SHORT STORY REX - Year One in Review
featuring tons of stories by a whole bunch of people
(IMPORTANT NOTE: Please read, or at least scroll, to the end for special news that will interest all my subscribers and yes its about what you probably think it is)
Well, well, we come to the end of 2023, the first year of me doing these posts. Figured I might do a retrospective of all the stories, books, etc I’ve recommended this year.
At the outset, I had a few specific goals in mind with this project. They were:
‘To share stuff from outside the confines of the Known, Prestigious, frequently-Award-nominated venues of SFF’. I think I’ve been pretty successful in that so far. Of the stories I’ve singled out for attention this past year, only 6/53 (11%) appeared in “pro-paying” genre mags (ie your Clarkesworlds, your Uncannys, your Strange Horizons, etc). Hell, 12/53 (22%) weren’t genre stories of any sort, much less of the pro-paying variety.
“recommending stories from a few months, maybe even a few years ago, in hopes of giving more exposure to work that may have already been consumed and filed away and forgotten” - nearly half the stuff I covered was at least a couple months old at the time I recommended them (24/53, 45%) and i hope my little tweets and skeets and stubsacks have helped at least a tiny bit in extending the ‘shelf life’ of these works
sharing some more classic stories - 7/53 (13%) fit this category, from Sherwood Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Harry Harrison, Herman Melville, Margaret St Clair (x2), and Manly Wade Wellman
self-promo - not counting the handful of my own stories published this year, I did share quite a few stories by other writers which appeared in those same venues where I’d been published (Body Fluids, Café Irreal, etc), which accounts for 8/53 (15%)
Other stats: As for the leaderboard venue-wise, those who’ve been paying attention will not be surprised to find Seize the Press in the lead with 4.
X-R-A-Y and ergot. tied for second at three, while Propagule and Tower take home the bronze with 2 each.
So with that fascinating bit of statistical analysis out of the way, here are all the short story recs from 2023, alphabetical by author’s last name. I think it makes for a pretty goddamn decent reading list of short fiction
Been a fun project to work on and one I mean to continue. Until next year, thanks for reading and following along!
Short Stories
Violet Allen. “The Venus Effect” (Lightspeed)
Sherwood Anderson. “The Dumb Man” (The Triumph of the Egg)
Paula D. Ashe. “The Ladies Room” (Black Women in Horror Magazine)
Max Barker. “The Invisible Magnetus Sphere Shields Us from The Dangerous Ionising Radiation of Space” (Propagule)
J. Billings. “Someone Coughs in the Darkness” (Ergot)
C.B. Blanchard. “Mycophilia” (Seize the Press)
Trevor Bonas. “Mountain” (Propagule)
J.R. Bolt. “"Abfigurations, 1997, or: Why I Hate Rei Ayanami" (Murdered Futures)
Ray Bradbury. “The Exiles” (MacLean’s)
Sasha Brown. “Super Black” (X-R-A-Y)
Vajra Chandrasekera. “Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labor” (Uncanny)
Brian Evenson. “Sisters” (Song for the Unraveling of the World)
Fabio Fernandes. “The Last Science Fiction Writer: A Hallucination” (Interzone Digital)
Evan Forman. “The Dream with No Dreamer” (Seize the Press)
Ivy Grimes. “Glass Book” (Ergot); “Glass Pet” (Seize the Press); “Stag” (Coffin Bell); “Glass Piano” (Hex Literary); “The Arcade” (Ivy Grimes’ Grime Time)
Camilla Grudova. “The Apartment” (Bourbon Penn); “Ivor” (Granta)
Thomas Ha. “Window Boy” (Clarkesworld)
Harry Harrison. “Portrait of the Artist” (Eight Tales and Two Tomorrows)
M. John Harrison. “Cicisbeo” (Weird Fiction Review)
Kij Johnson. “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” (Drabblecast)
Joe Koch. “Given” (Shortwave)
Thomas Ligotti. “The Clown Puppet”, “Teatro Grottesco” (Teatro Grottesco)
Robert Lopez. “Tax Returns” (Blue Arrangments)
Alice M. “At the Very Center of You is Nothing” (X-R-A-Y)
Kuzhali Mackinavel “Cats and Fish”, “Because We are Precious and Brave”, “Kisi Shayar Something Something” (Café Irreal)
Avra Margariti. “Three Stories” (Café Irreal)
June Martin. “9/11 Was the 9/11 of Stories about 9/11 but This Story is the 9/11 of Them Being Terrible” (substack)
Herman Melville. “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Sascha Belle Nastasi. “Another Customer” (X-R-A-Y)
Christopher O’Halloran. “At the Bottom of the Burlap.” (Cosmic Horror Monthly)
Bruce Holland Rogers. “The Ledger Angel” (Café Irreal)
Michael Allen Rose. “The Half-Eaten Sausage Will See You in His Office” (Body Fluids)
Naben Ruthnum. “Kenyon Archive Report” (Brooklyn Review)
Judith Shadford. “Endless Yearning” (Seize the Press)
Elena Sichrovsky. “Apologies for the Fact of Your Body” (Ergot)
Samir Sirk Morató. “it who wears my sister’s skin” (Body Fluids); “entrada” (Tower, Vol 2: HOLE)
Margaret St. Clair. “Squee” (Future Science Fiction); “The Gardener” (Thrilling Wonder Stories)
Fargo Tbakhi. “Twelve Worlds Interrupted by the Drone” (Strange Horizons)
Mary Thorsen. “Online Dating” (Tower, Vol. 1: End)
Nikolaj Volgushev. “Pete and the Elephant.” (Café Irreal)
Manly Wade Wellman. “The Frogfather” (Weird Tales)
D. Harlan Wilson. “Laundromat” (Café Irreal)
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez. “As the Shore to the Tides, So Blood Calls to Blood” (itch.io); “Up in the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter, Deep in the Ground” (Strange Horizons)
Novels, Novellas, Collections, Anthologies, etc…
Paula D. Ashe, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other
Nathan Ballingrud. Wounds
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
Màrio Coelho, Unto the Godless What Little Remains
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Sofia Samatar, Tender
Joy Williams. Breaking and Entering
Music
Big Black, “Kerosene”
The Bulletproof Tiger, You Wanna Kiss About It?
The Crownhate Ruin, “Ride Your Ride”
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. “People Vultures”
Mega Colossus, Riptime
Prince, “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)”, “Do Yourself a Favor”
Rapeman, “Monobrow”
Scratch Acid, “Eyeball”, “Lay Screaming”
Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil
Steely Dan, “The Second Arrangement”
IMPORTANT NOTE: as you may have guessed, Short Story Rex will be moving to a different newsletter service as i can find the spare time and head space to sort it all out, hopefully by the end of Jan 2024 but well see…