurt, her bruises bloom and heal into the most beautiful of patterns—"golden needles,” “caramelized frost crystals,” and more. To earn money to survive, the girl allows herself to be beaten so that her skin can bloom into beautiful patterns for the delight of foreigners. It’s a striking, powerful tale of exoticization, exploitation, tourist economies, and the way self-image is shaped by society. Follow-up stories in this same world deepen our view of island society and its interactions with the mainland, and also introduce science-fictional elements. It would be easy to write a world where the tourists are simply “bad” and the islanders are simply a poor, exploited people. But writer Yukimi Ogawa is smarter than that, and her stories go deeper, humanizing both islanders and the “foreign” mainlanders.

          The gentle humanity in these stories is perhaps the most distinctive, unifying element to these tales. While a few of these tales do go terrifically (rather thrillingly) dark, the majority twine darkness with light and compassion. Monsters show humans kindness that the monsters themselves never received at human hands, and in the soft-dystopia of the “colorful island” tales, decent humans do the best they can, pushing laws and boundaries as much as they can to treat others with kindness. Even when writing the darkest of her stories, Ogawa has a certain lightness of touch. These are lovely tales, odd in just the right way, surprising and fresh. And overall. it’s a collection filled with gentleness and warmth, a spirit of generosity and, in the end, a faith in humanity. Stories to hold to your heart, when warmth and faith are needed.

 

Skin Thief  by Suzan Palumbo

I first discovered Palumbo’s work with the short story, “The Pull of the Herd,” first published in Anathema Magazine. After reading it, I immediately tried to find more from this writer, and I knew that Suzan Palumbo was someone to watch: that this was a writer with an extraordinary talent, and one who would go far. I’m delighted to say that I was right, that she has published banger after banger since, and that her best stories are now gathered in this beautiful collection.

 

Skin Thief opens with “The Pull of the Herd,” a story about a shape-shifting deer-woman, torn between the herd of her birth and her love for a human woman. The narrator’s deer-skin has never felt quite right on her; it’s too tight, it doesn’t fit, she doesn’t want to be a deer. But when she leaves her herd to be with a human woman, her deer-skin calls to her each day. There’s a sense of gorgeous yearning in this piece; the narrator is truly stranded between worlds. In the end, even when she’s living a life she freely chose, she’s keenly aware of loss. It’s a sense of loss and yearning that haunts many of these stories, and “The Pull of the Herd” sings with themes that recur throughout this collection: themes of otherness, of feeling like an outsider; the pull between family obligations and expectations and living the life you want for yourself; shape-shifting, transformation, love, and loss.

 

Some of the strongest stories draw on the author’s Indo-Trinidadian heritage and Trinidadian folklore to explore these themes. In “Laughter Among the Trees,” one of my personal favorites, the theme of “otherness,” of not fitting in, is told through a diaspora lens. The narrator, Ana, doesn’t quite fit in, but her little sister, Sabrina does. Sabrina was born in Canada, unlike Ana and their immigrant Indo-Caribbean parents. Sabrina seems at ease in the world in a way that Ana isn’t and in a way that Ana resents—“as if the city had been fashioned for her, unlike my parents and I who’d been transplanted too late.” Sabrina is charming, adorable, beloved, and able to make friends everywhere she goes. And then one night, on a family camping trip, Sabrina disappears. . . This is a dark and gripping story, powerful and ultimately devastating. It’s about grief and guilt and jealousy and loss, about migration and assimilation and pretending that you are what you’re not. As Ana grows up without a sister, she tries to live the life she imagines that her sister would have lived. . . until one day she can’t.

 

There’s delicate magic in some of these stories, like the lovely “Propagating Peonies” and “Tesselation.” There’s fairy-tale magic, as in the yearning mermaid-with-a-twist story, “Apolepisi: A De-Scaling." And there’s outright horror, as in “Laughter Among the Trees” and other unsettling tales with sinister spirits and monsters of Trinidadian folklore: the deliciously creepy “Tara’s Mother’s Skin” and heartbreaking “Douen.”  “Kill Jar,” the novelette which is original to this collection, manages both delicacy and horror in a tale that draws on the setting and tropes of Gothic horror: a secluded mansion, an isolated heroine, dark family secrets. But this is also Gothic horror with a twist, as the author adds some of her own signature details: a heroine of South Asian heritage, a queer love story, and themes of shape-shifting and transformation. There’s a sense of bittersweetness in the ending of this one, as in many of Palumbo’s stories: a protagonist’s insistence on living as true to herself as she can, even as this entails sacrifice and loss.

 

All in all, “Skin Thief” is a gorgeous collection. The stories are by turns delicate and raw, dark and magical, filled with horror and heartache and deep emotion. The ending story, “Douen,” is particularly heartrending—a shriek of pain, as conveyed by the ghost of a little girl who just wants to be with her mother. While I had read many of these stories previously online, I’m glad to have them all gathered in one place. These are stories that are worth reading again and again. These are stories that dig and slide under the skin. A beautiful collection by a major talent.

Rosalind’s Siblings: Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders, edited by Bogi Takács

This anthology of science fiction stories takes its title and inspiration from the scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction studies were instrumental in solving the structure of DNA. Famously, James Watson and Francis Crick made use of her X-ray data when building their model of DNA structure. Also famously, they made use of her data without her permission and without proper acknowledgement.^1,2,3 In the years since, Franklin has become a symbol of the struggle that women scientists have faced in their careers, of the ways they’ve been sidelined in the past, and of how they have often had to struggle for respect and to be taken seriously by their peers.⁴

 

Rosalind’s Siblings is a tribute anthology to Rosalind Franklin, first conceived of by a relative of Franklin. This book pays tribute to Franklin by featuring, as editor Bogi Takács states, “speculative stories and poems about scientists marginalized due to their gender and sex.” Thus, Rosalind’s Siblings features stories and poems about women scientists, and also stories and poems about trans men and nonbinary scientists.

 

It's an incredibly varied selection of stories. There’s “hard” science fiction, and there are stories that blend fantasy with science. There are stories set in space, a story set in the sea, stories set on other planets, two stories set in the atmosphere of Venus, a story set in ancient Sumeria, and stories of cryptozoologists studying fairies and other strange beasts. There’s humor, whimsy, intensity, war, romance, and tragedy. The protagonists vary not only in gender/sex, but also in race/ethnicity, nationality, neurodiversity, and other life experiences. What unites these pieces is that they all feature scientists in speculative fiction. And it was while reading these stories that I realized that many—most?—of the science-fiction stories I read casually online don’t feature scientists as protagonists at all. In most science-fiction stories I come across, the “science” part is background, or backdrop. In this volume, science and scientists are front-and-center.

 

“Collecting Ynés” by Lisa M. Bradley is the opening story to this volume, and one of the best. This story is part poetry and part prose, lyrical and tinged with the mythical. It’s a fantastical, magical-realist telling of the life of the real-life Mexican-American botanist Ynés Mexia. Mexia was 55 when she went on her first botanical field trip to Mexico, launching a productive and celebrated career as a botanist. The joy of discovery—not just scientific discovery, but the thrill of finding one’s calling, even in later life—sings through this piece.

 

The joy of science is, indeed, a recurrent theme in this book. And as someone who was once a practicing scientist, I found myself particularly drawn to the stories focused on the actual practice of science—the nitty-gritty of data collection and problem-solving, the tedium and frustrations--amid the joy. In that respect, “Rewilding Nova” by Polenth Blake and “Leech Clinic” by Laura Jane Swanson are both good examples: gentle stories that feature the nitty-gritty of problem-solving within larger tales. “The Elusive Plague” by Santiago Belluco is particularly impressive in this regard, a medical mystery set among a tale of relationship drama. The story accurately captures the stress of trying to survive in a competitive science career (even making a not-so-subtle jab at the use of publication impact factors), and I was not surprised to learn that the author is indeed a practicing scientist in a biomedical field.

 

Science collides with the mystical in the wonderful “Cavern of Dreams” by Julie Nováková, which takes us into a world where magic has become real, and asks: what does this mean for science and those who have devoted themselves to it? How does a rational, dedicated scientist, who has spent years in rigorous training, fit into this new world? It’s a beautifully thought-provoking piece, which also introduced me to the intriguing concept of the “shadow biome.” Magic blends with fantasy to more lightly humorous effect in such stories as “Animal Behavior” by Emma Alice Johnson, where an animal behavioral scientist is called on to deal with a most unusual animal. And science and scientific ambition take on strange new forms in the weird and wild “Great Things of Which to Speak Of” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu and “The Bull of the Moon Holds His Horns to Time’s Grindstone; or, Cybernetineti in Ur,” by Vajra Chandrasekera (the latter of which has one of the most unexpected, and best, ending lines I’ve ever seen).

 

Science is, of course, a human endeavor. And Premee Mohamed reminds us of the importance of the human element in “If Strange Things Happen Where She Is,” where a woman is trying to run a lab during a time of war and is reminded that the future of her work—and of science—lies ultimately not with a physical laboratory or machines, but with the people: the students, professors, and other scientists. The human element is strongly present in all the stories of Rosalind’s Siblings, among settings that are often fantastical, exotic, and strange. Two additional stories that impressed me with their human emotion were “The Tightrope Walker” by Celia Neri, the story of an autistic astronomer caught between the noise and complexity of human society and the silence and peace of space; and “The Vanishing Of Ultratatts” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, which sets a story of grief amid a surreally futuristic world of animated tattoo sensors and volcano surfing.

 

All in all, Rosalind’s Siblings is a wonderful collection that showcases science fiction stories that are diverse in multiple ways, not just in the gender/sex of the characters, but also in the intersection of other identities/backgrounds and in setting, tone, approach, plot and themes. With such a variety, a reader is sure to find something of appeal. It’s a fitting tribute indeed to Rosalind Franklin’s legacy.  

 

1. Cobb M. and Comfort N. What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure. Nature 616, 657-660 (2023)

2.  Anthes E. Untangling Rosalind Franklin’s role in DNA discovery, 70 years on. New York Times. April 25, 2023.     

3. Watson, J.D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York, NY: Signet; First Edition; 1969. 

4. In his memoir The Double Helix, Watson freely admits that he viewed Franklin dismissively at first, something he would regret as he came to later respect her. As an example of this, he writes in one passage of attending a scientific talk by Franklin, where instead of paying attention to her science: “Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.” 

 

The Potential of Radio and Rain by Myna Chang

“The prairie is made of dirt and sky, of shushling grass and starling night—and the creatures caught between.”

 

This is a chapbook that I reviewed earlier in 2023, but I wanted to repeat this review again for my summary of 2023 reads. It’s a gorgeous collection of miniatures, flash tales of the shortgrass prairie, lit with longing. These are stories of small towns, teenagers desperate to get away and adults just trying to survive. Stories of a tornado that upends everything, of rebellions small and large, people loving and leaving one another; a group of teens driving to a rock concert, a man who still retains the muscle memory of how to handle a horse even as dementia robs him of all else. These are stories of desperation and grit, dust storms and drought and longing. And these are tales of magic—of starlit nights and lightning bugs, of moments of sweet freedom, of the fat years when times are good, of the magic when it rains. Myna Chang’s small fictions build up to a small, interconnected world. An enthralling collection, where prose becomes poetry.

 

 White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

My review of a major author’s new work will be on the shorter side—not because I have nothing to say, but because I don’t know how to say it. Kelly Link’s work leaves me flailing, sputtering incoherently, waving my arms as I wail to myself, But how does she do that??!

 

White Cat, Black Dog, her newest collection, consists of seven tales inspired by classic European fairy tales. Each tale is a marvel. “The Lady and the Fox,” an elegant and wintry tale inspired by Tam Lin, is the most straightforward fairy tale retelling, and would not be out of place in a typical genre fantasy magazine or anthology. “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” falls furthest from genre fantasy; it does not, technically, have any outright speculative elements at all. Yet there is something that feels supernatural, definitely off-kilter and strange, in this tale of a professor stranded at the Detroit airport for four days due to bad weather. Nothing much happens, yet everything feels ominous. Each strange occurrence, each coincidence, can be explained away; yet the strangeness builds and builds.

 

Strangeness amid the mundane—that’s a Kelly Link story, and these stories twist strangeness and mundanity in different ways, to different effect. “The White Road” takes us to a place of outright horror and “The Game of Smash and Recovery” (first published in the speculative fiction genre magazine Strange Horizons) takes on the form of science-fiction. Other stories twist fantasy and reality together in elegant ways. There’s a playfulness and wryness in most of these tales, as in “The White Cat’s Divorce” and the haunting “Skinder’s Veil.” My favorite of all these stories, though, is “Prince Hat Underground.” In fact, I think it’s now my favorite Link of story of all, which means it ranks high on my overall list of favorite stories. “Prince Hat Underground” is a novelette that starts with sunlit brunches in New York and ends in a quest and test in Hell itself. It’s playful, funny, entrancing, and ultimately heart-breaking in a way I don’t quite understand. It left me flailing, trying to dissect it, to understand what effect it has on me, to understand Kelly Link’s genius. In the end, I’m just left admiring, gaping, and wailing to myself, But how does she do that??!