"A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story."
~Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon's blurb on the front cover sums up this story collection well:
"A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story."
Dark wonders, surreal and often terrifyingly handsome; beautifully quirky and so damn fun. This was my "bathroom book" for many months, but I can't recommend it as a bathroom book.The reason is that there are some long stories in here. But they ALL worth reading.
I recommend it for the bus or train, or for curling up on the sofa, or as a before bedtime read.
Here is a list of my favorite stories from the book:
- A Hard Truth About Waste Management, by Sumanth Prabhaker
- Flushing your trash down the toilet will piss off whatever lives there. Bad idea.
- The Whipping, by Julia Elliot
- Weird parents, weirder children, and mutant neighbors. A strange girl awaiting punishment narrates this oddity.
- A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian
- Hauntingly beautiful.
- Draco Compestris, by Sarah Monette
- Because dragon skeletons and strange children nobody sees (or maybe they just don't want to).
- The Chinese Boy, by Ann Stapleton
- A Rear Window type story with a paralyzed man and his daughter who witness a bank teller's descent to attempted suicide, a shared madness of all three.
- First Kisses from Beyond the Grave, by Nik Houser
- High school for the dead. But not the anime.
- A Troop [Sic] of Baboons, by Tyler Smith
- Baboons finally gain sentience and what do they do? CHAOS THEATER. Well, that's what I call it.
- Pieces of Scheherazade, by Nicole Kornher-Stace
- I love Nicole Kornher-Stace's work.Her book Archivist Wasp was one of my favorite books of 2017-2018. I finished reading it at the first of the year. Her contribution to this anthology is a retelling of the Thousand and One Nights story, with tattoos.
- The Man Who Married a Tree, by Tony D'Souza
- I call this weird backwoods (quite literally) fiction. It made me think there should be a lumberpunk genre.
- A Fable with Slips of White Paper, by Kevin Brockmeier
- Imagine going to a thrift store and buying the overcoat that used to belong to God. It's like that.
- Lazy Taekos, by Geoffrey A. Landis
- Lazy Taekos is not so good with his hands, and he is lazy, but he has a trick and a riddle or two up his sleeve. Will it be enough to win him the princess?
- Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot, by Daniel Alarcon.
- An alternate history that imagines a modern era where Abraham Lincoln was president and still assassinated. Lived through the recollections and grief of his male lover as his current relationship is ending. Poignant and strange.
I picked up a used copy of this book on Amazon for about five bucks, Unfortunately, there is no Kindle edition. It's well worth grabbing a used copy of this great weird as fuck little anthology for your bedside or commuter reading pleasure.
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