Story Recommendations – July 2021

So… July has been another slow month, both when it comes to the amount of short stories I managed to read and in regards to finding gems amongst those stories. I really should stop being surprised by this since it’s the same issue every summer. Though, I still can’t quite wrap my head around why the summer holiday means I somehow have less time to read?

Anyway, this is a pityful short recommendations posts, but I hope you’ll still find something you might enjoy. And as always, if you have any suggestions for stories you think deserve to be on next month’s list (yes, even your own published stories), new or old, let me know in the comments.

Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction): Since finding recommendable stories wasn’t going great, I decided to dig through the archives, re-read an old favorite or two. So I found this gem I thought I would share with you all.

If you’re into fantasy and haven’t read Paper Menagerie, you really should get right to it. It is the first (and to my knowledge, only) story to sweep the “Best Short Story” category at all three of the major SF&F awards (Hugos, Nebulas, and World Fantasy Awards).

And even if you’re not normally into fantasy, it is well worth reading. Sure it’s a story which relies heavily on its magic element (which is really cool and interesting, btw — origami that comes alive), but it’s also a story that shows how difficult it can be to fit in in a foreign culture, a story with an incredible gut-punch emotional ending, and a story that is simply as close to perfect as they get.

So if you think fantasy is still all elves and orcs, you should definitely read Paper Menagerie and see just how diverse the genre truly is. (There’s nothing wrong with Tolkienesque fantasy, but I do love that fantasy has so many other stories and ideas to show as well.)

The Old Woman and the Tea by Marie Brennan (DSF): This story offered a very original blend of ideas, the atrocities of the Chinese cultural revolution mixed with traditional East Asian folklore: the Red Guards are chasing down old dieties holding back the progress of the nation.

The plot was so-so, with the author having to explain directly what the ending meant in the final paragraph, because said ending didn’t really make sense without specific knowledge about certain Chinese dieties. The prose was solid, though, and the premise alone was interesting enough that I really enjoyed reading the story.

City Above, City Below by Aimee Ogden (DSF): “On a clear day, when the wind stays home to rest and the waters of the lake go un-stirred, it’s possible to cross from the City-Above to the City-Below.”

Wow! What an opening. I mean, that’s just stunning prose. And on top of that, it perfectly introduces the setting and speculative elment and brings forth the the fairy tale-like tone of the story (which I absolutely loved, btw).

And Ogden does it again and again, with lines like this one: “when the sun has begun to wake but not yet fully roused from its bed. The passage is easiest then, when there is neither night nor day and nothing is either fully one thing or the other.”

It’s rare that the prose alone is enough to keep me reading, but in City Above, City Below it was. The story has a nice message, too, that we should not linger too much on what is no longer but focus on the present instead.

The tension level is pretty low, and we don’t really get a character to follow through the story world, but even with those (in my opinion) short comings, this was a stunning story. And Ogden is just such a great flash fiction writer that she deserves to be on the list.