Saturday Storytime: The Banquet of the Lords of Night
Liz Williams has written a police officer who herds demons and a librarian who maintains the boundaries between dimensions. Is it any wonder to find her here writing a chef who would be a...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Second Night of Summer
I’ve posted short stories by James Schmitz before, but he’s one of my favorite SF authors. Also, this week reminded me why he’s one of my favorite SF authors. I think this story illustrates it well. At...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy
Douglas F. Warrick writes surreal short stories, weird little realities that make internal sense but don’t leave the reader exactly comfortable. His first collection of these stories, Plow the Bones,...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Mantis Wives
Kij Johnson has been in these pages before, also for an award-nominated story. This one is up for the 2013 short story Hugos. If you like her work, she released a collection last fall. Eventually, the...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
Dark stories for children and young adults are nothing new. Holly Black, however, writes stories like Doll Bones for middle-grade readers and Tithe for young adults in which that darkness has sharp...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Call Girl
This is Tang Fei’s first English-language publication. I have a feeling it won’t be her last. “I did as you said and switched to a different car. Can you tell me why? It’s… unusual.” The middle–aged...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Brides of Heaven
N. K. Jemisin has been featured on this blog before, but today I feel like featuring her again. No particular reason. No one realized the extent of Dihya’s madness until she was caught sabotaging the...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Draco, Draco
Tanith Lee remains one of my favorite authors for dark, decadent fantasy. This is one of her older stories. Her name was Niemeh, or something along those lines. She was sitting in a little lamplit cell...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: My Mother’s Body
Part of the fun of meeting (in this case online) new people in the F&SF writers community is that you then get to find new stories too. In addition to writing science fiction and fantasy, Christie...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Longfin’s Daughters
O. J. Cade is a rarity in this day and age: a writer without much of an internet presence. Still, given recent events in getting to know people online, sometimes it’s refreshing to just sit back and...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Alive, Alive Oh
In addition to a bunch of short fiction, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley is the author of two non-fiction books on flying, including You Fly Like a Woman, the story of her getting her pilot’s license because...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Get a Grip
Paul Park is well known for his Roumania Quartet series of novels, but this story, a 1998 World Fantasy Award nominee for short story, may ring some bells for readers as well. He had lost weight, and...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Man Who Walked Home
James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon and possibly something of an alter ego. Tiptree shared much of Sheldon’s early life but went on to do things that Sheldon seemed unable to do in...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken
Elizabeth Ziemska was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award for her story “A Murder of Crows”. Unfortunately, that story doesn’t seem to be available online. I don’t think anyone will be disappointed...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: All Kinds to Make a World
Sometimes the horror isn’t quite where you think it is. Georgina Bruce is a horror writer who builds her stories out of vivid images. It’s not like we didn’t try. A little tentatively at first, a...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Castle That Jack Built
Emily Gilman writes mostly short stories and not a huge number of those. That seems to work for her, though, as this story is one of the finalists for this year’s World Fantasy Award. He thought the...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Telling
Gregory Norman Bossert is relatively new to writing fiction, but he’s sold several short stories nonetheless. This story is a finalist for this year’s World Fantasy Award. “Lord Dellus has passed,”...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster
Christopher Barzak‘s novel One for Sorrow is currently being turned into a movie, to be released early next year. This story is from the just-released anthology Glitter and Mayhem, edited by Apex...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Zombies, Condoms and Shenzhen: The Surprising Link...
One of the lovely things about the F&SF culture wars (the only other one I can think of being that good people seem to be winning) is that it introduces me to writers I haven’t seen before whose...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Turning the Whisper
In her announcement post for this story, Anaes Lay mentions a novel that exists in this universe. I was sad to discover the novel has not been published. Still, she has written several other short...
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