Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Description: Presents the author's selection of his best short stories, as well as a new piece, in a collection that includes "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," "Mono No Aware" and "The Waves."

Brief description: Ken Liu is an award-winning American author of speculative fiction. His collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. Liu's other works include The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, The Veiled Throne, a second collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the forthcoming Julia Z series. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work, including the short story "Good Hunting," adapted as an episode in Netflix's animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC's Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories. "The Hidden Girl," "The Message," and "The Oracle" have also been optioned for development. Liu previously worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, and the value of storytelling. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Review Quotes: 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. (Mar.)--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW