464 pages
Published March 8, 2016 by Gallery / Saga Press.
A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy …
A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.
4 (Read over a very long period as I only read it when I wanted a break from reading novels. It may've received a different score if I'd read it in a shorter period since I'd remember the earlier stories.)
A really stunning collections of stories that range from a heartbreaking but beautiful tale, suffused with magical realism, of a son's coming to terms with his mothers experience as a immigrant, to a rumination on the nature of memory told through the recollections of an alien to the adventures of Chinese prospectors in gold rush Idaho. Liu's fiction uses the fantastical and speculative to explore the human condition in tender provocative ways that left me wanting more, which luckily, exist in his other books!
Also some stories are good, the majority I found to be quite unimaginative. I did not finish the book.
I learned of this book when the title story appeared on an episode of LeVar Burton Reads. That did not prepare me for the variety of stories in this collection! The mix of science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction is very well done. There are some seriously dark stories in here; I found that the sharp thematic turns from one story to the next helped to manage that heaviness.
This collection of stories by Ken Liu is outstanding. These tales are written in a variety of styles, some affecting a nonfiction or documentary style, while others were written more like novels. Some contain fascinating folk tales, which relate to the main story. Also, these narratives vary greatly in length. I got into them all.
The Paper Menagerie is the stand-out, and I was not surprised to find that it won so many awards. I love the way that title takes on a double meaning as the title of this varied collection...I found Simulacrum, All the Flavors, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, and The Man Who Ended History to be especially memorable. The way Liu combined history and science fiction in this last story was especially thought-provoking, and also focused on a historical subject I was unaware of before.
For some reason, I do not read …
This collection of stories by Ken Liu is outstanding. These tales are written in a variety of styles, some affecting a nonfiction or documentary style, while others were written more like novels. Some contain fascinating folk tales, which relate to the main story. Also, these narratives vary greatly in length. I got into them all.
The Paper Menagerie is the stand-out, and I was not surprised to find that it won so many awards. I love the way that title takes on a double meaning as the title of this varied collection...I found Simulacrum, All the Flavors, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, and The Man Who Ended History to be especially memorable. The way Liu combined history and science fiction in this last story was especially thought-provoking, and also focused on a historical subject I was unaware of before.
For some reason, I do not read many short story collections...it would have been unfortunate to have missed this one. I'd recommend it to anyone.
This may just be the best short story collection I've ever read.
But be careful -- dust kept getting in my eyes!
http://fedpeaches.blogspot.com/2016/03/go-read-this-book.html
