V. Castro 186 pages Creature Publishing (2022)
Read this if you like: Feminist horror, optimistic post-apocalypses, Aztec mythology and culture
tl;dr summary: Collection of short stories featuring powerful women fucking shit up in various ways and places.
Catherine Gammon Braddock Avenue Books (2013) 296 pages
Read this if you like: voice-driven fiction, Carmen Maria Machado, Virginia Woolf
Tl;dr summary: A woman dies under mysterious circumstances in a New York apartment building—and then shit gets weird.
See the book on Braddock Avenue Books
Steven Sherrill 254 pages John F. Blair Publisher (2000)
Read this if you like: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Haruki Murakami, Greek mythology
tl;dr summary: The Minotaur (yes, that Minotaur) works as a line cook and lives in a trailer in the American South.
Susan Kaye Quinn 125 pages Self-published (2024)
Read this if you like: Solarpunk/climate fiction, Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson
tl;dr summary: Six stories set in near futures where we haven’t fixed shit yet, but we’re getting there.
Multiple authors (anthology) 129 pages air & nothingness press (2024)
Read this if you like: formal experimentation, flash fiction
tl;dr summary: Collection of 18 flash stories across genres that make use of footnotes and other marginalia to tell narratives in a new way.
See the book on the air and nothingness press website
Jacob M. Appel 181 pages Black Lawrence Press (2016)
Read this if you like: Robert Olen Butler, Matthew Cheney, Juan Villoro
tl;dr summary: A study in the craft of writing short stories, with 10 stories that each have a different lesson to teach.
Oliver K. Langmead 223 pages Titan Books (2024)
Read this if you like: novels-in-verse, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jeff VanderMeer
tl;dr summary: Colony ship engineer wakes from stasis to learn she slept through a war and is one of the few experts left to complete their mission.
Dorene O’Brien 156 pages Baobab Press (2019)
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).
Adrian Tchaikovsky 388 pages Orbit (2024)
Read this if you like: unique alien ecosystems, Rick Claypool, Vernor Vinge
tl;dr summary: Political prisoners in an Orwellian dystopia are sent to a labor camp on Kiln, a planet where the life is aggressively symbiotic and potentially sentient.
Carrie Gessner 419 pages Self-Published (2016)
Read this if you like: The Wheel of Time, David Eddings, character-driven high fantasy tl;dr summary: Three magic users in a world where magic is dying set out to avert war, solve a murder, and avoid bringing about a prophecied doom.
