Saga Press revealed the gorgeous cover for Ken Liu’s upcoming short fiction collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, today. Liu, who’s best known for his award winning short fiction, is publishing his first novel this year, an epic fantasy called The Grace of Kings, which has been receiving some great praise from early readers.
The full Table of Contents:
- Preface
- The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
- State Change
- The Perfect Match
- Good Hunting
- The Literomancer
- Simulacrum
- The Regular
- The Paper Menagerie
- An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition
- The Waves
- Mono no aware
- All the Flavors
- A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
- The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
- The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary
In an interview with Andrew Liptak of the Barnes & Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog, Liu and Saga Press Editorial Director Joe Monti reflected on the collection’s award winning short fiction. “It’s great to be able to offer readers who are new to my fiction, or who have read only a few stories, a convenient selection of the best non-novel work I’ve done in a well-designed package,” Liu told Liptak. “[I] was surprised by how much I remembered of what I was thinking about at the time of writing them—memories that often are not obviously connected to the stories themselves, yet resonant in some way. It was like looking through an album of old snapshots of my mind.”
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories includes many familiar stories, including the title story, “The Paper Menagerie”, which won several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award – and “An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” a previously unpublished short story.
“This is not a ‘Best of Ken Liu,'” Monti told Liptak. “[It’s] more a representation of the themes and voices that his work has explored.” Liu’s back catalog of short fiction is impressive, all the more so when you consider that he has only been publishing regularly since 2010.
“I think it ranks up there with the greatest collections of the field, alongside Le Guin, Butler, and Sturgeon,” Monti said. “If you enjoy George Saunders, read Ken Liu.”
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories will be released by Saga Press on November 3, 2015. It is available now for preorder.
