Books shelved under “Anthologies”

I still haven’t read Bad Feminist. But when I saw Roxane Gay’s new collection of short stories up for request on NetGalley, I leapt at the chance to read them. So thanks, NetGalley and Grove Press, for this opportunity.

Trigger warning in this review and book for discussions of rape and assault.

In many ways, Difficult Women seems like a kind of spiritual successor to Bad Feminist. Again, I haven’t read the essay…

How do you even review a 760-page book comprising 52 short stories that is meant to offer a comprehensive look at the genre for the purposes of teaching? I don’t know.

The Kara of seven years ago would have rated each story out of 5 stars and taken the average, but ain’t nobody got time for that these days. It took me over a year to read this anthology—because if I had torn straight through…

I am slowly but surely running out of ways to review anthologies. It’s maddening, let me tell you. #firstworldproblems

What can I say about Trigger Warning? It’s another anthology. It’s another Neil Gaiman anthology. Much like Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, Trigger Warning has its moments, its trademark Gaimanesque departures into clever flights of fantasy—but it’s just not the form for me. Gaiman waxes poetic about short stories in his introduction; it…

Back in Grade 4, a small group of peers asked me if I was a virgin.

Not knowing what a virgin was, I said no. Well, that certainly got them laughing. And I got very upset.

This incident has stuck in my memory (which is otherwise very much a sieve through which most details inevitably fall) for a few reasons. Firstly, it was one of the few times I ever felt bullied in school,…

This will be a short review. I don’t have a lot to say about Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange. If you are familiar with the Vinyl Cafe, then you know what the Story Exchange is. If not, then while you might still enjoy this book, it probably won’t have the same resonance for you.

There are some gems of stories in this book. I’ve heard most of them (because I’ve…

I didn’t go to the Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert this year, because I was feeling burnt out and wasn’t interested in going out that weekend. It turned out to be the last concert of the year, because Stuart McLean announced a melanoma diagnosis and cancelled the other shows. He seems positive and upbeat so far. I thought I’d dig into this, one of the more recent Vinyl Cafe collections of Dave and Morley stories,…

Now that I own copies of Neil Gaiman’s three short story anthologies, I re-read Fragile Things and then tackled this one, Smoke and Mirrors. As with Fragile Things this earlier collection has a description of each story’s origin in the introduction. Unlike the other collection, Smoke and Mirrors’ introduction also comes with a bonus short story embedded. So, yeah. There’s that.

I have to say that the more I read Gaiman’s stories…

I first read Fragile Things back in my first year of university, after which I promptly lent it to a friend, who gave it back to me three or four years later—as can sometimes happen when I lend out books. I’ve been meaning to re-read it for a while so I can write a review. Then Neil Gaiman’s newest collection, Trigger Warning came out. So when I bought that, I also picked up his first…

I have never read anything else by Peter S. Beagle.

Just want to make that clear, since I know that in some corners of the fantasyscape, he is a Big Deal. He’s Known. Renowned, even. So this little collection of short stories of his was probably met with squeals of glee from fans the world over when it was published (back in 2009, because I am 6 years behind on my to-read list these days).…

I actually don’t read Lightspeed all that much, so it’s hard for me to evaluate this special edition in that context. All I can say is that this is packed full of good content. In addition to original stories there are reprints, some good flash fiction (one of which is my all-time favourite of the volume), non-fiction discussions and essays, and a novel excerpt. It’s good times.

I didn’t like every, or maybe even most,…

I picked this up while nosing around an antique shop. My copy is battered: its front cover is torn and disfigured; its spine is bent into a sadistic and perilous curve; its pages are bloated and distorted from what I can only guess is water damage. If it weren’t such a thick book, I’d have scoffed at the £2 I paid for it.

As it is, there is something familiar about The Mammoth Book of…

This is a hefty and imposing volume, heavy yet also compact in dimensions and in print. Thirty-one stories make up the Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, as selected for this immaculate Everyman’s Library edition that I scored for free from my school library. After a particularly work-heavy weekend I needed something I could sink into, something that could envelop me with lush descriptions of far-off lands and times gone by. This short story anthology…

So, I am an idiot and did not realize this was a book of short stories until I was well into it. Don’t ask me why. I have an ebook copy, and so there was no real description or anything to clue me into it. I just started reading, assuming it was a novel. After a few chapters there were no obvious connections between these characters and their respective stories, but that’s Ekaterina Sedia for…

The librarians at my school alerted me to this book. I knew Neil Gaiman had written a special short story, “Nothing O’Clock”, for the 50th anniversary, but I hadn’t been particularly bothered about finding it. Aside from the fact that I tend not to read fan fiction, the state of ebooks these days is still deplorable enough that finding a non-DRM copy would probably have been tricky.

Luckily, I was clever and made sure I’m…

Not that long ago, I sampled another anthology of alternate history, Other Earths. Now I’m dipping into this specialized sub-genre again with Roads Not Taken. The premise is similar, but in this case the stories were all previously published in either Analog or Amazing. Though I’m disappointed that not one of the ten contributors is a woman, the stories themselves are much more thoughtful and interesting than those I encountered in Other…

Alternate history can often act like a soothing balm: science fiction, but of a very special type. It’s the ultimate “what-if” version of science fiction, the impossible attempt to create counterfactual stories. It is the logical conclusion to the lying that is the art of storytelling; taken to extremes, any story is alternate history. But with Other Earths, we’re on more conventional ground when it comes to alternate history. It’s exactly what it says…

One of the nice things about working in a school is that I can nick books from the English cupboard, bring them home for a day, or a week, or most of the year, and quietly return them without anyone complaining. It’s a perk that almost makes those times you accidentally stand under the bell worth it.... Anyway, earlier this year I was reaching for short stories to show my sixth form students, and it…

I picked this up off the library shelf based solely on the fact that I’ve enjoyed the other works of Kazuo Ishiguro that I’ve read—particularly the stellar The Remains of the Day. Music doesn’t capture me in the same way that it does many of my friends. That is to say, I find music powerful and compelling, but stories about music don’t always hold the same allure for me. Bel Canto stands out as…

I read the Foundation novels when I was younger, probably around the same time that I began getting into science fiction and fantasy in grades 7 and 8. I read a lot of Asimov, both because there was a lot of him in my suspiciously well-stocked public library and because … well, he wrote a lot of books. I read about the Foundation, psychohistory, his Three Laws of Robotics … everything and anything Asimov, if…

As usual, I snap anything up involving artificial intelligence. This has been on my list for a while, and I finally got around to acquiring it. We Think, Therefore We Are is exactly what it seems: a collection of stories about AIs, robots, and other posthuman ideas about disembodied consciousness. Fifteen stories from fifteen authors, all with different ideas about what the next centuries might bring us.

For such a long wait, this wasn’t all…