Wonderful Short Stories Online

Since I started university, I often haven't had the time or brainpower to sit down and finish a novel. I've therefore got much more into short stories - my dad gave me a copy of Borges' Fictions just before I went to university and I fell in love utterly and completely. Since then I've read some fantastic collections - including the one I'm reading at the minute, Diving Belles by Lucy Wood - but I've also got into reading short story magazines. Partly this is, ahem, market research; I've started writing short stories myself, since I realised that I enjoy writing fiction but can't sustain a novel-length plot for shit. But short story magazines, especially those with a SFF/speculative fiction focus, are having a bit of a renaissance.

I was very excited when I found out that you can submit your short stories to these magazines and get paid! And pretty well - the "pro" rate is 6 US cents a word or more. It's also common practice for these magazines to release their short stories online, where I've been devouring them. I love short stories about magic and ghosts much more than short stories about divorce and middle-aged problems. ;)

So, here's the short stories that I've really enjoyed! I hope you do too - they're easy to consume in a single sitting, perfect for busy people like me who've been promising themselves they'll get to reading War and Peace for, oh, two years now...

An Index of How Our Family Was Killed, Matt Bell
This is a strange and rather heartbreaking story, using the alphabetical format to tell you all the details in the wrong order. You slowly piece together the story, and although the writing itself is beautifully bleak and evocative, the greatest satisfaction comes when everything you've read comes together and you realise "how our family was killed".

Dustbaby, Alix E Harrow
The descriptions in this story are just - I'm open-mouthed. They're vivid and almost hallucinatory in the picture they build up of this alien, dustbowl landscape. This story is an apocalyptic tale set during the Depression in the US South (I think? My American geography is not great). There are tons of specificities which make this story come alive - the pamphlets issued by the federal government about how to stop the red dust that's rising everywhere, the preacher, the nosy neighbours that are an inevitablity of rural life, and of course the dustbaby herself.

The Earth and Everything Under, K. M. Ferebee
This is one of the first online short stories from the "establishment" of US-based SFF magazines I wrote, and it remains one of my favourites. It's a beautiful narrative of death and grief, with a dual POV between the man who's dead and wandering around the underworld in confusion, and the woman who's left alive, grief-stricken, and avoided by her neighbours because they think she's a witch. I still think about the images from this story sometimes.

Help Me Follow My Sister Into the Land of the Dead, Carmen Maria Machado
I adore Carmen Maria Machado! I still haven't read the stories she's most famous for ("Descent" and "The Husband Stitch"), but I've read a lot of others, and I think this is one of the more accessible and also maybe a little fun? It's in the form of a Kickstarter campaign, with the story taking place in updates from Ursula, whose sister has gone to the land of the dead for a laugh. It's funny and wry and a little heartbreaking.

Pocosin, Ursula Vernon
A possum god, a Pratchett-esque witch (so other people have told me), and the Devil and Death and it's so lovely. It has a very strong sense of place, of the land and what it feels like and represents, and I love that in, well, anything really, but especially short stories. It is very sad, but the witch is fantastic and no-nonsense and she's an utter delight.

Cat Pictures Please, Naomi Kritzer
After all these rather depressing stories, I'll end with a fun, light-hearted one. This is about a benevolent AI (they explicitly dismiss all the sci-fi examples of AIs going evil) who just wants to help people, by finding them different jobs, making them meet potential partners; all of which sounds very nice until you realise that, as an AI, they don't have a great grasp on appropriateness, and sometimes their well-intentions don't turn out so well. However, there is a happy ending! And cat pictures.

I hope you enjoy at least some of these; let me know what you think of them!

The Power of Photos

I spent some time today looking through old Facebook photos. I was a little late to Facebook - I didn't get an account until, I believe, 2010, and I didn't use it very much until 2011/12. But I do have some old photos of me on there - and by old, I mean photos when I was about 15. Some of them have gone since the friend who uploaded tons of photos has taken them down, but it's been interesting to see not only what I used to look like, but the things I used to do and the friends I had, many of whom I've lost touch with.

It's easier than ever to take and share photos of yourself, and for all that I do roll my eyes at people who have to photograph every part of their lives - I also tend to, myself, mostly take artsy rather than personal photos - they are really fun to look back at. I'm proud of the landscape scenic photos I've taken but I also like the photos of people I know just having fun. More than anything else, they can be such a strong reminder of parts of your life that you don't think about that often.

They can be a record of who you were with at that moment...

The family mob back in 2009. At least half of us are missing.

My friend group at school on our last day, 2011.

Or of a particular event you may have forgotten...

HAHAHA so this was taken at a benefit concert we were playing at. We got slightly drunk before performing and had a whale of a time backstage.

Of the styles you used to try...

God, I used to spend so much time on my hair. This is dyed and curled with tongs!

Obviously this was not an everyday look! But I had just discovered backcombing.

The places you've been...

On top of Table Mountain in Cape Town, with Robben Island in the distance.

Rehearsal on a music project in Turkey.

Or even hold a premonition of the future in a weird sort of way...

As a seventeen-year-old on a summer school, I am standing on the quad of what, just over a year later, will be my college at Oxford.

So none of these photos are great examples of photography, and a lot of them have no real point to them - no one needed to take photos of us at the benefit concert we organised or disobeying the rules about not standing on the grass (oops...). But what they lack in skill they make up for in memories (and also cringey memories of hairstyles past!).

A March Day in Oxford

I've finished my thesis, it was sunny today... life is good. The only not-good thing was that I went out with my camera to take photos, because I don't take enough of this ridiculously photogenic city, but most of them didn't come out because I forgot to adjust the ISO and they were all massively over-exposed. :( By the time I realised there was no point retaking them, so I just have a few. I got some good ones, anyway.

As it says on the plaque, this is Christ Church War Memorial Garden, part of Christ Church Meadow. You can see the clock tower in the background.

A statue on the side of Magdalen College. Not sure who it is though!

Shadows of the dreaming spires. I edited this to look a bit moodier, I hope it worked...

Pastel houses in Holywell Street!

Anyway, I've been really behind with blogging, but soon enough the term will be over and I'll have nothing to do. Which won't make for very interesting blog posts, but I'll have the time to write said posts.... ah, the circle goes on.

Stuff.

Holy shit, I got 250 views on my blog last month from Russia. I am sorry, Russian readers, I didn't update for ages. It's because I have to write my thesis and it has consumed my life. I barely have enough time for keeping up with my friends, let alone blogging.

So of course I started a book blog! This will remain my personal blog, for photos, ramblings, linkspams, non-book reviews, and such, but I now have a book blog at Sporadically, Books! I have a grand total of one post there, but I hope to write a lot more about books, doing stuff that isn't just reviews. (I want to do a post about ugly book covers at some point, because God knows I have enough of them in my collection...)

I will leave you with some links, so I can delete at least some of my tabs and you can hopefully learn something.

• HfBK Dresden | Historisches Frieseren 2-4.Studienjahr - pretty historical re-enactment photos.
• The Almost Forgotten Race - an article about Eurasians in Singapore.
• Serbia's Geopoetika Publishes English Translations with an Eye Towards Foreign Rights Sales - phew, that was a long title! Anyway, I'm really interested in the issues and practicalities of literary translation, and this was an interesting way of going about it.
• Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world - related to the last link, this was a really interesting experiment. I ended up scrolling through her blog for recs!
• Notes on Science Fiction and Fantasy in Latin America - wow, I have a lot of literary and language-related links today! I've known for a while from Argentinian friends that fantasy is a core part of the literary canon in at least Argentina, and operates quite differently from the typically secondary-world fantasy of the Anglophone world, but I liked reading about these genres across the whole continent.
• Finding Alice's 'Wonderland' in Oxford - I love Alice in Wonderland and I live in Oxford. I like this article. :>
• Splendid Photos of Salvador Dali being Salvador Dali - needs no explanation. Also, splendid.

P.S. my computer crashed twice writing this post, but I persevered!

Review | The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas, Dmitry Chen

Studying Latin translation has given me a new appreciation for literary translation. Before this point, I didn't really think about how books are translated from one language to another, but now I'm familiar with the process of deciphering the work on a word-by-word level, producing a rough "translationese" draft, going back over it and clearing it up, working on drawing out the implications of the original text... Literary translators of this world, I salute you!

And yet there really isn't enough translation being done. I have a friend who is doing a degree in German and has to translate a contemporary German novel (which hasn't been translated into English yet) as part of her coursework. She has an enormous choice; there's tons of fantastic untranslated German literature out there, as there is for every country. What makes The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas interesting on the level of translation is that it wasn't published conventionally; it was crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign and published by Russian Life. The trilogy it's part of, the Silk Road Trilogy, was a massive hit in Russia, but no Anglophone publishing house has picked it up. (The same goes for the cult hit Дом, в котором... by Mariam Petrosyan which still isn't available in a language I can read!) Could this represent a new way to get translated fiction out into the world?

Musings about translation aside, this definitely deserved to be translated. It's an excellent book on an unconventional subject: the fall of the Umayyad dynasty and the rise of the Abbasids. It further subverts expectations by not taking place in the centre of the action in Syria/the Levant/Mesopotamia, but in the trading cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv. Peripheral and yet entirely central to these pivotal events, the people of Central Asia - the conquered peoples of Sogdia and Iran - live under uneasy Arab Muslim rule and are experiencing a sea change not only in the dynasty that rules the Islamic empire, but in their own countries and cultures. More people, such as the protagonist's brother, are converting to Islam out of genuine conviction or the chance for an easier life or both. Although the Islamic conquest of Central Asia is a century old by the time this book takes place (749-50 AD), a strong miasma of loss and dislocation permeates this book.

The main character, Nanidat Maniakh, is a wealthy silk merchant from Samarkand who is caught up in murder, mystery, and intrigue when he returns from two years in China and is the victim of an attempted assassination in his own home. He then journeys from Samarkand into Iran to try to uncover the truth, and finds himself part of a great tangle of alliances, plots, and secret organisations. Nanidat did not exist, but most of the people in this book did, and are huge figures in early Islamic history: Abu Muslim, al-Mansur, al-Saffah, Marwan II, and many more. This book relies heavily on real and imagined history, and as such it can be difficult to keep track of everything that goes on. Many reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have highlighted this problem; personally, I had very little difficulty following the narrative, but I did study early Islamic history which gave me a big head start! Reading a little on the Umayyads and Abbasids, as well as some basic Central Asian history, would go a long way in enriching one's enjoyment of this book.

The style of this book is somewhat grandiose and epic, which is suitable to the story and is not particularly distracting or irritating once you get absorbed in it. Unlike some historical fiction, it doesn't try to translate an older experience to modern understandings, and there's very little slangy, casual dialogue. To come back to the translation - I haven't read the original Russian, but Liv Bliss' translation is superb. It's fluid and eloquent, and doesn't have any of the dull, stiff quality that translated prose can sometimes have (God knows most of my translations are overly stiff and unnatural...). I commend both Dmitry Chen for writing this book (if the other two books of the trilogy come out in English I will definitely be buying them!), and Liv Bliss for producing such a distinguished, readable translation.

Last of the Oxford Term

(I was trying to play off Last of the Summer Wine, but I'm not sure it worked...)

I was active with my camera the last couple of weeks, trying to capture a sense of Oxford in the cold depths of December. Tomorrow I leave for Amsterdam (and Havanah!) and I won't see Oxford again until January. So long, city! It hasn't snowed yet but you're still beautiful.

Ooh artistic ooh!!

My best friend from school came to visit! She loved our dining hall and dressed for the occasion.

You can see more of the hall here.

The next set of pictures I took one evening walking back to where I was staying (not in my college - they kicked me out and I'm currently staying at a friend's room while she's going back home to Italy). I really love the light in these; evening light in winter can make for some very stark, eerie shots.

And these last ones I just took today, my last day in Oxford. Other than the first one, which is of Hertford College, they were all taken in Radcliffe Square at night.

All photos are unedited because I'm lazy.

Ice Hockey!

On Saturday I went to my first ever ice hockey match. I went with - who else? - a couple of Canadians, my friend Jenny and her boyfriend Jackson. While I knew Oxford had an ice-skating rink, I didn't know ice hockey matches took place there. We were lucky this time, because it was the last (I think) match of the university ice hockey season, between the two best teams in the league: Oxford and London. Obviously I cheered for Oxford. ;)

And this match was, somewhat dramatically, advertised as the Battle of the Burghs.

Wait, that needs to be bigger.

The Battle of the Burghs!!!

That's better. 

Of course, I took photos, though they weren't great since the netting got in the way and my camera kept focusing on the netting rather than the hockey players! I got a few nice shots, however.

And a couple of us at the match.

Ugh, phone quality.

So I ended up enjoying it a lot! I'm not a sports fan and I don't go to matches, but this was really fun.

Oxford Christmas Lights Festival

...happened this weekend! Unfortunately I wasn't able to see a lot of it, because I went to London at midday Saturday, didn't get back until the wee hours, and today I was stuck inside writing an essay. However, Friday night I went out with my friend June and got to see the lights and such.

The light-up toys that are inevitably on sale at these things. I used to live in Canterbury which had a lot of these events and I loved these things!

The moon behind the Sheldonian. :)

A view up Broad Street.

Outside the Oxford Museum of Science.

The Cornmarket - now the Christmas lights have gone up!

The lantern and the moon. I tried so many times to take this photo!

In the Weston Library an "Impromptu Orchestra", which to my understanding means people turn up with their instruments and play, was performing Handel's Messiah.

Unfortunately it was a slightly avant-garde performance and an incredibly annoying woman made an old vinyl recording of the piece cut in and out of the actual music (it wasn't even in time! It was the kind of thing you do when you're a child and making music cut out was really clever) so in the end we left. We went to the Castle Quarter where there was supposed to be a performance involving light-up umbrellas, but we missed it. :(

Got a couple of photos with the lights, though.

June.

And me!

Oxford gets into the Christmas mood early because we have "Oxmas" on the 25th of November, which is the only reason I don't mind Christmas stuff happening before December. It's slightly ridiculous, but it gets me in the mood for Christmas so when I go home I'm really enthusiastic and all my family and friends are still in the "ugh, Christmas comes too early" stage.

Being a Tourist in My Own City

I turned 21 yesterday. As the cliché goes, I don't actually feel any different, but one thing that did happen is that my friend Elise, whom I've known since we were at sixth-form together, came to visit me! She wasn't here very long, but I took the opportunity to show her around Oxford and be a bit of a tourist myself.

Elise outside the Radcliffe Camera, the very distinctive library that mostly houses history and English books.

In Brasenose, which is not my college, but I took her to the nicest-looking ones.

Lovely view of the roof of the RadCam from Brasenose.

In Corpus Christi, that pint-sized college!

The dining hall at Christ Church. And yes, that is the Hogwarts dining hall!

Also in Christ Church: the Harry Potter stairs!

The last few days have been appalling weather in Oxford, with torrential rain, but the last couple of days have been even worse and added gale-force winds to the mix. On certain streets it was almost impossible to walk into the wind. These are the kind of days when you wonder what the point was in styling your hair...