The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
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4.5 • 78 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots
Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories 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 and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many 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).
Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Questions of identity galvanize the 15 stories in this outstanding collection of fantastical fiction, giving them extraordinary gravity and resonance. In "Good Hunting," the human companion of a supernatural creature from Chinese folklore contrives an ingenious way to help her adapt to a steampunk future. The title tale (which swept the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards), in which a mother expresses love for her son through the magically animated origami animals she creates, is one of several in which the author uses Chinese-American experience to explore how all individuals assimilate into society. Whether writing about Asian culture and history, as in "The Literomancer" and "All the Flavors," or extraterrestrial civilizations, as in "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" and "An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Comparative Cognition," Liu (The Grace of Kings) universalizes the experiences of his characters, who realize at some point, as the protagonist of "Mono No Aware" does, that "we are defined by the places that we hold in the web of others' lives." Gracefully written and often profoundly moving, these stories are high-water marks of contemporary speculative fiction.
Customer Reviews
Fantastic
This collection is verbose and vibrant. Liu's mastery of the english language is complete. I cannot imagine a more poignant and powerful collection. I genuinely teared up for the first time in years while reading the title story of this collection. I cannot recommend these stories enough. Please take the time to enjoy and appreciate.
Excellent Collection by an Award Winning Author!
I recommend reading this excellent collection by Ken Liu. It covers several genres, some of the stories are fantasy, and some deal with horrible elements (although these are often historical rather than supernatural). There are other stories that are entirely science fictional. All of the stories are well written, I see why they give this guy so many awards! These are powerful small doses of thoughts and ideas that unfold in your mind like a chrysanthemum blooming, long after you read them.
One example is the titular story that is only 15 pages long, about the relationship between a Chinese-American son and his mail-order bride mother from Hong Kong. She has the magical power of making origami animals that come to life. This is a very poignant tale, that won the 2011 Nebula Award. It is unlikely to leave you unmoved...
Mr. Liu has went on to writing a series of "silk-punk" epic fantasy novels and translating the works of Chinese authors. This collection is his shorter work that he was writing and publishing before he became as well know as he now is. It clearly shows his talent and various styles.