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.
I am put into a similar worshipful and ecstatic frame of mind. These fabulaic heterogenous and ingenious mini-masterpieces (including some hard-edged SF) bring to mind...past masters ... This must-have collection, monumental yet never overwrought, shows Yu sharing the same stage as Salman Rushdie and other fine fabulists of our lucky era.
Brilliant, sparkling ... Inanimate objects take on wondrous life ... The prose is exquisite on a sentence-by-sentence level ... The realistic stories in the collection are heartrending ... An enchantment.
An astonishing collection of stories ranging from the merely beautiful to the complex articulation of magic. Run, don’t walk, to get a hold of this transformative text.
