need recs

[maritimo]

 after recent development i’ve come to the conclusion that i’m vibing a lot with short story collection books… am looking for good recommendations u_u i guess genre is kind of open though:) 

Comments

[hwarium]

Hello!! I found you through a mutual's reading page <3 what kind of stories do you enjoy reading? I personally love sci fi and would recommend Ken Liu and Ted Chiang's anthologies - starting with Paper Menagerie and Stories of your Life.

[maritimo]

omg hi! [recognizes you from 17hols comment section] honestly i prefer reading like ummm realistic fiction i guess but ive been tipping into horror recently to Explore Horizons… will definitely look those up!!!! thank you:)

[prizefig]

seconding ted chiang since the only short stories i've read recently have been his. they're not very hard sci fi, so it should be a good option to bridge the gap.

[chestnut_pod]

This is maybe low-hanging fruit, so please forgive me if you have already read this one, but Carmen María Machado's Her Body and Other Parties is s t u n n i n g. It remains one of the (perhaps the?) best collection I have ever read.

Others in the speculative realm: Sofia Samatar's Tender, which boasts her trademark dreamy prose and wonderful conceits. Vandana Singh's Ambiguity Machines, which is the only climate fiction I have really engaged with in ages, not least because it's mostly dealt with through allegory and metaphor, and is always deeply thoughtful and hopeful. And Nalo Hopkinson's Falling in Love With Hominids, which is an excellent introduction to one of the GOATs and has some real gems in there.

And then, I'm sorry, I should try to be better about reccing non-speculative fiction, but here, have two excellent collections! (Both with Indigenous authors and themes, I notice belatedly.) Sabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, which is full of spare, human stories that evoke the American West in a truly wonderful way. And This is Paradise, by Kristiana Kahakauwila, which was the first piece of Hawaiian literature I read and has stuck with me through the years as, just, a necklace full of quiet jewels.

(Oh, ETA: found you through a mutual friend's Reading Page!)

[daisiez4eva]

i'm still trying to find a short story collection which i love and can wholeheartedly recommend, because i'm really picky and i haven't found one yet where i'm like wow this is great i need everyone to read this. like tbh most of the short story collections i read annoy me lmfao. or are too serious/bleak to recc to friends even if i think they're well written. but of the most recent ones i've read the most fun i had was probably with The Hugo Awards longlist anthologies (Volumes 1-2, these are like scifi). idk i just really like collections with lots of different authors thrown in together. Related to this, there's this anthology from 2017 called Eight Ghosts which i stole from my friend and it's just.. 8 pretty good ghost stories. the best two imo were Foreboding by Kamile Shamsie and As Strong As Death Jeanette Winterson.
I'm reading through Tove Jansson's A Winter Book rn on the train in the morning and I think its just... really nice. like exciting/dramatic but just lovely and thoughtful and enjoyable to read imo. I like how she writes..
I read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez all the way back in summer and im still thinking about it now like it really stuck in my head and i keep talking about it like a million times even though I thought like 1/4 of the stories were misses. the ones that did hit were just really good horror.
in terms of "classic" weird/eerie/gothic fiction, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Gaskell and Angela Carter's short stories are consistently well written and creepy and interesting. definitely imprinted on the carter's the bloody chamber when i was younger lol. idk i feel weird recommending these because you've probably already heard about them but yeah.
i think thats everything i can think of off the top of my head. if i find anything really good ill definitely post about it lol. i hope you find some good books to read!!

[maritimo]

hi!! thank you for the recs!!!

actually im curious to hear why you enjoyed her body and other parties because i found it so underwhelming? i read it last month and the first story was really good but none of the others really lived it up to it. but thats just my opinion of course!!!

ambiguity machines sounds awesome!! and i'll look into the others as well i really appreciate your comment

[maritimo]

first of all never feel weird recommending anything to me!!! 80% of the time i havent even heard of X author or w/e due to being brazilian and not knowing many of the classics so please always go ham... also i just really trust your taste and judgement. thank you <3 ill probably check out the dangers of smoking in bed first hehe

[chestnut_pod]

Ah, that's taste for you! The first story was my favorite, but I enjoyed the way she played with fragments and structure throughout the collection. The story that was an inventory, the story that was episode recaps, the story that was literal and growing gaps in memory (and also dresses), the one about missing parts of one's own body -- that all really resonated with me, who is interested in what happens when there are gaps in a narrative or continuity that have to be filled up somehow. (Thanks, Saidiya Hartman and Dionne Brand and decimated Jewish family history.) I thought the way she allowed things to remain unspoken, and asked the reader to try to stretch strings across those big empty spaces, was done very deftly, while at the same time providing a lot of pleasure via what was there on the sentence level. I really enjoyed her way of writing fairly short, but not choppy, sentences with relatively simple vocabulary but a lot of color words, unexpected verb-noun combinations, and rhythmic paragraph-level structure. It made much of the text feel sort of dreamy and unreal, which is a favorite prose-mood of mine. Yeah, and I also just liked the conceit of urban legend retellings -- it was obvious to me she was very influenced by Angela Carter, but this was like the "low culture" version of that, and I never felt that she was setting herself up to be immune to the silliness or oddity or baroqueness of her source texts, be that fireside stories or zombie movies or Law and Order. Instead, she would happily include that into the stories themselves. (Admittedly, "The Resident" is a bad short story. But the rest made up for it, for me.) Also, great cover. I like the throat-corset.

[maritimo]

ahhh thank you so much for all this... my literary analysis repertoire isn't that great yet so i apologize in advance but i think what i disliked the most was the repetitiviness of the themes? at least the first few stories felt similar to me, at one point i was like okay the protagonist is a bisexual woman and men suck... what else can you tell me? i don't know, none of the stories really got to me in terms of provoking a reaction besides the first one.

also resident really was.. something. it definitely had the most cringe worthy dialogue from the book from what i remember. “You know. That old trope. Writing a story where the female protagonist is utterly batty. It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done”—here she gesticulated so forcefully that a few drops of red spattered the tablecloth—“don’t you think? And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well? Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, I’m not a lesbian, I’m just saying.” like hello??? what the hell is this. the book just had a lot of moments where i rolled my eyes and moved on, but that was definitely about the substance and not the actual prose.

[chestnut_pod]

LOL yessss the Resident is TERRIBLE, just give me your whole-chested, name-naming Myriam Gurba rant in the LARB. Just TELL us who the worst people in your MFA were; inquiring minds want to know.

And I think that's all fair! I definitely think her best stories were the ones where all protagonists were women, or when it went really deep into one POV. Such is the nature of different strokes for different folks.

[prizefig]

just remembered another one: i haven't read it yet, but based on what i've heard of it i think you specifically would love macho sluts by patrick califia

[maritimo]

IF ONLY I COULD FIND IT .