This morning I want to share with you all some fiction that I’ve read and loved over the last few weeks. There’s no particular order here, just words that have been on my mind.
“A Witches Guide to Escape: a Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow. Witches, libraries, endangered adolescents, and a defense of escapism. I loved this story, and if you’ve ever had a kind librarian give you just the book you needed, I bet you will too.
“And Yet” by A. T. Greenblatt. I was fortunate enough to get to see an early draft of this story at Clarion West 2017. It’s a haunted house story, a multiverse story, and a moving contemplation of just what cost we might pay to try to fix horrors from the past. You may think you know what’s coming here, but you don’t. Greenblatt keeps us guessing right to the very end. Come for the haunted house, stay for the keenly observed sibling relationship.
“Like a River Loves the Sky” by Emma Törzs. Another story that I first saw as an early draft at Clarion West (Team Eclipse, you are killing it!), “Like a River Loves the Sky” explores questions of friendship, loss, loneliness, and what it means to truly love something. That may sound like well-trod ground, but not under Törzs’s deft hand: she makes it new, breathless, moving. It’s the rare story that features dead dogs that can win me over, but this one absolutely does.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. It’s nearly impossible to describe the brilliance of Tidbeck’s novel without spoilers. There’s a city where objects continue to exist only if people habitually re-affirm their existence, an increasingly oppressive government, and a growing sense that what has long been barely controlled will soon be uncontrolled. Tidbeck’s novel takes on systems of power, queerness, and the power–and limitations–of language in ways that I’ve never seen before.
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Those are some of the pieces that have most stayed with me of late. What have you been reading?