Short Stories 366:190 — “Dress Rehearsal,” by Nicole Zelnicker

As I read my way through the stories in Nothing Without Us, I kept coming across a sense of tone, or an angle of perception that left me smiling, even when the topics of a particular tale weren't uplifting, and it took me a while to get why it was happening: they were inhabited by …

Short Stories 366:189 — “Mauve,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

Another moving—and also painful—tale from Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction, "Mauve" splits our point of view between two characters. On one hand, Gidney gives us a boy who has just moved to an old house far away from his friends and the life he knew because his mother has died and his father is not …

Short Stories 366:188 — “What is a Volcano?” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

Oh, holy flying heck this was wonderful. Found in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, and told as a kind of parable or folk tale, "What is a Volcano?" has a narrative that begins with the god of ants and the goddess of rivers having a disagreement that escalates, but while …

Short Stories 366:187 — “No Man of Woman Born,” by Ana Mardoll

The penultimate story in No Man of Woman Born is also the story that shares the title with the collection as a whole, and as I've been saying throughout this collection, each story seems to nudge up my enjoyment factor a little bit more. Here, we meet Innes, a young boy who has a complicated …

Short Stories 366:186 — “Little Enigmatic Monster,” by Wayne Carey

One of the great things about a shared-world anthology for me as a reader is how you get to see slice-of-life stories from characters who aren't the protagonists, and how easily that lends itself to various other kinds of stories, even within science fiction. Case in point? "Little Enigmatic Monster," by Wayne Carey, which puts …

Short Stories 366:185 — “The Fourteenth Floor,” by Adam Meyer

Ah, Crime Travel. This anthology of crime stories with the added theme of time-travel continues to deliver fun and clever little knots of mystery and science fiction, and "The Fourteenth Floor" is no exception. Even better? This one features a character in his sixties, which I always appreciate, in the form of Frank Russo, a …