It's a Jumble

  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.     ...

  My review of SL Huang’s latest novella, The Language of Liars , is now online and free to read at Locus Magazine!

  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...

  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...

  Well, I fell way behind on my short fiction reading over the last few months, for a number of reasons.  But here are a few stories that I did manage to get to--a mix of old and new-- that I loved.   Stories of Love and Darkness   Last Flesh Ice-Skaters by Claire Jia-Wen in Khoreo  The first time I saw you, you laced up your skates, adjusted your knee mods, and I was just another unremarkable face as you fluttered to the ice. My mother snapped at me to watch you, but it was like asking a mallard to observe a flamingo. Our legs didn’t work the same. You’d been competing across the national circuit, in Boston and Orlando and Frisco, and this was my first competition.    A near-future science-fiction tale about two figure skaters—both Chinese-American, both from Southern California, and both using the latest in sports body modifications.   A propulsive sports rivalry story about competition, obsession, attraction, and love for the sp...

  My newest story went live last week! “Lotus Dew for the Emperor’s Tea” is now free to read at Lightspeed Magazine . This tale   braids together Chinese immortality myths with a love for tea, and it is one of my favorite things that I’ve written yet. There’s also a beautiful narration by Si Chen, if you’d like to hear it in podcast form. And if you want to hear me gush about some of the inspirations for this tale, you can also check out the accompanying author interview!

  Very late, but here are some stories I read and loved in the last months of 2025—a mix of older stories and new.   “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise in Reactor (published in January 2025) Wolves have always ranged on the outside of the town, snapping jaws at its ragged edges. Sometimes they kill to cull. Sometimes they kill to eat. Sometimes they protect the town from worse things, older things, and newer ones as well. But the town would rather look away from the wolves, because the doe-girls’ radiant magic is so much prettier. Was. Now the doe-girls are gone.   A small town governed by a balance of unspoken powers. Wolves in the hills, and doe-girls in the form of high school students—beautiful and shining. But there are also human hunters, disrupting the balance of power with their greed. And there is Merrow, a high school girl who is a different kind of protector, inheritor to her grandmother’s power. What is Merrow—a semi-outcast, always on the ed...

  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...

  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. 

  It’s the last day of September, and this round-up is way overdue. Some things I read and loved in July and August.   Strange Tales of Horror, Darkness, and Beauty   “And the Planet Loved Him” by L. Chan in Clarkesworld I’ve been here a few weeks, and the sunsets never get old. The blue sun scintillates off the spore miasma, glittering into fractal rainbows. The worst part is the waiting. We’re so far off the grid that by the time the distress signal relays back to someone that could authorize the funds requisition for a rescue, there’s a good chance that I’d already run out of air or food or both. We still see the light of stars long gone supernova in the sky. I’m dead already; I just haven’t gotten the memo.   And this is all before my deceased husband’s voice crackles on the radio from outside the habitat.   L. Chan excels at strange, beautiful hard science-fiction stories with striking ideas and imagery. He gives another one here, in th...