The strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with
astonishing consequences in this collection of twenty-two stories from
award-winning writer E. Lily Yu.
In the village of Yiwei, a fallen wasp nest unfurls into a beautifully
accurate map. In a field in Louisiana, birdwatchers forge an indelible
connection over a shared glimpse of a Vermilion Flycatcher, and fall. In
Nineveh, a judge who prides himself on impartiality finds himself
questioned by a mysterious god. On a nameless shore, a small monster
searches for refuge and finds unexpected courage.
At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, these
twenty-two stories sing, as the oldest fables do, of what it means to be
alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. For readers who loved
the intelligence and compassion in Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of
the 21st Century and the dreamlike prose of Kelly Link's Magic for
Beginners, this collection introduces the short fiction of E. Lily Yu,
winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and author of the
Washington Book Award-winning novel On Fragile Waves, praised by the
New York Times Book Review as "devastating and perfect."
