It's a Jumble

I have a new story out today. “The Breaking” appears in Issue 13 of Mithila Review, alongside stories and poems from so many wonderful writers. “The Breaking”   is an apocalypse-story that, yes, feels weirdly resonant in these current times, in ways that I certainly didn’t anticipate when I wrote it a year ago. There is no virus, no plague, in my story. But it’s about people who refuse to see what’s in front of them, about those who won’t hear what is clear to others. It’s about an unbridgeable gap in perceptions, one that I’ve felt since fall 2015 in my country. And “The Breaking” is also about family. It’s about the gap between generations, and the care-taking that occurs within families, and the responsibility a sister feels for her brother. I also mention food in the story, because I almost always mention food! This story stars two Thai-American siblings and is one of the rare instances in which I’ve explicitly written Thai-American characters. The Thai-style omelet, ...

These are strange times, to put it mildly. Again and again on Twitter I see people posting something along these lines: In these times of social distancing/quarantine/lockdown, so many of us are streaming movies/television, listening to music, and reading books to get though the day. Don’t ever say again that art is useless. Some of the art I’ve been consuming: TV I remain obsessed with the Chinese fantasy drama The Untamed (which I wrote about at the end of my last post here ) . I am still losing myself in this rapturous, epic love story; still watching fanvids, still swooning over the beauty of this show and grieving over the terrible losses the characters endure. If you want to be swept into another world, into other lives, to feel intensely and cry over problems that are not your own—this is the show for you. Music I’d never paid much attention to K-pop, but when BTS released their latest album, Map of the Soul:7, I clicked on the performance music video o...

It’s the end of February, and I am only now writing up my recs for December and January. It seems that I’m always struggling to stay atop the flood of great short fiction being published these days, but that feeling was particularly strong this winter. I missed a lot these few months, preoccupied with other things. But here’s a sample of some lovely short stories (and more!) that I did find. Augur Magazine Augur Magazine has quickly become one of my favorite publications. This magazine offers dreamy, gorgeous fiction and poetry that plays in a liminal space between the “literary” and speculative fiction genres. Issue 2.3 (the latest as of this post) is particularly strong, and although I’ve selected only two stories here, the entire issue is well worth reading.  “Remembrance of Worlds Past” by Andrew Wilmot in issue 2.3 One day a new planet appears on the edge of the solar system, a planet that’s twice the mass of Jupiter but moves through other planets, asteroid...

It's nearly the end of December, and I'm only now writing up this post. I binge read books this fall, and read less short fiction than usual. But here's some of what I did read, and love, in October and November. Magic, beauty, gentleness, and love "The Sloppy Mathematics of Half-Ghosts" by Charles Payseur in Strange Horizons Aboard the ghost ship  Nine Lives  there are the living, the dead, and a great many cats. This is a story that lives up to its name, and presents a world like none I've seen before: a weird, wild, wonderful world of ships that sail between the stars, powered by ghost-passengers and crewed by both humans and cats. It's a rollicking story of a race to ferry a dead Emperor to paradise, with wishes (wishes for anything!) as the prize. It's the story of Jourdain, a half-ghost haunted by trauma. And it's a story, ultimately, of joy and beauty, told amidst dazzling world-building. “The Boy on the Roof” by Fran...

Gods of Jade and Shadow is a road trip through 1920s Mexico and through Mayan myth; it's a quest-adventure, a fairy tale, and a lovely coming-of-age story. It begins in a dusty Mexican small town, where eighteen-year-old Casiopea Tun waits on her tyrannical grandfather and scrubs floors for her sneering, wealthy relatives a la Cinderella. Casiopea dreams of escape, of the glamor of the Jazz Age which is passing her by. She wants to wear short, pretty dresses like the women that she's seen in newspapers; she wants to dance the Charleston, to swim in the sea, to drive an automobile. And then escape comes to her in a way that she never expected, when she opens the chest her grandfather keeps and releases Hun-Kamé, the Mayan god of death himself. . .   What follows is a fresh and original road trip with witches, demons, sorcerers and gods—something that reminded me at times of Neal Gaiman's American Gods , but with a focus on actual indigenous myths and gods. Casiopea i...

I first came across Nancy Au’s work when I read her short story, “Odonata at Rest” in the (now sadly on-hiatus) speculative fiction journal, Liminal Stories. “Odonata at Rest” remains one of my favorite stories from that brilliant journal: a gentle, shimmering story of unexpected connections, with a delicate air of fabulism. When I found that Nancy Au’s first collection of short stories was out, I was thrilled for the chance to read it. Spider Love Song and Other Stories does not disappoint. These seventeen stories slide from realism to outright fantasy, and all points in between. They are centered primarily upon Chinese-American communities in contemporary California, and many, like “Odonata at Rest,” seem to occupy a liminal space between realism and fantasy; even when events are wholly explainable by reality, they seem outlined by the uncanny. In “How to Become Your Own Odyssey, or The Land of Indigestion,” a father eats in his sleep, cleaning out the refrigerator, eating “w...