Saturday Storytime: Bearing Fruit
I’m catching up on some writers I really shouldn’t have missed over the last several years. Based on this story, Nikki Alfar is very much one of those writers. Despite the general, dismaying, though...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Midnight Hour
I usually try to find a new writer for these stories each week. It’s easy to do. F&SF has no shortage of talented short story writers at the moment. Quite the opposite in fact. So it tells you...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: When Your Child Strays From God
Sometimes a bad review will lead you to a story you’ll like. In the case of this story from Sam J. Miller, it was the reviewer’s distaste for the name “Carolina Bugtuttle”. Combine that with the...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Shape of My Name
Time travel stories are hard to do well. They’re even harder when they don’t hide where they’re going, when the map of time is laid out on the table so the story is all about the travel. This story by...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Totally Secret Origin of Foxman: Excerpts from an...
My friend Kelly McCullough just launched his new book, School for Sidekicks, this week. (No, literally, he launched it.) It’s his first middle-grade book after a history of writing for adults, and it’s...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Catcall
All I can really say about this story from Delilah S. Dawson without spoiling it is, “Enjoy the punch in the gut.” I was doing my homework at the dining room table last night, and my dad came in from...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: A Kiss with Teeth
This story by Max Gladstone was not on the Hugo Award ballot this year. It would have been*, but the puppies’ slates pushed it off. This is yet one more reason I am angry with the puppies. The teacher...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Oiran’s Song
This story from Isabel Yap comes with a trigger warning, as well it should. It is a vivid story set in the midst of many kinds of trauma. It simultaneously is as cold as the winter in which it is set...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Loving Grace
Oh, do we have messed-up ideas about work. Erica Satifka shows us exactly how messed up some of them are. “The bird wasn’t unhappy to be owned. She knew that her shining eggs, though worthless to her,...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The World in Evening
Strange Horizons is now running its annual fund drive. And if you want to know why they’re worth supporting, you could do worse than this delicious little creeper from Jei D. Marcade. For a while there...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Cold Wind
It is a glorious time right now to enjoy F&SF short fiction. It is also a slightly overwhelming time, with so much out there to choose from. So it’s nice when short lists come along and help you...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Star Maiden
io9 is helpfully making sure we don’t miss great stories from the last few months. There are plenty of good ones to choose from, but as I’m a sucker for good riffs on fairy tales and folks tales, this...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Sisters’ Line
If you’ve known me for a while, you have some idea of my love for nonsense. I have an inordinate fondness for things that make no sense whatsoever and refuse to justify themselves but still, somehow,...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: The Game of Smash and Recovery
Strange Horizons is approaching the end of this year’s funding drive, with just a couple of days left. As a reward for hitting one of their funding targets, they’ve published this story from Kelly...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Children of Dagon
Sometimes future history can carry all the same weight of inevitability that our own history does, even when it’s fantastic. This story by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a good example. We mass at Knightsbridge...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Night’s Slow Poison
Ann Leckie is a Tor author whose books are published by Orbit and a bestselling, award-winning author whose books no one reads or likes. And one has to wonder whether the people saying these things,...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Godwin’s Law
Though this story by Curtis C. Chen is about lasting ripples from World War II, it doesn’t feature quite the Hitler–or the Godwin–you know. Michael walked to the memorial wall. The flags were as he...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Love Will Tear Us Apart
There is literally nothing I can say about this story by Alaya Dawn Johnson that won’t lessen it. You’re just going to have to read it. Think of it like the best macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had. No...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Bloodless
This story by Cory Skerry continues F&SF’s long and honored tradition of making us think hard about who the monsters are and what makes them monsters. Fresh snowfall had softened the world that...
View ArticleSaturday Storytime: Aye, and Gomorrah . . .
Hmm. Looking around, I see I’ve never posted a Samuel Delany story here. That’s quite the oversight. Thanks to Strange Horizons for the prompt. At which point Kelly noticed what was going on around us,...
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