195 pages Edited by Susan Kaye Quinn (2024)

Read this if you like: Solarpunk, short speculative fiction, inventive worldbuilding

tl;dr summary: Collection of shorts that each imagine a hopeful future in a different way

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Simon Jacobs 223 pages Two Dollar Radio (2018)

Read this if you like: “Sorrow” by Catherine Gammon, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis

tl;dr summary: Punk kids with a past navigate a world where people have vanished. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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