Welcome back to Bite-size Reads, my 2022 challenge to read (some of) the amazing anthologies on my shelves. Today I’m looking at the final batch of stories from Sinopticon, a curated collection of Chinese SF translated and presented by Xueting Ni.
Category Archive: Anthologies
Welcome back to Bite-size Reads, my 2022 challenge to read (some of) the amazing anthologies on my shelves. Today I’m looking at my second batch of stories from Sinopticon, a curated collection of Chinese SF translated and presented by Xueting Ni.
Welcome to Bite-size Reads, my 2022 challenge to read (some of) the amazing anthologies on my shelves. I’ll be chiming in every couple of weeks with thoughts on the stories I’ve recently enjoyed – starting today with tales from Sinopticon, a curated collection of Chinese SF translated and presented by Xueting Ni.
Kim Bo-Young is a respected SF author in her native South Korea. I’m Waiting For You marks the first time her work has appeared in English, collecting two pairs of connected short stories exploring love, sacrifice and identity.
There are many tales of shapeshifting women. Sharon Blackie explores their hidden powers in a collection of retellings by turns cautionary, haunting, and inspirational.
When Allah created man out of clay, he created djinn out of fire. Ephemeral spirits that tempt us, trick us, and sometimes grant our wishes, these creatures of folklore take centre stage in excellent Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin’s anthology, The Djinn Falls in Love.
Christmas Eve is when Icelanders given books to one another and winter is when we Brits historically told ghost stories by the fire. I’m celebrating the season with a collection of speculative horror stories chosen by Margrét Helgadóttir.
This anthology collects the best stories from the first six years of Apex Magazine, including several award-winning shorts, the readers’ Stories of the Year and some careful editorial selections to round it out. Expect 21 helpings of the surreal, the shocking, the strange and the rather beautiful.
Bite-size books will be a regular weekly feature, as I have accumulated a healthy pile of them that I’m very excited about (plus several short story collections). This week: The Fox’s Tower and other tales is flash fiction that made my soul sing.
I received this as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer title – it’s the latest in a series of collections of speculative / science fiction shorts from around the world. I took it as a great opportunity to broaden my horizons and get to know the works of non-Anglo/American authors, many of whom I hadn’t previously heard of. And generally, the quality here is very good – even the stories that weren’t to my taste were well-written and accomplished.
Ann Vandermeer – The Ultimate Time Traveller’s Almanac: also the ultimate doorstop. No door too big.
I’ve been reading The Time Traveler’s Almanac since February, and I’ve finally reached the end of the enormous time travel compendium. There’s a reason this is printed as 4 separate volumes – I don’t like to think how heavy the physical edition would have been. 65 stories and 5 essays by different authors old and new explore the concept of time travel, gathered around 4 themes. Following some excellent advice not to read from start to finish, I zipped from point to point like the various protagonists, reading a story from each theme and then putting the book down for a while so that it didn’t get stale.
This collection of short stories from Malaysian author It took me a long time to read Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors. I picked it up, put it down; read the table of contents, put it down. Eventually I got round to reading the Introduction, and then I was pretty much committed. And when I finally devoured the treasures within, I found I enjoyed them a lot. Much of it was dark, true, but that’s always suited me; much of it was also magical.
So there was no real doubt I would acquire and read Fragile Things.
onemore.org 