I am always excited to encounter stories which blend the literary and the speculative, which are off-kilter without feeling gimmicky, which end up imparting on me the sense I have encountered something mysterious and resonant and fine. These sometimes bittersweet, sometimes hopeful short stories mingle quiet humour and longing with enough adventurousness to always feel fresh. This book, like the other two on my list this year, is published by an indie press (7.13 Books), and if you are ready for a luminous example of the uniqueness only a small press can offer, this collection will not disappoint.
A young woman falls in love with a biohacked model, a woman with gadgets implanted in various parts of her body. A mother searches for her missing daughter by taking on a hitchhiker in the hopes of finding a restaurant rumored to be a destination for runaways. A man suddenly starts dreaming the dreams of his girlfriend, but is she dreaming his? After a pandemic wipes out modern civilization, a group of survivors must decide whether to merge with the Mother Earthlings, a clan determined to repopulate the Earth. A book for lovers of Doris Lessing and Emily St. John…
Lieberman continues his blithe defiance of norms, categories, genres, and all other stylistic straitjackets in this satisfyingly complex memoir. I’ve come to know and love this author’s talent for weaving, with wisdom and wryness and the incisive rigour of a philosophically trained mind, a dizzying welter of topics and themes into an everything’s-connected-to-everything narrative—one which is about being trans while mostly being about everything else. The book promisees that every person who reads it becomes trans, and that trans is “a flexible beginning” for which “you can pick your own secret suffix”. Once you’ve read it, I suspect you, like me, will be in the happy position of getting to wonder what suffix we’ll pick.
These six linked sci-fi stories are finely wrought in every sense: the language, the characters, the plot, the world, you name it. I greatly enjoyed the sense of delivering myself as a reader into the hands of a sophisticated and conscientious storyteller. If you love Ursula Le Guin, you’re in for a treat as Whitcher builds her society through a sociological lens, focusing especially on the oblilgations and responsibilities the characters have to one another. These are beautiful stories which do not lean away from darkness; their strong ethical core and poetic execution make this collection a standout.
On Nakharat, every contract is a ribbon and every ribbon is a secret.
On Nakharat, every contract is a ribbon and every ribbon is a secret, braided tight and tucked behind a veil. Artificial intelligence threatens the tightly-woven network. Stability depends on giving each machine a human conscience—but the humans are not volunteers. In the midst of strife, individual people struggle to hold onto their jobs and protect their lovers, those trusted few who could draw back the veil.
Abigail Patel does not expect to be born a second time. Yet from infancy she is aware she has lived before. She has no specific memories of her prior lifetime; what she does possess is inexplicable melancholy and foreboding. Abigail and her mother Faye must navigate a mother-daughter relationship that starts to deteriorate. As fragmentary memories from Abigail’s previous life begin to unlock, a conviction burgeons that she has been guilty of some terrible act. When at last Abigail learns what links the crumbling relationship with Faye and the troubling memories of her past life, the revelation will upend her entire identity.
