The Unfinished World
And Other Stories
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The images tumbling from Sparks's mind in her extraordinary second story collection (following May We Shed These Human Bodies) are fantastical and sublime, whether she is unveiling the secret life of a janitor working in a space station, exposing the heart of darkness in a twin who is set on revenge, or as in the title novella pairing two lovers in the 1920s who have widely diverging backgrounds. In present-day, historical, and fantasy settings, the author is assured; her spare but colorful prose takes the reader on journeys of longing and mystery, often into uncharted territory, all the while capturing setting and character in a few words "Teesa is one of those people who substitute scarves for personality." As Sparks explores the glory of a daughter killing a werewolf in "Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter," the tenderness of the man who builds "death houses" in "For These Humans Who Cannot Fly," or the obsession of a time traveler in "Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting," the breadth of her imagination never ceases to amaze.
