One family’s magical legacy intertwines with the ongoing trauma of slavery in this Reconstruction-set short from the author of The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Blades line every moment of “The Devil in America,” so sharp that you don’t realize you’re bleeding until it’s far too late.
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I’ve got another oldie-but-goodie for you today. E. Lily Yu’s “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” took the 2012 awards season by storm, racking up nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. This Short Story of the Day pick is just as captivating in 2023, nearly twelve years after it originally appeared in Clarkesworld.
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A lot of these early Short Stories of the Day are Hugo and Nebula winners, and Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” is no exception. Ken Liu’s 2015 translation won the Best Novelette Hugo, and the story is so enthralling that non-Chinese speakers will wish they could read the original.
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If you’ve read the Short Story of the Day series so far, you know I love stories about monstrous women and girls. I shared Carrie Vaughn’s take on Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” last year. Yesterday’s pick, Kelly Sandoval’s ‘What Sisters Take,” follows a teenager with a hidden twin who can only survive by killing her. Next up: “Sometimes Boys Don’t Know” by Donyae Coles.
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Escape to Witch Mountain taught us that everybody has a twin. The One said we’d have to kill our double to achieve primacy. In Kelly Sandoval’s “What Sisters Take,” supernatural events lead to the births of three hidden twins, each of whom has only one goal: to siphon life from her human sister.
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