Book picks similar to
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
short-stories
horror
fiction
fantasy
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories
Kelly Barnhill - 2018
When Mrs. Sorensen’s husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch.” In “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. “Dreadful Young Ladies” demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination. In “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake,” a witch is haunted by the deadly repercussions of a spell. “The Insect and the Astronomer” upends expectations about good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, love and longing. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella The Unlicensed Magician introduces the secret magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead—with thematic echoes of Barnhill’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon.
A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
Victor LaValleTananarive Due - 2019
K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, and more.
For many Americans, imagining a bright future has always been an act of resistance. A People's Future of the United States presents twenty never-before-published stories by a diverse group of writers, featuring voices both new and well-established. These stories imagine their characters fighting everything from government surveillance, to corporate cities, to climate change disasters, to nuclear wars. But fear not: A People's Future also invites readers into visionary futures in which the country is shaped by justice, equity, and joy.Edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, this collection features a glittering landscape of moving, visionary stories written from the perspective of people of color, indigenous writers, women, queer & trans people, Muslims and other people whose lives are often at risk.Contributors include: Violet Allen, Charlie Jane Anders, Ashok K. Banker, Tobias S. Buckell, Tananarive Due, Omar El Akkad, Jamie Ford, Maria Dahvana Headley, Hugh Howey, Lizz Huerta, Justina Ireland, N. K. Jemisin, Alice Sola Kim, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Daniel José Older, Malka Older, Gabby Rivera, A. Merc Rustad, Kai Cheng Thom, Catherynne M. Valente, Daniel H. Wilson, G. Willow Wilson, and Charles Yu.
The Doll's Alphabet
Camilla Grudova - 2017
Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark.In Unstitching, a feminist revolution takes place. In Waxy, a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In Agata's Machine, two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In Notes from a Spider, a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city.By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.Content:- Unstitching (2017)- The Mouse Queen (2017)- The Gothic Society (2017)- Waxy (2016)- The Doll's Alphabet (2017)- The Mermaid (2017)- Agata's Machine (2015)- Rhinoceros (2017)- The Sad Tale of the Sconce (2017)- Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead (2017)- Hungarian Sprats (2017)- The Moth Emporium (2017)- Notes from a Spider (2017)
If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha - 2020
"Even as a girl, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face... even before a fortune-teller told me so." Kyuri is a beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a "room salon," an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood.Her roomate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the super-wealthy heir to one of Korea's biggest companies.Down the hall in their apartment building lives Ara, a hair stylist for whom two preoccupations sustain her: obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that is commonplace.And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to get pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise and educate in the cutthroat economy.Together, their stories tell a tale that's seemingly unfamiliar, yet unmistakably universal in the way that their tentative friendships may have to be their saving grace.
The Mythic Dream
Dominik ParisienKat Howard - 2019
From Hades and Persephone to Kali, from Loki to Inanna, this anthology explores retellings of myths across cultures and civilizations. Featuring award-winning and critically acclaimed writers such as Seanan McGuire, Naomi Novik, Rebecca Roanhorse, JY Yang, Alyssa Wong, Indrapramit Das, Carlos Hernandez, Sarah Gailey, Ann Leckie, John Chu, Ursula Vernon, Carmen Maria Machado, Stephen Graham Jones, Arkady Martine, Amal El-Mohtar, Jeffrey Ford, and more, The Mythic Dream is sure to become a new classic.
The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories
Mahvesh MuradJames Smythe - 2017
Eavesdropping and exploring; savaging our bodies, saving our souls. They are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends. Some have called them genies: these are the Djinn. And they are everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every history has them hiding in their dark places. There is no part of the world that does not know them.They are the Djinn. They are among us.With stories from: Nnedi Okorafor, Neil Gaiman, Helene Wecker, Amal El-Mohtar, Catherine King, Claire North, E.J. Swift, Hermes (trans. Robin Moger), Jamal Mahjoub, James Smythe, J.Y. Yang, Kamila Shamsie, Kirsty Logan, K.J. Parker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Maria Dahvana Headley, Monica Byrne, Saad Hossein, Sami Shah, Sophia Al-Maria and Usman Malik.
The Starlit Wood
Dominik ParisienKarin Tidbeck - 2016
It’s how so many of our most beloved stories start.Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d’Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have crafted all sorts of tales that have always found a place in our hearts.Now a new generation of storytellers have taken up the mantle that the masters created and shaped their stories into something startling and electrifying.Packed with award-winning authors, this anthology explores an array of fairy tales in startling and innovative ways, in genres and settings both traditional and unusual, including science fiction, western, and post-apocalyptic as well as traditional fantasy and contemporary horror.From the woods to the stars, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales takes readers on a journey at once unexpected and familiar, as a diverse group of writers explore some of our most beloved tales in new ways across genres and styles.
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector - 2015
Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Lispector’s stories take us through their lives—and ours.From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.
Home Remedies
Xuan Juliana Wang - 2019
Young, reckless, and catapulted toward uncertain futures, here is the new face of Chinese youth on a quest for every kind of freedom.From a crowded apartment on Mott Street, where an immigrant family raises its first real Americans, to a pair of divers at the Beijing Olympics poised at the edge of success and self-discovery, Wang’s unforgettable characters – with their unusual careers, unconventional sex lives and fantastical technologies – share the bold hope that, no matter where they’ve come from, their lives too can be extraordinary.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Natsuko Imamura - 2019
She is observed at all times by the undetected narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. From a distance the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. Like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, she is single, she lives in a small, run-down apartment, and she is short on money. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan lures her to a job where she herself works, as a hotel housekeeper; soon the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss. Unfortunately, no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That's the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt.Studiously deadpan, highly original, and unsettling, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores the dynamics of envy, the mechanisms of power in the workplace, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, voyeuristic narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.
The Time Traveler's Almanac
Ann VanderMeer - 2013
Gathered into one volume by intrepid chrononauts and world-renowned anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, this book compiles more than a century's worth of literary travels into the past and the future that will serve to reacquaint readers with beloved classics of the time travel genre and introduce them to thrilling contemporary innovations.This marvelous volume includes nearly seventy journeys through time from authors such as Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, H. G. Wells, and Connie Willis, as well as helpful non-fiction articles original to this volume (such as Charles Yu's "Top Ten Tips For Time Travelers").In fact, this book is like a time machine of its very own, covering millions of years of Earth's history from the age of the dinosaurs through to strange and fascinating futures, spanning the ages from the beginning of time to its very end. The Time Traveler's Almanac is the ultimate anthology for the time traveler in your life.
Dark Water
Kōji Suzuki - 1996
The first story in this collection has been adapted to film (Dark Water, Walter Salles), and another, "Adrift" is currently in production with Dimension Films.
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Edogawa Rampo - 1956
Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo's best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic, the perverse, and the strange, in a marvelous homage to Rampo's literary 'mentor', Edgar Allan Poe.
Meet Me in the Future: Stories
Kameron Hurley - 2019
Yes, it will be dangerous, frequently brutal, and often devastating. But it’s also savagely funny, deliriously strange, and absolutely brimming with adventure.In these edgy, unexpected tales, a body-hopping mercenary avenges his pet elephant, and an orphan falls in love with a sentient starship. Fighters ally to power a reality-bending engine, and a swamp-dwelling introvert tries to save the world—from her plague-casting former wife.So come meet Kameron Hurley in the future. The version she's created here is weirder—and far more hopeful—than you could ever imagine.
The Refrigerator Monologues
Catherynne M. Valente - 2017
A ferocious riff on women in superhero comics.A series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who’s ever been “refrigerated”: comic book women who are killed, raped, brainwashed, driven mad, disabled, or had their powers taken so that a male superhero’s storyline will progress.