A Washington Post Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Selection One of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of the Year
A highly anticipated collection of wildly imaginative short stories from “one of contemporary fiction’s true mad scientists” (Necessary Fiction).
In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks’s dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly familiar. In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.
Amber Sparks is the author of The Unfinished World, and her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
Is life, as the famous quote would have it, like a box of chocolates? Not necessarily, but a good story collection is: full of surprise, variation, and occasionally some very unexpected contents. I consider short stories to be members of an entirely different species than novels, with their own distinct pleasures. In stories, feats of language […]
