This post is a roughly tidied version of my May 2022 tweets about short stories. It’s quite long, so I’m putting the rest of it below the cut. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post.
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Choosing stories
I was recently asked how I choose the short stories I’ve been reading for the short story reading posts. It’s not particularly scientific. But I’m trying very hard not to primarily review each story or reduce comments to whether or not I personally like it. Rather, I’m interested in what a story does, and how.
That’s why I’ve been working through a few recommended / year’s best lists (e.g. Locus and Quick Sips Reviews, among others).
I tell myself the stories have been
so there’s no need to add my additional valuation to that. (Counterintuitively, this has also made it a lot easier to just enjoy the stories.)
Beyond that:
Noticing patterns
So far, this reading project tends to be most revealing about:
I need to read more anthologies, as the patterns of editors’ motivations are still a little obscure. There are lots of overlays there — the market or venue’s style, what is submitted, the collective motivation or interpretation or concerns of a particular group of authors in a particular era. I suspect analysing what’s happening at the anthology-construction level, across a number of books by the same editor, would give more of a sense of this.
Notes about individual stories
So far the short story notes are in these posts, but there will be more (tagged short story reading posts):
This post is a roughly tidied version of my April 2022 tweets about short stories. It’s quite long (although the month’s reading was abbreviated by Covid), so I’m putting the rest of it below the cut. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post.
Continue readingMy short story “Gisla and the Three Favours”, first published last year in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #43, has been selected for THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY, VOLUME ONE, edited by Paula Guran (Pyr Books). It will be published later this year.
Here is the table of contents, from Paula Guran’s announcement — keep an eye out for subsequent (and previous!) volumes over on paulaguran.com:
• Marika Bailey, “The White Road; Or How a Crow Carried Death Over a River” (Fiyah #18)
• Elizabeth Bear, “The Red Mother” (Tor.com)
• Tobias Buckell, “Brickomancer (Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories)
• P. Djèlí Clark, “If the Martians Have Magic” (Uncanny #42)
• Roshani Chokshi, “Passing Fair and Young” (Sword Table Stone: Old Legend, New Voices)
• Varsha Dinesh, “The Demon Sage’s Daughter” (Strange Horizons 2/8/21)
• Andrew Dykstal, “Quintessence” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #324)
• James Enge, “Drunkard’s Walk (F&SF 5-6)
• Karen Joy Fowler, “The Piper” (F&SF 1-2)
• Carlos Hernandez & C. S. E. Cooney, “A Minnow, or Perhaps a Colossal Squid (Mermaids Monthly, April)
• Kathleen Jennings, “Gisla and the Three Favors” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #43)
• Allison King, “Breath of the Dragon King” (Fantasy #72)
• PH Lee, “Frost’s Boy” (Lightspeed #128)
• Yukimi Ogawa, “Her Garden the Size of Her Palm (F&SF 7-8)
• Tobi Ogundiran, “The Tale of Jaja and Canti” (Lightspeed #135)
• Richard Parks. “The Fox’s Daughter (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #344)
• Karen Russell, “The Cloud Lake Unicorn” (Conjunctions:76)
• Sofia Samatar, “Three Tales from the Blue Library” (Conjunctions:76)
• Catherynne Valente, “L’Esprit de Escalier” (Tor.com)
• Fran Wilde, “Unseelie Bros, Ltd.” (Uncanny #40)
• Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, “Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts” (Apex #121)
• Isabel Yap,“A Spell for Foolish Hearts” (Never Have I Ever)
• E. Lily Yu, “Small Monsters” (Tor.com)
Once, not so long ago, a marvellous stag lived in the forest at the foot of our mountain, on the other side of the little bridge you must still cross when you leave our village…
My (very) short story “The Wonderful Stag, or The Courtship of Red Elsie” has just been published on Tor.com — with this gorgeous and luminous illustration by John Jude Palencar.
That lit crescent of its antlers! The strange wise oddity of its face! The texture of its fur! The ears!
A fun fact about this story is that it actually began as an illustration — one of the earliest of the ink-and-gold Inktober fairytale illustrations I did in 2019.
The story I imagined behind this illustration was a little different (although it survived as one of the narrator’s asides about possible origins). It was prompted by a @fairytaletext tweet “Before long, the suitor fell in love with a mischievous stag.”
I couldn’t shake the image of a stag running through the forest, hung with rings with which it had made off. When I sat down to write that, however, the consequences became rather deeper-reaching, and George-the-Wolf emerged to listen to the rumours, and Red Elsie flickered into being, and all the courtship arrangements of the isolated village…
But you can read all about that here: https://www.tor.com/2021/09/01/the-wonderful-stag-or-the-courtship-of-red-elsie-kathleen-jennings/
Here are two reviews I missed for my (Eugie Foster Memorial Award-shortlisted) short story “The Heart of Owl Abbas” (and an excuse to post Audrey Benjaminsen‘s beautiful illustration for it again).
Charles Payseur: Quick Sips – Tor dot com April 2018
“Framed as a bit of history, part anecdote and part fairy tale or myth, the piece is quietly moving and archetypal, sweeping and sweet and dark all at once…. It’s a piece that looks very much at the almost accidental power of small good things.”
Iseult Murphy: The Heart of Owl Abbas by Kathleen Jennings
“not only does it produce a literary treasure, it’s also a story very much about music, and she somehow manages to incorporate its movement and emotional resonance into the narrative as well.”
You can read the story for free on Tor.com, or buy it as an ebook at the usual online locations.
A big week for writing news! In addition to the new piece, my short story “Undine Love” has just been reprinted on Tor.com!
It’s a story of promises and hospitality, set in Australia (or something like it), and I’m still rather fond of its heroine and her not-entirely-absent family.
This is the first publication of Undine Love since it appeared in ASIM in 2011, and although Tor.com doesn’t usually illustrate reprints, I wanted to do a fresh set in the style of the silhouettes in Flyaway.
But you’ll need to go to https://www.tor.com/2020/06/11/undine-love-kathleen-jennings/ to see more…
My very odd short story “The Heart of Owl Abbas” is now up on Tor.com!
Art by Audrey Benjaminsen
The story kind-of-sort-of-maybe exists in the same world (or continuum of worlds) as “Kindling” (in Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear and Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2012) and “Skull and Hyssop” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #31 and Prime’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015).
Huge thanks to Ellen Datlow, editor for Tor.com, and Angela Slatter, story doctor extraordinaire, for all they contributed, and to publisher and art director Irene Gallo who let me have Audrey Benjaminsen’s beautiful art. I think it’s the first time a story of mine has been illustrated by someone else and I think it is remarkable. I keep staring at all the little details. Thanks also to Noa Wheeler, copyeditor, who gamely catalogued all the careless inventions and copy-edited with an ear for the weird structures, and to Jodi Cleghorn who kickstarted me into writing this particular project when I was focussed on drawing.
Also, a word to the wise: baroque stylings exponentially increase editing difficulty. Thanks here to C.S.E. Cooney who is the sort of person you want on your side to find replacement words that slot into a particular matrix of sense, feeling, alliteration and anachronism. And also to Amber Gwynne, who diagnosed me with semantic exhaustion.
The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2015 is out, and includes my short story “A Hedge of Yellow Roses”, which was originally published in Hear Me Roar, and also won a Ditmar!
“A Hedge of Yellow Roses” is the story of Vermeille, a vagabond knight (perhaps), who bears three messages out of a kingdom torn by revolution, and on the way stumbles across an old farmhouse and its enchanted, enchanting residents.
The Year’s Best also has all these other most excellent reasons for buying it:
Kathleen Jennings 