“The world starts with a story. So do dynasties and eras and wars. So does love, and so does revenge. Everything starts with a story.” The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to an aging lord at a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. But they’re forgetting things…
Category: Novella
The Descent of Monsters by Neon Yang
“My greatest fear is not that I will find some sort of half-animal creature, wild-eyed and untamed. It is that I will find a genuine monster: someone perfectly human but with a heart of stone, turned cruel from enduring years of cruelty. What if they are not a tool enslaved by the Protectorate but a…
Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
“It’s easy to go along with a system. It’s harder to create one. You have to choose it, over and over, when you’re building it.” Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds…
The Truth of the Aleke by Moses Ose Utomi
“History is only a story told by those with power to justify why they have it. The truth does not bend to power’s whims.” Stolen from Goodreads (because I don’t trust myself not to give away too much): The Aleke is cruel. The Aleke is clever. The Aleke is coming. 500 years after the events…
A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon
“Magical girls exist because justice does not.” Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge. But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a…
The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi
“You see, the desert, in its way, is a school. It taught me that life is filled with lies. There are the shallow lies that can be uncovered by a light wind. And there are the deep lies whose roots extend further down than the eye can see. Lies we don’t uproot because we are…
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
“The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.” Alex Easton has agreed to host Ms. Potter in their hunting lodge in Gallacia,…
System Collapse by Martha Wells
“I know I get pissed off when humans don’t acknowledge my work, but why is too much acknowledgment also upsetting? Sentience sucks.” Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot…
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
“small and sick and afraid three of my favorite flavors” A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives under the Hollywood sign. They watch the hikers and their strange habits each day, gleaning bits of information from them continuously. However, when a man-made fire forces them down out of the mountains and into the city,…
Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo
“On the border between the north and the south, the nights cast long shadows, and sometimes, the only thing you can do to drive back the things that live in darkness is to tell stories.” Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass–and now their granddaughters have arrived on…
The Great Book Wyrm 