Category: Short Stories

Life And Other Shortcomings by Corie Adjmi

This slim volume of short stories punches far above its weight class as it examines the lives of loosely connected characters in and around the turn of 21st century America. The opening story Dinner Conversation is one of the strongest, revolving around three couples out to dinner and the weight of expectations felt by the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/25/life-and-other-shortcomings-by-corie-adjmi/

Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris & Charles Vess

What a sumptuous delight of a novel that greatly satisfied both the craftsman and the girl-in-search-of-the-fantastic living inside me! Joanne M Harris has turned her considerable talents to a mosaic novel crafted as a compendium of fairy tales that are both wildly original yet hearken back to the tales we already know, usually giving the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/01/honeycomb-by-joanne-m-harris-charles-vess/

Love In Color: Mythical Tales From Around The World, Retold by Bolu Babalola

I finished this book of romantic short stories and thought to myself “why on earth did I think this was going to be more about myths than romance?” And then I copied the full title for this review and realized that it was because Love In Color has been marketed as such. Which is a …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/13/love-in-color-mythical-tales-from-around-the-world-retold-by-bolu-babalola/

Black Panther: Tales Of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland

Being a comic book fan from way back, it’s often difficult for me to find prose-form entertainment featuring my beloved comic book characters that is as compelling as the comic book versions themselves. But I love what Titan Books does with its short story anthologies and, like much of America, I’ve been made a Black …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/16/black-panther-tales-of-wakanda-edited-by-jesse-j-holland/

Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology edited by Mur Lafferty & S. B. Divya

I am not a pod(cast)person, but this anthology might change that for me! Or at least get me out of my very narrow lane of go-to things to listen to while wrapping Christmas presents or other visual-heavy artsy-crafty things. I tend to enjoy more radio-drama-type fare like Limetown or, even older than that, Sherlock Holmes …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/07/escape-pod-the-science-fiction-anthology-edited-by-mur-lafferty-s-b-divya/

Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan

Happy December, everyone! Let’s start the month with a chilling read! I have a bad habit of not remembering why I picked up certain volumes, not helped by the often considerable lag time between me deciding I want to read a book and me actually getting the opportunity to read it. So I vaguely recall …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/02/bluebeards-first-wife-by-ha-seong-nan/

Invisible Planets edited and translated by Ken Liu

Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu

With his smashingly successful translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three–Body Problem, Ken Liu introduced modern Chinese science fiction to a large English-speaking audience. The reception of the rest of Three-Body‘s trilogy, one translated by Joel Martinsen and the other by Ken Liu, showed that it was not a one-book phenomenon, and that English-speaking science fiction …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/05/invisible-planets-edited-and-translated-by-ken-liu/

The Night Archer and Other Stories by Michael Oren

Reading Michael Oren’s debut collection of short stories reminded me very much of being a teenager again and reading two of Roald Dahl’s short story collections for adults, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, once I’d exhausted his works for younger readers. Densely packed with entertainment value, each book was a wild ride that I wouldn’t …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/02/the-night-archer-and-other-stories-by-michael-oren/

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

The afterword of T Kingfisher’s terrific The Hollow Places (which I’ll shortly be reviewing over at CriminalElement.com) mentions that it’s based on the classic horror short story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, which has been cited by H. P. Lovecraft as being one of the most terrifying stories ever written. Being a voraciously curious reader, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/28/the-willows-by-algernon-blackwood/

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020 edited by Jonathan Strahan

With Gardner Dozois’ passing, science fiction lost not only a brilliant writer but also one of the most prominent editors in the genre. Since 1984, he’d presided over the premiere collection of sci-fi’s shorter works via his Year’s Best collections, which numbered thirty-five at the time of his demise. Two years on, Jonathan Strahan and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/09/the-years-best-science-fiction-vol-1-the-saga-anthology-of-science-fiction-2020-edited-by-jonathan-strahan/