Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 Edition: A Tor.com Original

by Charlie Jane Anders, G. V. Anderson, Gregory Norman Bossert, Jeremy Packert Burke, Katharine Duckett

Overview

A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2020.

Includes stories by:
Charlie Jane Anders
G. V. Anderson
Gregory Norman Bossert
Jeremy Packert Burke
Katharine Duckett
Brian Evenson
Carolyn Ives Gilman
Maria Dahvana Headley
Stephen Graham Jones
Justin C. Key
Naomi Kritzer
Rich Larson
Yoon Ha Lee
S. Qiouyi Lu
Usman T. Malik
Melissa Marr
Maureen McHugh
Tamsyn Muir
Sarah Pinsker
C. L. Polk
Matthew Pridham
M. Rickert
Zin E. Rocklyn
Rachel Swirsky
Lavie Tidhar
Carrie Vaughn
Fran Wilde
Claire Wrenwood

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250817983
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1
Sales rank:	114,523
File size:	105 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy coming in April 2021, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

G. V. Anderson is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula Award. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, as well as anthologies such as The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy&Horror. She resides in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.

Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started writing on a dare in 2009 at the age of 47. Since then his fiction has appeared in print and online, in audio, foreign translation, and Year’s Best anthologies, with stories in Conjunctions, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for legendary visual effects studio Industrial Light&Magic.

Jeremy Packert Burke is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. They have had stories in the Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among other places.

Katharine Duckett’s fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Interzone, PseudoPod, and various anthologies. She served as the guest fiction editor for the Disabled People Destroy Fantasy issue of Uncanny. She hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first book. She currently resides in Brooklyn with her wife.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, including the story collections A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016), Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and the novel Immobility (Tor 2012), the latter two of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009). His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her novels include Halfway Human and the two-volume novel Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. Her short fiction appears in many Best of the Year collections and has been translated into seven languages. She lives in Washington, D.C., and works for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor of seven books in a variety of genres, including The Mere Wife (2018), a contemporary retelling of Beowulf. Magonia and Aerie (HarperCollins) are young adult adventure novels set in an imaginary sky kingdom, and she co-edited Unnatural Creatures, a monster story anthology, with Neil Gaiman. Her work has been nominated for The Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, The World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, The Shirley Jackson Award, and The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree), among others. Her nonfiction and cultural critique has been seen everywhere from The Daily Beast to the New York Times. In addition to her career as a writer, she's been a pirate negotiator, a corset maker, and a bartender at the Threesome Tollbooth, a bar built for exactly two guests and one cocktail expert, in a tiny Brooklyn closet. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, and several remote Italian island airbnbs.

Stephen Graham Jones was raised as pretty much the only Blackfeet in West Texas—except for his dad and grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, a couple kids, and too many old trucks. Between West Texas and now, he's published more than twenty books, including the novels The Fast Red Road, Ledfeather, and Mongrels, and the short story collections After the People Lights Have Gone Off, States of Grace, and The Ones that Got Away. Stephen teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert.

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer and psychiatrist. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy&Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres. He graduated from Clarion West in 2015 and earned his MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai two years later. As a psychiatry resident, he is currently trying to decide between a career in child, addiction, or work alleviating the social pains of the criminal justice system. As an author, he's currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. When Justin isn't writing, seeing patients, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he's chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons.

Naomi Kritzer has been making friends online since her teens, when she had to use a modem to dial up at 2400 baud. She is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana's Song duology and the Dead Rivers Trilogy. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Grande Prairie, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015.

Yoon Ha Lee's debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller. Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy catten, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

S. Qiouyi Lu writes, translates, and edits between two coasts of the Pacific. Aer fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Strange Horizons, and aer translations have appeared in Clarkesworld. Ae edit the flash fiction and poetry magazine Arsenika.

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer who divides his life between Orlando and Lahore. His short fiction has been reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction&Fantasy series and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the StorySouth Million Writers Award, and twice for the Nebula Award. He has won the Bram Stoker Award as well as the British Fantasy Award. In his woefully diminished spare time he runs distance.

As a result of teaching university for over a decade prior to writing, Melissa Marr has an ongoing weakness for writing short stories and editing anthologies. However, she is best known for her folklore, myth, or fairy tale based novels, including the internationally bestselling Wicked Lovely series, the award-winning Graveminder, and The Blackwell Pages (the latter co-authored with Kelley Armstrong). Melissa's 2016 release, Seven Black Diamonds, is the first of two books in a YA faery series.

Maureen McHugh grew up in the Midwest and has lived in New York City, Austin, Texas, the People’s Republic of China, and Los Angeles, California. Her first novel, CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG, a dystopian story set in a China dominated future, was a New York Times Noteworthy Book and won the James Tiptree Award. Her collection of short stories, AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2011. She currently lives in Los Angles where she writes interactive narratives and teaches Interactive Storytelling at the University of Southern California.

Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Trilogy, which begins with Gideon the Ninth, continues with Harrow the Ninth, and concludes with Alecto the Ninth. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.

Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the
Locus, World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first collection, Sooner or Later
Everything Falls Into the Sea, and first novel, A Song For A New Day, were both published in 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels. She was born in New York and has lived all over the U.S. and Canada, but currently resides with her wife and dog in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines.

C. L. Polk (she/her/they/them) is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning novel Witchmark, the first novel of the Kingston Cycle. After leaving high school early, she has worked as a film extra, sold vegetables on the street, and identified exotic insect species for a vast collection of lepidoptera before settling down to write silver fork fantasy novels. Ms. Polk lives near the Bow River in Calgary, Alberta, in a tiny apartment with too many books and a yarn stash that could last a decade. She rides a green bicycle with a basket on the front.

Matthew Pridham was born in New Jersey and spent his childhood chasing trolls in Bergen, Norway. He has since mostly lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After working 13 years as a bookseller, he succumbed to the glittering allure of academia and earned degrees in philosophy, literature, and creative writing. His haunted house novella, “Renovations,” was printed in Weird Tales magazine issue 348, his film criticism has been published in WeirdFictionReview.com, and he’s written fiction and nonfiction for The Thought Erotic. He is currently not quite finishing his first novel.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She is the winner of the Locus Award, Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her third short story collection, You Have Never Been Here was published by Small Beer Press. She is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, which brings to mind The Confederacy of Dunces and Frankenstein in its exploration of flawed and tragic characters, will be published by Undertow Press in the summer of 2021.

Of Trinidadian descent and hailing from Jersey City, NJ, Zin E. Rocklyn's stories are older than her years, much like the name she's chosen to pen them under. Her work is currently featured in the anthologies Forever Vacancy, 2017 Bram Stoker-nominated Sycorax's Daughters of which her story "Summer Skin" was longlisted for Best of Horror 2017, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Nox Pareidolia and the independent zine Weird Luck Tales No. 7. Her non-fiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” was published in Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-Winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 issue. Her personal website is currently under construction, so stay tuned for all of her weirdness in HTML form. In the interim, you can follow her on Twitter.

Rachel Swirsky is a short story writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and in 2014 for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005.

Hugo and Nebula finalist K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD. His debut novel is Docile, and his short fiction and essays appear in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and more. Kellan has a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, which he totally uses at his day job as a paralegal.

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, The Violent Century, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to many other works and several other awards. He is also the author of the Locus Award nominated Unholy Land and debut children's novel Candy.

Carrie Vaughn is the New York Times Bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories. She's best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings. She's also a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels edited by George R.R. Martin. She has been nominated for various awards, including the Hugo and RT Reviewer Choice Awards.

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, three Hugo Awards, two Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, and her debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny, and Jonathan Strahan’s 2020 Year’s Best SFF.

Fran directs the Genre Fiction MFA concentration at Western Colorado University and writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tor.com.

Claire Wrenwood grew up in Indiana and New Zealand and now lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is a member of the Clarion class of 2019, and her work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
G. V. Anderson is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula Award. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, as well as anthologies such as The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy&Horror. She resides in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.
Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started writing on a dare in 2009 at the age of 47. Since then his fiction has appeared in print and online, in audio, foreign translation, and Year’s Best anthologies, with stories in Conjunctions, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for legendary visual effects studio Industrial Light&Magic.
KATHARINE DUCKETT’s fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Interzone, PseudoPod, and various anthologies. She is also the guest fiction editor for the Disabled People Destroy Fantasy issue of Uncanny. She hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first book. In addition to writing, Katharine works as the Publicity Manager for Tor.com Publishing. She currently resides in Brooklyn with her wife.
BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen books, most recently the story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021). His penultimate collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019), won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize. Other recent books include A Collapse of Horses (2016) and The Warren (2016). His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild (IHG) Award. His 2003 collection The Wavering Knife won the IHG Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
CAROLYN IVES GILMAN is a Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her novels include Halfway Human and the two-volume novel Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. Her short fiction appears in many Best of the Year collections and has been translated into seven languages. She lives in Washington, D.C., and works for the National Museum of the American Indian.
Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES was raised as pretty much the only Blackfeet in West Texas - except for his dad and grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, a couple kids, and too many old trucks. Between West Texas and now, he's published more than twenty books, including the novels The Fast Red Road, Ledfeather, and Mongrels, and the short story collections After the People Lights Have Gone Off, States of Grace, and The Ones that Got Away.

Stephen’s been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Awards for Multicultural Fiction, three This is Horror awards, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Novels of the Year. Stephen teaches in the MFA programs at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California Riverside-Palm Desert.

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer and psychiatrist. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy&Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres. He's currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. When Justin isn't writing, working in the hospital, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he's chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons.
NAOMI KRITZER has been making friends online since her teens, when she had to use a modem to dial up at 2400 baud. She is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana's Song duology and the Dead Rivers Trilogy. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Grande Prairie, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015.
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. His first published story, "The Hundredth Question," appeared in Fantasy&Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. He lives in Pasadena, California.
S. Qiouyi Lu writes and translates between two coasts of the Pacific. Ær work, including fiction, poetry, and essays, has appeared in several award-winning venues. In the Watchful City is ær first novella. You can find out more about S. at ær website or on Twitter.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His work is forthcoming in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Nightmare, and other venues. In December 2014, Usman led Pakistan's first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge.
Melissa Marr writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into 28 languages and been bestsellers in the US (NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal) as well as overseas. Remedial Magic is the first of two books in a witchy lesbian fantasy-romance series. You can find her in a kayak or on a trail with her wife if she's not writing.
With her groundbreaking novel, China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. She is the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.
TAMSYN MUIR is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Series. Her fiction has won the Locus and Crawford awards, and been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.
Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the Locus, World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, and first novel, A Song For A New Day, were both published in 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels. She was born in New York and has lived all over the U.S. and Canada, but currently resides with her wife and dog in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines.
C. L. Polk is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning novel Witchmark, the first novel of the Kingston Cycle. After leaving high school early, they have worked as a film extra, sold vegetables on the street, and identified exotic insect species for a vast collection of lepidoptera before settling down to write silver fork fantasy novels. Polk lives near the Bow River in Calgary, Alberta, in a tiny apartment with too many books and a yarn stash that could last a decade. They ride a green bicycle with a basket on the front. They spend too much time on Twitter.
Matthew Pridham was born in New Jersey and spent his childhood chasing trolls in Bergen, Norway. He has since mostly lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After working 13 years as a bookseller, he succumbed to the glittering allure of academia and earned degrees in philosophy, literature, and creative writing. His haunted house novella, “Renovations,” was printed in Weird Tales magazine issue 348, his film criticism has been published in WeirdFictionReview.com, and he’s written fiction and nonfiction for The Thought Erotic. He is currently at work on a novel.
Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "The Night Sun" and flash fiction "teatime" were published on Tor.com. Flowers for the Sea is their debut novella. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2022 Clarion West candidate.
Rachel Swirsky lives in Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award, and twice won the Nebula Award. Her books include Placed into Abyss (Mise en Abyse) and A Memory of Wind.
K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with a small dog and long cat. He is the author of speculative novels such as FIRST, BECOME ASHES (2021), DOCILE (2020), and a novel that will follow up on his Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette, "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time." They're about cults and trauma, consent and debt, and a horny trans vampire, respectively. His short fiction appears in Tor.com, Uncanny, Lightspeed, and more. You can find himme on the Internet at kmszpara.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @kmszpara.

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, The Violent Century, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to many other works and several other awards. He is also the author of the Locus Award nominated Unholy Land and debut children's novel Candy.

Lavie works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut's by Locus.

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville series of novels about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and the post-apocalyptic murder mysteries Bannerless and The Wild Dead. She's written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.

Two-time Nebula Award-winner Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, three Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton Crook Award-winning debut novel Updraft, and her Nebula award-winning, Best of NPR 2019, debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple years' best anthologies.

Fran teaches for the Genre Fiction MFA concentration at Western Colorado University and the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tor.com. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as a kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She has published the short story collections Map of Dreams, Holiday, and You Have Never Been Here. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, won the Locus award. Her second novel was The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie. She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. She has also lost several awards for which she was nominated, including the Nebula, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Sturgeon, and British Science Fiction Award. She currently lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Table of Contents

If You Take My Meaning / Charlie Jane Anders
Hearts in the Hard Ground / G. V. Anderson
The Night Soil Salvagers / Gregory Norman Bossert
The Ones Who Look / Katharine Duckett
Solution / Brian Evenson
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods / Maria Dahvana Headley
Wait for Night / Stephen Graham Jones
Little Free Library / Naomi Kritzer
How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobucar / Rich Larson
Beyond the Dragon's Gate / Yoon Ha Lee
Anything Resembling Love / S. Qiouyi Lu
City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat / Usman T. Malik
Of Roses and Kings / Melissa Marr
Yellow and the Perception of Reality / Maureen F. McHugh
The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex / Tamsyn Muir
Two Truths and a Lie / Sarah Pinsker
St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid / C. L. Polk
Everything's Fine / Matthew Pridham
The Night Sun / Zin E. Rocklyn
We're Here, We're Here / K. M. Szpara
Sinew and Steel and What They Told / Carrie Vaughn
An Explorer's Cartography of Already Settled Lands / Fran Wilde
Flight / Claire Wrenwood