Breathing Just a Little

 The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the short stories! Novella and novel review posts to come. The six stories on the list are: “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim While I have given a tie mark to the two I think are the strongest, if it were me, I would give the Hugo to We Will Teach You How to Read We Will Teach You How to Read because I think what is does is strikingly original in both form and affect, and I think risk-taking innovation like that should...

I love a good short fic. Short stories, novellas, small but well-formed novels - if they are good of their type, they are absolutely my jam. I just finished a collection of the O. Henry short story prize winners from 2024, which prompted me to think I should post a review of some of the short story collections I have read over the past few months. So here goes! The O. Henry Prize Winner 2024 edited by Amor Towles This collection of the short stories that won the O. Henry short fiction prize in 2024 is, as is not uncommon for anthology collections, a mixed bag in terms of quality. There are some outstanding stories in the book, which will stay with me for a long time - I would particularly cite Brad Felver's Orphans, Amber Caron's Didi, Kate DiCamillo's The Castle of Rose Tellin, Juliana Leite's My Good Friend, and E.K. Ota's The Paper Artist. Some of these stories moved me intensely, and Orphans, which is my favourite story in the book, made me sob, which is a high ...