Short Stories And Microfiction: A Thread

So I've been reading a lot of short stories lately and have even more stacked on my Kobo reader. Thought it might be fun to have a thread to share them. No idea if anybody else will be interested, but do feel free to jump in!

I'll start with a ressource I discovered last month: tor.com's Short Fiction Spotlight features a monthly selection of Must Read Short Speculative Fiction. I just received the February installment and started by reading The Books Would Like a Word by Cynthia Gómez. I have to confess I tend to mentally roll my eyes when I hear about books (or stories) about books. But this one was pretty cool, and I think I'll even write down some names for further research.

I look forward to reading the rest of the selection. Last month, all except two of the stories featured were available for free reading. I liked almost all of them even if none really stood out, but mostly I enjoyed the experience of discovering authors and magazines I knew nothing about, and reading short fiction.

Is this a communal thread you are making or a personal thread for you to document just your reading. I wasn't sure.

If it is the former, I would be happy to cross post my reviews of short fiction. I have an awful lot in the piles, both single author collection and multi-author anthologies.

Currently, I'm reading Journeys by Iain R. MacLeod, one of my very favorite fantasy/magical realism authors. When I get caught up with an author I like—most of the time—to read all of their work, or as much as I can.

What I have waiting in the nearest to-hand book shelf:

The Granta Book of the African Short Story ed. Helon Habla
Moss Witch and Other Stories by Sarah Maitland
Album Zutique : No. 1. edit by Jeff Vandermeer
The New Dark Age: Collected Stories by Joan London
Driving the Heart & Other Stories by Jason Brown

(some of these have been sampled a bit..)

Absolutely a communal thread, sorry I didn’t make that clear!

>3 FlorenceArt: That's what I thought...but wanted to be sure :-)

The hubby (dukedom_enough) reads a lot of short fiction from the SF zines (which he still gets in paper) but also other short fiction from online sources on his tablet and now some on the new Kobo .... I'll see if he might find a bit of time to come over and contribute.

Great idea! I only read a short story collection from time to time, but when I do I will remember to post about it here.

>2 avaland: I wishlisted The Granta Book of the African Short Story. One of the books I currently have under way is Mothership: Tales From Afrofuturism And Beyond and this has made me realize how little I have read from black people, from Africa, America or elsewhere.

This is a great idea for a thread. I want to try and shoehorn more short fiction into my reading. I thought I would start by listing my favorite collections (4* or more).

Single author collections:
Children of the Holocaust by Arnošt Lustig
Short Stories of Mark Twain ("The Diaries of Adam and Eve" is hysterical)
Say you're one of them by Uwem Akpan
The road by Vassily Grossman
Talking to the Enemy by Avner Mandelman
The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories by Tayeb Salih
The complete tales of Nikolai Gogol
The call of the wild, White Fang, The sea-wolf, 40 short stories by Jack London ("To Light a Fire" is one of my all-time favorites)
The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin

Anthologies:
The Crazy iris and other stories of the atomic aftermath edited by Kenzaburō Ōe
Great Soviet short stories edited by F. D. Reeve

Runner's up:
Twenty stories by Turkish women writers by Nilüfer Mizanoğlu Reddy
A good man is hard to find and other stories by Flannery O'Connor
Stories from the vinyl cafe by Stuart McLean

>6 FlorenceArt: I am going to try and get a copy of The Granta Book of the African Short Story.

>7 labfs39: Oh no, more books to check out! (Tries to look away and fails).

I Left My Heart In Skaftafell, by Victor Lavalle
In Mothership: Tales From Afrofuturism And Beyond
I really liked the beginning, but after a while I noticed that the writing was a bit heavy handed. Then about two thirds in I began to think it was too long. And then it went downhill. The last third was pretty bad. What a shame.

>1 FlorenceArt: Many thanks for that tor.com link!

Here are the collections I've read (including some fiction magazines) read over the past 10 years or so. I generally have two or three short story collections going at a time, which I read through gradually. I have left out a few that I didn't find particularly enjoyable. I have a few more anthologies I'm in the midst of. I'll add those as I finish them. Just as an fyi, there is a Short Stories LT group, though it is mostly moribund at this point, though there are two or three of us still adding posts there. However, folks might enjoy going back through some of those old threads to get reading ideas, I guess: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/253/Short-Stories

Anthologies
The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley *
The Arbor House Treasury of Great Western Stories edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin Harry Greenberg
The Best Short Stories of 1931 edited by Edward J. O'Brien *
The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume edited by Judith Merril (1957)

Single Author Collections
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin *
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin *
Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London
Creek Walk and Other Stories by Molly Giles *
Tierra del Fuego by Francisco Coloane *
Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Modern Library) *
Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan *

Magazines
The New Yorker Magazine Fiction Issue - December 28, 1998 & January 4, 1999
Manhunt Detective Story Monthly, January, 1953 edited by John McCloud
Short Story International: Volume 3, Number 15 edited by Sylvia Tankel
The New Yorker 1999 Summer Fiction Issue: 20 Writers for the 21st Century
The New Yorker Magazine Fiction Issue, December 2006
The New Yorker 1994 Fiction Issue

* Particularly good

I’d like to read some good microfiction.

So would I, Diane. I'm reading Best Microfiction 2021 and so far it's not an unforgettable experience, but I did leave a few bookmarks already. I'll have to revisit them after I've finished the book.

I thought the three stories here were pretty good:
https://www.drabblecast.org/2023/01/08/drabblecast-465-trifecta-love-hurts/

Or this one:
The House Of Linear Change by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

How is microfiction different from a short story? I looked it up and various sources said it was between 50 and 1,000 words (1,000 the low end of a short story), but still included plot and character revelation/development. Is microfiction always prose?

>15 nohrt4me2: They are all stories so they are always prose. If they are poetry, they are... poetry :)

Microfiction is usually considered a subset of flash fiction which is a subset of short fiction. If you go as high as 1,000 words, you are in flash fiction territory IMO - the highest I had seen for microfiction is ~500 words although some definitions go for 300.

At the end, each editor makes their own restrictions usually - but the 1,000 for flash fiction is kinda established well enough. And then of course some places use microfiction and flash fiction as synonyms.

There are also dribbles (50 words), drabbles (usually exactly 100 words) and the good old term of sudden fiction (which is a bit shorter than flash usually and tops at 750).

Confused yet? :)

>1 FlorenceArt: So are novelettes and novellas welcome here or are we only dealing with the shorter of the short fiction categories? :)

>16 AnnieMod: No, that all seems clear, even at my advanced age. Thank you.

>17 AnnieMod: My personal preference would be no novelettes, novellas, novellinas, whatever ;-)
But I don’t want to impose undue restrictions, so if you feel strongly that one of the above fits in, why not?

>16 AnnieMod: I wanted to include flash fiction in the thread title but I felt it would be redundant, and that microfiction may be a clearer concept. I had no idea there were such precise definitions, though I suppose that makes sense.

My personal idea, or rather what I personally like about flash or micro fiction, is when it gets close to poetry. And don’t ask me what I mean because it’s just a feeling. I first became aware of the concept of flash fiction through the books of David Shumate, which are actually described as prose poems. So I guess that shows how confused about the whole thing I probably am :-)

>18 nohrt4me2:

Apologies if I sounded a bit flippant - it is just that any fiction editor out there seem to have their own ideas where to draw the lines and outside of the very well defined formats as the drabble and somewhat defined flash fiction, things can be a bit murky... Thus the "confused yet?" (or "clear as mud" as I usually say).

>19 FlorenceArt: >20 FlorenceArt:

So where do we draw the line - at 7,500 words (as the speculative awards do) or at 10,000 words (as most/some of the literary journals do)? Just out of curiosity and because I tend to look for lengths. I get the idea though - we want the short ones. :)

I am a short story junkie (or used to be anyway - not much lately but as with all of my reading, it comes in phases).

Prose poems are a different but related thing in a way - they sit somewhere between poetry and fiction and where they land depends on the author and sometimes the editor or the reviewer. I don't mind genre bending in my reading my form bending like that gets me all confused. And not all short stories are poetical - some are just... short.

A few of my usual go-tos when I want a very short story:

https://365tomorrows.com/ - Science Fiction, no big names
https://flashfictionmagazine.com/
https://www.flashfictiononline.com/
https://everydayfiction.com/
https://dailysciencefiction.com/ - Speculative, always short, some of them from the big names of the genre; subscribe and it will land in your mailbox Monday-Friday and you can read them when you feel like it.

Somewhere I have a long list of bookmarks with short fiction venues and magazines. I need to track that down.

>21 AnnieMod: Thank you for the links!

>22 FlorenceArt: Some more:

https://vestalreview.net/ - one of the pioneers of flash fiction; still going strong
https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures - Nature used to have these in the magazine, then kicked them out and now they are online only. One story per week. Always very short. Almost always good SF.
https://www.hobartpulp.com/categories/fiction - these can be pulpy and different but I tend to like them
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/fiction/ - usually very literary
https://newflashfiction.com/

Book Riot did a round up of the best stories online a few years ago - and each story leads to its site and there are more in most: https://bookriot.com/flash-fiction-stories/ - I don't agree with all their choices but the links are what counts here.

Want to go very short? https://www.thedribbledrabblereview.com/ - the UI is... weird but the stories are short - 50 and 100 words short. :)

I appreciate the info, but some short narrative poems, e.g., Browning's "My Last Duchess", seem within range of microfiction. Or Oscar Wilde's "prose poems."

Microfiction, if we're just going by word count + plot and character revelation/development, sounds like something that has been around for a long time, just under a new name.

So I was trying to tease out what's new here.

Carry on.

Has anyone looked into George Saunders’ story club? Possibly of interest to LT members interested in short short stories. I subscribed but am not a paying member and have not had time to research. Perhaps someone here knows of it? I think it’s more for writers. Still, one never knows.

https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/office-hours-fc6?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjk...

>25 kjuliff: I've been a member of Story Club since day 1—even have a nice Story Club two-headed dog t-shirt. Saunders is a great instructor and the community is really wonderful. I don't consider myself a writer of fiction, but I am a writer and a lot of the discussions really hit home anyway. Plus you never know... maybe I'll pick up some knowledge and inspiration will hit.

I read a lot of short fiction—I'm one of the judges for Library Journal's best short story collections of the year—but have no bandwidth to list favorites just this moment. I'll be back, though.

(Anyone here read One Story magazine? It's a great source of new stories, one story/one author at a time.)

>26 lisapeet: I even reviewed one of them this year (I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, reading them is a different thing…)

Just finished a wonderful collection by Scottish author Ian R. MacLeod titled Journeys, a collection of some of his short stories published in the SF&F 'zines.
McLeod is a favorite author of mine. His work is intelligent, beautifully written, and a joy to read.

>26 lisapeet: and >27 AnnieMod: I love this idea, but unfortunately they don’t seem to have an electronic version apart from Kindle.

>28 avaland: This sounds really tempting. I am now adding to my wishlist at an alarming rate.

This thread is a terrific idea! I've been getting into short stories for a while now.

I'm currently working my way through 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories as a between book, and I get the Tor emails, as well, though I'm way behind on reading them. Plus, I'm doing a year-long read of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories through Letters from Watson.

Some reviews of stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, cross posted from my main thread:

Father’s Vampire by Len Moffatt and Alvin Taylor: I quite enjoyed it, and rated it 4 stars.

"The Feather Pillow (El almohadón de plumas)" by Horacio Quiroga, translated from the Spanish in 1976: I did not enjoy or think highly of this at all. My notes for this one read "dumb. All tell no show. No characterization, so no investment in fate of characters. 1.5 only because it wasn’t actively offensive." It's possible that some of this is the fault of the translation. But quite frankly, I doubt I'd have thought any more highly of it were I able to read it in the original Spanish.

The Fisherman’s Special by H. L. Thomson, on the other hand, I noted was "not bad" and "entertaining enough" despite the predictable ending, and rated a solid 3 stars.

"The Frog" by Granville S Hoss: 3 stars. According to my notes, "not too long. Prose is fine. Ending imagery is creepy."

"Frogfather" by Manly Wade Wellman: 3.5 stars. I enjoyed this one. I noted that it had "good prose" and "good characterization." The plot and ending were also satisfying. I probably would have rated this one a full 4 stars out of 5, if not for the fact that Wellman's use of the Wise Native trope detracted from my enjoyment some.

"The Gargoyle Sacrifice" by Tina L Jens: 2.5 stars. In this case, the rating says more about me and my personal taste than the quality of the story. I was very excited to see a woman author, as the editors of this collection seem to favor men. This is a more modern story than many in the collection, written in 1994. Jens did a good job of establishing character and setting, especially in so short a story. That takes real skill and effort. The story is well plotted and well written. There isn't anything actually wrong with it, per se. But it is not my type of story at all, and I did enjoy reading it. I was uncomfortable the whole way through. In my notes, I described it as "sordid," "grimy," and "grubby." Many horror fans will likely enjoy this a lot, but I'm not one of them.

"Ghouls of the Sea" by J. B. S. Fullilove: 3.5 stars. As far as I can tell from some cursory googling, this is the only piece of fiction the author ever published, which is a shame. This story did not create narrative transport, due to the now-archaic, stilted prose style, but in a story like this, I actually prefer that. This way, I can read the whole thing without getting freaked out. I can't watch or read modern zombie stuff, but the level of detachment and lack of verisimilitude in a story like this makes it safe for me to enjoy. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it works for me.

Two very different short stories that I didn't think I liked at first and then changed my mind.

A short story from the February list at tor.com:
The Monologue of a Moon Goddess in the Palace of Pervasive Cold by Anja Hendrikse Liu
I wasn't sure what to make of this at first, probably because I'm not familiar with the tradition it refers to. But it grew on me, and after skimming through it a second time I think I like it.

And this one is from Granta magazine. I subscribe to their rss feed, but I don't check it very often and usually manage to miss their posts, which is a shame.
Husband Number Five by Emily Adrian
I didn't think I would like this one at first, but I was wrong, I ended up loving it. The writing is light and humorous and the lovable characters in this not unhappy slice in the life of a dysfunctional family worked for me.

>32 FlorenceArt: Husband Number 5 was very entertaining!

I just finished a reread (for my book group) of A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of heartbreaking but breathtaking stories by Lucia Berlin. My review is on my CR thread. I recommend this collection highly enough.

Another one from Granta. A weird one. I liked it.
Acid Permanent

>35 FlorenceArt: That is delightfully weird.

>36 lisapeet: indeed

>35 FlorenceArt: I liked the noticing of random things, eg, the nurse's ear wax, that seemed to mean nothing but had significance for the narrator and her son who understands her. We're not privy to their view of the world, but we can still sense the bond of mother and Earl, and the sense of grief over the fractured family.

Just finished a collection of short stories(many would probably qualify being short-shorts) by the Finnish author Rosa Liksom. I read previously her novels Compartment No. 6: and The Colonel's Wife and liked both. Her stories were intriguing (once I settled into reading length). I haven't written a review yet, but her stories are not for everyone, I think, due to some content. I winced more than a few times.

The list of Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: February 2023 was a disappointment. Most of the stories were from paid magazines that could not be bought individually in electronic form, so I didn't read them. The rest was mostly disappointing.

The list contained a short story from Hexagon issue 12, which is not only free but available in ePub format, so I downloaded it and I just finished it. It's pretty short with one poem (not my style) and four stories, all with a definitely gloomy outlook on our future. Two of them were worth the effort, They Come To Return Home by Elou Carroll and The Loneliness of Water by Lyndsey Croal. I didn't finish the one recommended in the tor.com list, a not particularly well written rehashing of old clichés. Obviously Alex Brown felt differently though, so your mileage may vary. It's supposed to get "even better" toward the end.

I just read a very powerful short story by Elizabeth Bear:
"Covenant" in The Long List Anthology 1
Originally published in Hieroglyph: Stories And Visions for a Better Future
Very well written and manages to raise a lot of questions about crime and responsibility and bio-engineering.

I have read another short story by Bear in Some of the Best of tor.com 2021, The Red Mother (this link leads to the story on tor.com). I liked it, it started like a very traditional fantasy tale but the ending was unexpected.

Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels
By Lavie Tidhar
In Some of the best of tor.com 2021

No, not that Judge Dee, although this is obviously either an homage or a subtle parody, I'm not sure which. Either way I liked it, it has the right balance of seriousness and humor for me, all subtle and low-key. And apparently it's a sort of series on the tor.com website, there will be more to enjoy later. The "original" Judge Dee (the one by Robert van Gulik) is not for me, but I liked this one.

Some more brief reviews of short stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"The Gray Wolf" by George MacDonald (1864): left me wanting to know more, including what was going on. I noted that it would have worked better as a TV episode or short film than it did as a short story - the story struck me as better suited to visual media than prose. Additionally, the prose style of this one was not for me. Not bad, though. 3 stars

"The Green-and-Gold Bug" by J. M. Alvey (1924): The thing that struck me the most with this one was the weird tone, which read almost more like someone telling a joke than a story. The last paragraph, especially, reads like a punch line. I also noted the abrupt ending. The dialogue is stilted and bizarre. Also, whole thing is obviously and inescapably racist. 2 stars

"The House on the Rynek" by Dermot Chesson Spence (1936): This one was difficult for me review and rate in the way that stories that unexpectedly touch on personal subjects often are. Overall, the prose style works for me. The story is immersive and achieved narrative transport. The creature bit is weird, and it took me a few reads of that paragraph to understand what was being described as happening, but that's not that uncommon for me with weird fiction. The frame is very, very thin, and could stand to be more substantial, but that was not a huge drawback.

As to the role that antisemitism played in the story and how it was handled, my feelings are much more mixed. On the whole, the subject seemed to be treated pretty respectifully. On the other hand, the use of a murdered Jew as plot device in this type of story is uncomfortable at best, espeically from a gentile author, especially in 1936. The way the plot resolves also complicates matters. No star rating on this one.

"I'll Be Glad When I'm Dead" by Charles King (1946): My notes for this one were "fun. Enjoyed story. Narrative voice fit content. No real depth or anything, but a nice bit of fun without any real detractions. 3.5 stars."

"Indigestion" by Barry N. Malzberg (1977): This one was not for me. I didn't like it at all. My issues were not with writing, story structure, or prose quality, but simply personal taste. 1 star

"The Inn" by Rex Ernest (1937): fine little story. Nothing to dislike, but nothing special either. Ending was predicatable. 3 stars.

Three short stories from Some of the Best of tor.com 2021

L'esprit de l'escalier
By Catherynne M. Valente
Orpheus and Euridyce, 21st century style. Loved it.

An Easy Job
By Carrie Vaughn
I don't much like this writing style and I almost gave up before the story got interesting. I'm glad I held on, it was worth it. But the writing is flat and leaves nothing to the imagination. Except for the narrator's gender. Of course it had to be pretty much the only kind of ambiguity that annoys me, but it's just as well, I guess I need to get used to living in a world where gender is not necessarily binary.
Added: well, the summary on tor.com uses he/him, so I guess that's the end of the suspense. I sort of leant that way too but it didn't feel obvious. This wouldn't be possible in French without some serious contortions. I think a famous French writer did it once.

Aaand I finally finished Some of the best of tor.com 2021 with Small Monsters by E. Lily Yu. Which was... OK I guess. It' written like a monster fairy tale, one of the original versions with gory bits. I don't know, something was missing for me, but it was an OK read.

And just as I finished the 2021 edition, here is the Tor.com Spring 2023 Short Fiction Bundle. It's free and I just downloaded it.

I've finished Bloody Scotland, a collection of crime fiction stories that a friend brought back for me from a trip to Scotland this past October.

The collection comprises twelve short stories, each inspired by and centering in some way around a different Scottish landmark. There's an introduction by Crawford at the begninng, and a map of all twelve locations followed by brief descriptions and visiting information for each location at the end. Finally, there are bios for each contributing author.

There's a slightly longer review of the collection as a whole on my thread. On the whole, I liked it, and rated it 4 stars.

My reviews of the twelve stories collected, in order of appearance, are as follows:

"Orkahaugr" by Lin Anderson: 3 stars. This one didn’t suck me in. The prose was clunky on a sentence-level. There was no narrative transport or immersion. The story itself wasn't bad. It would have worked better with better sentence-level writing. The ending worked for me. The presence of the supernatural in this type of collection surprised me. All in all, just okay.

"Ancient and Modern" by Val McDermid: 4 stars. The use of the setting felt natural, not forced or wrenched. The story pulled me in from the beginning and kept me in through the end. The sentence-level prose is good. The ending was satisfying. Good pacing, structure, length. The tension is handled well. I liked this.

"Kissing the Shuttle" by E S Thomson: 5 stars. This one had immersive prose and was great on a sentence-level. The structure works, and the tension is well handled. The setting is integral to story, and doesn’t feel forced or tacked on. The POV and characterization are believable and well rendered. The story pulled me in and kept me in. Nothing felt extraneous; the length is just right. The topic of rape is handled well, treated seriously and with respect, and without reveling in any gory details or depicting it on page at all. The setting feels real and well fleshed out and vivid. The use of sensory detail, especially sound, is very good and works well with theme. Really really good.

"Painting the Forth Bridge" by Doug Johnstone: 3.5 stars. Too much tension, not enough relief for my personal taste. The tension just keeps mounting inexorably until the end. Very interesting play on points of view – the last scene, especially, makes it very clear how different the situation looks from the POV character’s perspective vs everyone else’s perspectives. The POV and main character are well done – the protagonist is round, believable, and nuanced. Very technically good, just too tense for me personally. The way that the tension is handled is clearly deliberate and done to great effect.

"The Last Siege of Bothwell Castle" by Chris Brookmyre: 4 stars. This one starts a bit slow, but gets much better once the actual plot kicks off not far in. Fun, and at many points funny. Plot holds together well. Structure works. Ending was good. Made me smile. I enjoyed reading this.

"Sanctuary" by Sara Sheridan: 4 stars. This one features immersive prose and a well done, very deep character perspective. Well constructed and well written. The ending fits.

"Stevenson’s Candle" by Stuart MacBride: 2 stars. characters are one-dimensional, flat. The story is disjointed and difficult to follow. The twist comes out of nowhere, and does not make sense in hindsight. There is no foreshadowing, just wham. It felt less like a constructed story and more like a series of incidents. Too random. Too much coincidence. Felt pointless, if that makes sense.

"History Lesson" by Gordon Brown: 3 stars. This feels almost like the beginning of a story more than a complete story itself. Too obvious/overt with the themes. Sentence-level prose is clunky. Doesn’t really feel like there’s much point or impact.

"Come Friendly Bombs" by Louise Welsh: 4 stars. Reads less like crime fiction and more like horror. Also feels like lit fic, almost. Not quite sure what we’re meant to think happened, but for once I’m not put off by the ambiguous ending. It works for the story. Prose worked for me, as did tone and characterization.

"The Twa Corbies of Cardross" by Craig Robertson: 3.5 stars. Very stylized, but I like it. The prose does feel forced in places – it works best where there’s just narration and no dialogue. Interesting conceit, and done well, I think. I enjoyed it, but definitely not for everyone. Read a bit like a folk story.

"Nemo Me Impune Lacessit" by Denise Mina: 2.5 stars. The characters felt flat, especially Jake. The story felt unbelievable - it lacked verisimilitude. It also made me really uncomfortable as someone with a pervasive developmental disorder– real disabled, mentally ill, or even just misbehaving children aren’t just evil like this. This feels like a demonizing of mentally ill/developmentally or otherwise disabled kids, and an excuse for the caregivers and parents who abuse and even murder them. Obviously that's me pulling in personal context, but every reader brings their personal context to everything they read. In this case, I just couldn't enjoy the story. I think it would have worked better for me with a supernatural or horror conceit of posession or something like it, to explain Jake's behavior, but not like this. From a technical standpoint, the prose feels detached, but it isn't bad. The pacing and structure are fine. This one is not badly written, just not for me.

"The Return" by Ann Cleeves: 3 stars. All tell and no show. Too detached. Too reliant on the narrator just knowing or figuring stuff out and then relating it to us. The protagonist is too perfect, and the ending is too pat. Not uncomfortable or off-putting to read, just not very good.

>46 Julie_in_the_Library: « Felt pointless, if that makes sense. »

It’s strange, isn’t it? After all why should books have a point? And yet I also feel that way sometimes, I put down a book and it just feels pointless, not necessarily very bad but gratuitous somehow.

>47 FlorenceArt: This didn't feel so much gratuitous as like the author had nothing to say. I think it's to do with the way the story felt random, like a series of coincidences and unfortunate incidents rather than a constructed narrative. I'm not sure that I'm expressing this well.

I'm saving my reviews of the stories from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 for once I've finished the whole volume, since there are only 20 stories.

For now, some more brief reviews of stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"Itching for Action" by Charles Garofalo: 3 stars. The prose is stilted. That keeps the reader at a remove from the story, even as the dialog tries to be naturalistic and slangy. On a prose level, not well written. There is POV jumping without any space breaks between paragraphs of differing POVs, which is jarring and amateurish. The story never outright tells the reader what is actually going on, but the ending implies it so strongly that any reader is sure to understand, which I did appreciate. Mildly unpleasant to read, but not nearly as gross as some other stories in the collection. There were some funny moments and lines.

"Jikininki" by Lafcadio Hearn: 3 stars. I’ve actually read this story before; it’s in Hearn’s collection Kwaidan. I bought it for a college class and read it cover to cover in July 2021. There’s a brief review of the collection as a whole on my 2021 thread. As to this story and my thoughts on it this time around: there was no narrative transport or immersion in the story. The prose style is formal and removed. We are kept at a distance and not given a window into any character’s interiority. The story itself is interesting enough, though I think readers with more background and understanding of Japanese culture and religion will get much more out of it than I did.

"John Mortonson's Funeral" by Ambrose Bierce: 1.5 stars. Not really a story, more of a single scene. Microfiction rather than short story. Most of the scene is just an irony-tinged and rather mean description of a funeral. And then, out of absolutely nowhere, it turns out the deceased's cat was in the casket and ate his face. No narrative arc or structure, no real point to the story. Just judgy meaness followed by shock value.

"The Keen Eyes and Ears of Kara Kedi" by Claude Farrère: 2.5 stars. translation of La peur du chat 1907, no translator attributed. Strange. I liked the prose style - not distracting or clunky. Diary format kept me from true immersion. Not quite sure what happened, and finished the story confused, which I did not like. Ending was not satisfying.

"The Kelpie" by Manly Wade Wellman: 3 stars. the bit where Lu sees the kelpie climbing out of the tank is genuinely creepy. Fun little story, but nothing special.

"Ladies in Waiting" by Hugh B Cave: 2.5 stars. Nothing wrong with it, just not for me. Too sexual.

"Laura" by Saki: 1 star. reads more like a joke with a punchline than a short story, and racist to boot. My 2022 notes: “did not like. Satire. Fascile, surface, and also not funny. Everything felt flat. More a joke than a story.”

"Left by the Tide" by Edward E. Schiff: 3 stars. Fine; nothing special. Generic

"The Lesser Brethren Mourn" by Seabury Quinn: 4 stars. I liked it. Not really sure it’s horror, or even that creepy, by the end, but I liked it. It’s definitely weird, perhaps even Weird, but also comforting and warm. I like the first person POV voice, and the prose gives it a good sense of setting and character. Well written.

"The Marmot" by Alison V. Harding: 3 stars. a little racist. Otherwise average

"Metzengerstein" by Edgar Allen Poe: 1 star. Difficult to parse. Did nothing for me.

"Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim: 2.5 stars. Just not very good.

>49 Julie_in_the_Library: Doesn’t sound like you’re enjoying this book much, or am I wrong?

>50 FlorenceArt: It's very, very varied in quality. A lot of the stories are just average, or even bad. But there are also some that I enjoy, and some that are genuinely very good.

Also, in a collection this big, and for which the stories weren't selected for literary quality but for genre/trope and to fill a required number (100), I'd expect 3 stars (average) to be my most common rating overall.

I'm also pretty new to the genres included (Weird Fiction and certain types of horror), and it serves as a pretty good introduction/broad overview to get me started, which is something I find merit in even if I'm not enjoying every story.

So am I enjoying the book much? *shrugs* Depends on the day and the stories that come up in the alphabetical order they're arranged in.

I loved Claire Keegan’s Antarctica. The first in the collection is such a shock after reading novels set in rural Ireland, far away from a world of city lust and sexual adventure. For a moment there I thought there must be two Claire Keegan’s.

The stories are set in Ireland, England and the US. I was so used to seeing Kegan as entrenched Irish through and through, I was surprised at how easily her style switched seamlessly across the Atlantic.

Each story is a gen. Each one a slice of ordinary life a little off-skew

>52 kjuliff: Sounds wonderful! I added it to my reader as it’s included in my subscription.

>51 Julie_in_the_Library: "the stories weren't selected for literary quality but for genre/trope"

Genre and literary quality are, of course, not mutually exclusive. There is romance, mystery, SF, horror, western, etc. of great quality; there is romance... that is utter schlock. There's a lot of schlocky literary fiction, too, and we are too often eager to forget that "literary fiction" is just as much a genre as the others.

>54 KeithChaffee: Oh, I'm well aware. I meant in comparison to something like The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, where the stories are all going to be high quality.

>54 KeithChaffee: >55 Julie_in_the_Library: I also think that budget might have been a significant factor in which stories were chosen for 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories. The ratio of stories in the public domain to those still in copyright is suggestive.

Reading this anthology feels a little bit like treasure hunting.

Have read:
The Forester's Daughter by Claire Keegan (Faber Stories, Irish) Read twice!
Antarctica by Claire Keegan (1999; short fiction)

She is an amazing short fiction writer, I just chased down another collection that has just been reprinted: Walk the Blue Fields: Stories

I’ve just finished listening to Claire Keegan’ latest short story, So Late in the Day which was brilliantly read by Claire Keegan in the New Yorker Fiction podcast of July 1 this year, and published in the New Yorker in February 2022. I write more about it in my thread, but just had to mention it here as it’s Keegan at her best. And for George Saunders lovers, it’s worth listening to, as a fair part of the podcast contains a conversation about the story between Saunders and the podcast presenter. Saunders had chosen Late in the Day but had been amable to read it aloud.

Sheer Keagan, sheer brilliance.

I can’t wait for Keegan’s next collection of short stories, due to be published in November, under the same title of Late in the Day,

>58 kjuliff: I have Antarctica on my reader, must get to it soon.

I just read The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar
In The Long List Anthology 1
I liked it very much, it's a moving and delicately told story about a teenager living in difficult times. I'm saying this very badly, just go and read it 😊

oh my yes!I didn't want it to end. did you read the book she cowrote this is how you lose the time war? Magnificent, just the way this book is. I didn't realized she wrote anything else. Thanks so much for suggesting that. I now want to read the honey month !

No, I haven’t read anything else from her. Thanks for the references!

she wrote time war with Max Goldstone; its a story about two spies of sorts who communicate thro letters. You really notice the diff in their own writiing style here but the two styles work really well together

I see, that’s interesting. I think Kobo tried to push that book to me but I wasn’t too keen. I read one book by Max Gladstone and liked it, and then tried to read the next in the series but grew tired of the writing style and gave it up. I might give this one a try.

honey month didn't grab me but would like to read more of here

Now reading the Djinn falls in love and other storiesAuthors include Claire North, Neil Gaiman, Amal El-Mohtar, Helene Wecker (author of the golem and the jinni and hidden palace) and Nnedi Okorafor. havent gotten to Amals story yet but the first three have been fun

I read Neil Gaiman's collection Fragile Things last year. I think I reviewed the collection as a whole in my 2022 Club Read thread, but I definitely never posted my thoughts on the individual stories.

I've now posted those thoughts in my short story review thread in the Short Stories group, in case anyone wants to go take a look.

I've also posted my reviews of the first 28 stories in 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories - the ones that I read in 2022 - on my short story review thread in the Short Stories group.

Reading Two Nurses, Smoking and Instructions for a Funeral by David Means. I’m not one myself, but Dog Lovers will live the one about the daschund and . It truly touched my non-dog-lover heart.

>57 avaland: The Forester's Daughter isn’t out in audio yet. (I can’t read print), but I’ve loved all her other books

A special 15th anniversary edition of tor.com's anthology "Some of the best of tor.com" is available for download for a limited time:

Download the Tor.com 15th Anniversary Short Fiction Bundle.

It's free in ebook format, and all the stories are also available on the site I think. I haven't started reading them.

Also, the blog post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: June 2023 is up, and I haven't looked at the list yet either.

OMG the tale of ash in seven birds by Amal El-Mohtar is hauntingly sad, its easy to see the analogy to people kept under a cruel nation in these birds, Its from the Djinn falls in love and other stories Odd I dont see a jinn unless its the fire. Anyway read this.

Some more brief reviews of stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"Mive" by Carl Jacobi (1928): 3.5 stars. Opening description of the marsh is very good. Very atmospheric. Went weird, but not in a bad way. I enjoyed it.

"The Moon-Slave" by Barry Pain (1901): 3.5 stars. I enjoyed it. Ending reveal (it was the devil!) came out of nowhere but for one (1) line about the protagonist forgetting the words to a xtian prayer. All other signs pointed to the villain being the Moon itself right up until literally the last line of the story. The randomness of that plot twist kept this from a full 4 stars.

"Monsters in the Night" by Clark Ashton Smith (1954): 3.5 stars. Fun, quick little story. I enjoyed it.

"Mother of Monsters" (translation of La mère aux monstres) by Guy de Maupassant, translator from the French uncredited (1883, translation 1903): 1 star. Judgy, misogynist, ableist, classist. I did not enjoy it at all. The only positive thing I can say about this story is that the sentence-level prose is not bad.

"Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith (1938): 3 stars. Vivid, descriptive prose. Ending worked for story. A little gross, but not too bad. I didn’t really enjoy it, though.

"Mummy" by Kelsey Percival Kitchel (1929): 3 stars. Consistent first person narrative voice. Cliché plot, at least by today’s standards, just different set dressing. Nothing special, but also not bad.

"My Father, the Cat" by Henry Slesar (1957): 4 stars. Well written. Not horror, or even Weird Fiction. More fairy-tale or fantasy vibes. Tragic, sad. Very good. I liked it.

"The Necromancer" by Arthur Gray (1912): 2.5 stars. Overly wordy, formal, archaic prose. Took more effort to follow than I prefer, but I managed. Not very interesting or engaging.

More brief reviews of stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"Night Shapes" by Robert Weinberg (1994): 2.5 stars. Amateurish. No immersion. Things just happen to the protagonist. No active choices from him affect the story.

"The Owl on the Moor" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer (1928): 3.5 stars. Prose is good. Enjoyed reading, through ending was expected. Fun but predictable, and the ending was too abrupt for frame narrative. No one ends a letter like that.

"The Phantom Drug" by A. W. Kapfer (1926): 3 stars. Silly; impossible to suspend disbelief with modern medical knowledge. Fun though.

"The Place of Hairy Death" by Anthony M. Rud (1934): 3.5 stars. Good up to the last line, which I don’t understand. Do mouse bites kill instantly? Well written, consistent narrative voice. Interesting and entertaining. Would be 4 stars if not for confusing ending.

"The Plant-Thing" by R. G. Macready (1925): 2 stars. Ending was abrupt. Story felt unfinished. Professor losing control of the plant-thing while the narrator was there, and so quickly, was too convenient and contrived. The plot, such as it is, is very thin and weak.

"The Power of the Dog" by G. G. Pendarves (1927): 3 stars. Well structured plot, with a fitting ending stinger. Prose is fine but stiff.

"A Problem of the Dark" by Frances Arthur (1927): 3 stars. Prose is fine. Story is structured fine. “Scientific” explanation of nightmare monster ghost thing is silly.

"Professor Jonkin's Cannibal Plant" by Howard R. Garis (1905): 3 stars. The word cannibal does not mean what Garis thinks it means. Possible inspiration for Little Shop of Horrors? Fun. I enjoyed it. Construction of story felt a bit weak.

"The Quare Gander" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1975): 1.5 stars. The story could have been fun from what little I could make out, but the phonetically written out dialect makes it very difficult to parse and unpleasant to read.

Two stories from Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: June 2023.

I read the shortest one first and enjoyed it: An Obituary to Birdsong by Tehnuka. Sad and poetic.

Why You Should Consider Me for Your Master of Dark Arts Program was a bit of a disappointment. It was off to a great start but it didn't manage to keep the dark humor working, and the ending felt flat.

More brief reviews of stories from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"The Real Wolf" by Thomas Ligotti (1988): 3 stars. Interesting use of the present tense first person.

"The Sacrifice" by Miroslaw Lipinski (1988): 3 stars. Interesting. Consistent narrative voice. A little detached.

"The Seeds from Outside" by Edmond Hamilton (1937): 3.5 stars. Narration gives the story a fable-like feel despite the fact that it’s sci-fi rather than fantasy. This one was sad, rather than scary, creepy, or horrific. I liked it.

"Seeing the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1984): 2.5 stars. Difficult to follow. Too surreal for my taste. Good sense of creeping, anticipatory horror, though.

"Seven Drops of Blood" by H. F. Jamison (1930): 1.5 stars. Difficult to follow. TWay too surreal for me. Did not enjoy.

Loved djinn in love Amal El-Mohtar's writing was incredible as was Claire Norths another fav author wish Gaiman used a new story for this anthology instead of a story from American Gods which I read and liked Rest of the stories were good. Id recommend

A new to me author, Jaimie Quarto wrote a story in this weeks NewYorker was just stunning. yogurt days (no touchstone) she has short story collection I want to show you more anyone hear read it?

Thanks for your comments on The Djinn Falls in Love. I just added it to my wishlist but I already have too many short stories and collections lined up on my reader…

Another excellent short story from tor.com, found in The Long List Anthology:

A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone

I just found this great thread, thanks FlorenceArt for starting it!

The last short-story I read (well it seems it's a novelette technically, sorry for those of you who prefer shorter fiction) was Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler.
I liked it.
This is the fourth story of his I read and I'm beginning to see why he's attracting so much attention.

I recently registered to Clarkesworld magazine to support them. I don't know if I'll be able to read all the stories but I'll report here on the ones I do read!

Yesterday evening I read You have never been here by M. Rickert, published in Lightspeed magazine.
I'm not sure what the story was about or what the end means, but it was really well written and got me captivated.
It's a fantasy story (well the author describes it as slipstream, which I didn't know about and apparently means speculative fiction that cannot be ascribed to the science fiction or fantasy genre) about somebody who's sick and thinks of the people he sees as bodies, not persons, and who has been in a strange hospital...

I read another story by her earlier this year, This world is made for monsters. I found it really well written but did not understand the ending _at all_ and in that case that spoiled the story for me.

This is not a short story and apparently not even a novelette, so not the main focus of this thread as it's a very short novella, but I wanted to give a shoutout for Suzanne Palmer's The secret life of bots series.

So far it consists of two novelette and the third one which I just read. These stories are really interesting, funny and heartwarming. They are about a bot, Bot 9, serving on a spaceship, who tends to take more autonomy from the orders it is given that is expected, which leads to much frustration from its ship, but then it is faced with extraordinary situations.

I highly recommend the three stories. In particular I think they should appeal to those who like Murderbot.

>80 chlorine: Sounds interesting! I don’t know where you read them, but I found the first one on the Kobo shop inside Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 132. And it looks like it won the Hugo. I’ll probably get to it some day but I have so many magazines and collections to read already…

And I might as well mention the Shadow Unit series, although it's maybe a little off topic too. It's designed as "a television show disguised as a series of short stories: TV that you read", and I enjoyed the first book very much. I reviewed it on my CR thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/347182#8292841

>80 chlorine: I use the dotepub extensions to transform these stories which are available on line into epub and then read them on my ereader. I took a subscription to Clarkesworld Magazine recently because I felt like I was downloading so many of their stories I wanted to give something back. :) Of course now I don't have time to read the magazines...

I don't read a lot of short stories, but I did read this collection last month and thought I would share here.



Ten years of the Caine Prize for African writing : plus J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ben Okri edited by Chris Brazier
Published 2009, New Internationalist Publications, 205 p.

The Caine Prize for African Writing is named after Sir Michael Caine, who chaired the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. Nicknamed the African Booker, the Caine Prize is awarded every year for the best short story by an African author, published in English. The Prize seeks to connect budding African authors with publishers in England and America. Each year the shortlist is published in an anthology along with the stories written at the Caine Prize Workshops. This particular anthology contains the first ten prize winners from 2000-2009, as well as short stories by Nobel Laureates J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, and Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri.

The fourteen stories cover a wide variety of perspectives and styles, but the authors were all from one of six countries. I was a bit surprised that there hadn't been winners from a broader selection of countries, but this collection only represents a single decade, so perhaps there has been a wider range since then. Themes of dislocation, the effects of colonization, and war were omnipresent.

"The Ultimate Safari" by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) is told from the perspective of a child who is escaping with his grandmother and siblings through a game preserve to a refugee camp in a neighboring country. This story was, predictably, very good.

"Nietverloren" by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) is about a man reflecting on his grandparents farm, once a source of employment and food, which devolved into a tourist attraction for foreigners.

"Incidents at the Shrine" by Ben Okri (Nigeria) is about a salaryman who is laid off and returns to his village where strange and otherworldly things are happening at the local shrine.

"The Museum" by Leila Aboulela (Sudan) was one of my favorite stories. It's about a young woman who is studying statistics in Edinburgh and trying to navigate between her old world and her new.

"Love Poems" by Helon Habila (Nigeria) is written from the perspective of a journalist and poet, imprisoned for reporting on a demonstration. His warder forces him to write poetry to the woman he wishes to seduce. Also very good.

"Discovering Home" by Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya) is about a young man returning to his village in Kenya and then going to a family reunion in Uganda after having lived in Cape Town for a year.

"Weight of Whispers" by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) was difficult to read. It's about a princeling who flees his country, which has descending into chaos and genocide after the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi is shot down and both men killed. The prince goes from being a diplomat more at home in Europe than Africa, to being a refugee haunted by the role he may have unwittingly(?) played in inciting the violence. His mother, sister, and fiancée pay a terrible price for their life of privilege.

"Seventh Street Alchemy" by Brian Chikwava (Zimbabwe) is about several people whose lives intersect in various ways over the course of a few days.

"Monday Morning" by Segun Afolabi (Nigeria) is about a refuge family in London trying to adapt to their new life.

"Jungfrau" by Mary Watson (South Africa) is told from the perspective of a young girl whose mother teaches children in the townships. She is both jealous of her mother's attentions and happy to be left in the company of her father and glamourous aunt.

"Jambula Tree" by Monica Arac de Nyeko (Uganda) is a stream of consciousness narrative of a girl waiting for her childhood girlfriend and nascent lover to return from abroad.

"Poison" by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa) reads like a dystopian story about a young woman fleeing Cape Town after an explosion at a chemical plant.

"Waiting" by EC Osondu (Nigeria) is about a boy waiting in a refugee camp, hoping to be adopted by a family abroad.

"An Emissary" by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) is a short social and ecological commentary framed around a young couple on their way to a rave.

What were your favorite short stories this year? Here is my list:

Questions Asked In The Belly of the World by A. T. Greenblatt, in Some of the best of Tor.com 2021
Husband Number Five in Granta magazine
The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar, in The Long List Anthology 1

>85 FlorenceArt: I liked Questions Asked in the belly of the World very much indeed! I've read many short stories and started logging them together with a rating so I will be able to make a list of my favorite this year, I'll try and do that this weekend.

Loved the truth about owls , also read her honey month which I thought was quite delightful.

Currently reading Best American Short Stories 2023 , and Best American science fiction 2023not far into them but Ill report back

I've been remiss about crossposting my short story reviews here, so I've got quite a few. Starting with some from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories:

"Short and Nasty" by Darrell Schweitzer (1991): 4 stars. I liked it. The prrose could use some more commas, but very readable. And not just readable, enjoyable. Had a distinct voice and feel to it. The characters and their relationships and history were well-drawn and felt believably real. Plot is well constructed. Pacing is handled well. Frame works. I wasn’t frightened or even creeped out, despite it clearly being a horror story, but that’s a plus for me, not a minus.

"The Silver Knife" by Ralph Allen Lang (1932): 3 stars. set in Lovecraft’s Cthullo Mythos universe. Readable prose that fades into the background. Entertaining enough, but nothing special. Ends about how you expect. No narrative transport or immersion.

"The Sky Garden" by Peter Cannon (1989): 3.5 stars. Interesting. I liked it. I actively enjoyed the sentence level prose on this one. Well written. Pacing is handled well. Character and POV are well done. The setting is vividly described, and the milieu is portrayed very well. Would be 4 stars if not for the nagging issues regarding the two narratives (the manuscript described in the story and the frame narrative around the story itself): why did Christopher bother writing his manuscript and having the narrator read it in the first place? And why did the narrator bother to write his frame narrative, and how did it end up in his desk after the events of the story? These holes bothered me enough to keep me from rating this 4 stars, but I can see other readers not being bothered as much, or even at all.

"Smoke Fantasy" by Thomas R. Jordan (1939): 3 stars. Jump-scares really don’t work in prose the way they do on screen. Or, at least, this one didn’t. It was obvious where the story was going very early on. I did enjoy the meta vibe of a (very) short story about a short story writer having difficulty with his writing, but I also couldn’t help but feel like the story itself was inspired by the actual author finding himself in the same jam as his protagonist. It felt a little more like the result of a writing exercise than a deliberately crafted short story. So short that even those who don’t like it will find it difficult to resent any time wasted reading it.

"Smudge Makes a New Best Friend" by Peter Cannon (1994): 3 stars. Easy read. I saw where it was going just before it got there, which felt satisfying. The ending worked. I felt no emotional attachment to any of the characters. No real narrative transport. Nothing special, but fun enough.

"Snail Ghost" by Will Murray (1985): 1 star. I did not enjoy reading this one. Too confusing, surreal, and alienating for my taste. Not bad, inherently, but definitely not for me.

"Something Nasty" by William F. Nolan (1985): 4 stars. Fun, interesting. I liked the ending. A genuinely good story that I enjoyed reading.

"The Specter Spiders" by W. J. Wintle (1921): 1 star. The entire plot is essentially Greedy Jewish Money-lender Gets What’s Coming to Him. Also too long. I actively disliked this.

"The Spider of Guyana" (1899 translation of "L'araignée-crabe" by Emile Erckmann 1860) translated by Alexandre Chatrian (1860, 1899): 2 stars. Nothing special, and I didn’t enjoy reading it. Too long. Not bad, or badly written, but not for me.

"Spidertalk" by Steve Rasnic Tem (1984): 2.5 stars. I found this story unpleasant to read. I was not clear on what actually happened. The story was too surreal for me, personally. It isn’t badly written – it sets the mood and tone very well, and holds together, and the prose is fine. I just didn’t like it.

"The Tabernacle" by Henry S. Whitehead (1930): 2 stars. I don’t think I understood this at all. I don’t have the cultural context or background knowledge necessary to even understand the plot fully, let alone get the nuances, implications, and themes, or appreciate the story. The prose was fine, as were the structure and the characterization. It was not unpleasant to read. But it did nothing for me.

"Take Me, for Instance" by Hugh B. Cave (1974): 3 stars. The plot, pacing, and structure all work well. The dialogue is well done, and the characterization is good. The prose is fine. It’s a solid story. It just rubs me the wrong way. I’m oversensitive about any whiff of anti-intellectualism.

"That Only a Mother Could Love" by Mollie L. Burleson (1994): 3 stars. Not an unpleasant read. Some interesting and fun phrasing in the prose. The prose was smooth, easy to read, but oddly detached. No narrative transport. Felt almost fairy-tale like. I did see where it was going pretty early on, but that’s not a bad thing. All in all, not bad, but not quite good either - average.

"There Was Soot on the Cat" by Suzanne Pickett (1952): 3 stars. Not unpleasant, but nothing special

And to finish, some Tor.com originals:

Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale by Kathleen Jennings (2022): 2.5 stars. I would call this a poem or prose-poem rather than a story. There is no narrative, nor are there any characters. Considered as a poem, it’s not bad, though it’s not my preferred type of poetry. It’s an interesting look at fairy-tales, fairy-tale retellings, and stories generally. But it is not, itself, a story.

The Canadian Miracle by Cory Doctorow (2023): 4.5 stars. Unsurprisingly, given the author, very, very good. Doctorow paints a disturbingly plausible near-future that’s both dark but also filled with the hope of a better future. The story gripped me from start to finish. Doctorow exercises excellent control over the tension, letting it build throughout the story without allowing it to become so overwhelming I had to look away, as some other authors do. I absolutely loved the ending. Absolutely what I needed by the time I got there, and in perfect keeping with the themes, tone, and worldbuilding.

On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo (2023): 4 stars. A good story set in an interesting, vivid, believable world with well-rendered, fun characters. I enjoyed reading this.

The Locked Coffin: A Judge Dee Mystery by Lavie Tidhar (2023): 4 stars. An enjoyable story with intriguing worldbuilding, fun characters, and entertaining prose. I look forward to reading more Judge Dee stories.

>88 Julie_in_the_Library: I've enjoyed the Judge Dee stories I've read so far and am also looking forward to reading more of them. I've also heard a lot of good about Nghi Vo's stories but have yet to get to one.

>89 chlorine: I'd definitely reccommend "On the Fox Roads." It was very good.

I have some more reviews from 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories. I'm approaching the end, now - 95 down, 5 to go

"There’s No Such Thing as Monsters" by Steve Rasnic Tem (1984): 3.5 stars. Interesting premise. Quick read. Left me wanting to know more.

"The Throwback" by F. Orlin Tremaine (1926): 3 stars. Nice and short. Easy to read and easy enough to follow, though some more concrete information about the date and place it’s set would have been nice for context. Read a lot like a campfire story. Not bad, but ultimately forgettable.

"The Toad Idol" by Kirk Mashburn (1935): 2.5 stars. Easy to read, not too long, could have been average, but the ending killed it for me. It just felt too silly and out of nowhere.

"Tzo-Lin's Nightingales" by Ben Belitt (1931): 3.5 stars. Very effective, vivid descriptive prose. Excellent sensory detail and scene setting. This would have been a 4 star story but for the ending, which confused me. I didn’t really understand what happened, which is not something I enjoy in a reading experience. Still, I enjoyed reading the story right up to the end, so 3.5.

"The Unnameable" by H.P. Lovecraft (1925): 3 stars. Surprisingly and interestingly meta, witty, entertaining, and only a tiny bit antisemitic.

"The Vampire Maid" by Hume Nisbet (1890): 3 stars. Fun little vampire story, but nothing special. Short and sweet. Read a bit like something you’d tell around a campfire.

Since I started recording the short-stories I read at the end of March, I've read 192 short stories and novelettes from 125 different authors, the very vast majority of them speculative fiction.

My favorite ones are:
The Peacemaker by Gardner Dozois
Notes to a Version of Myself, hidden in Symphonie Fantastique Scores throughout the Multiverse by Aimee Picchi
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
A heap of Broken Images by Sunny Moraine.

I'd like to read more stuff by Picchi and Moraine in the future.

are we continuin this thread in 2024? if so link pls

https://www.librarything.com/topic/355959 :)