Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree, Jr.

Under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., Alice Sheldon wrote dozens of award-winning and influential stories, some of the best of which are included here.

The Water Dancer

Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a story of the underground railroad, of memory, and of magic—all told with Coates’s exquisite prose.

Errantry

Elizabeth Hand

This collection of shorts includes ghosts, flying machines, witches, ancient trees, and more than one impossible transformation.

And Go Like This

John Crowley

This collection ranges across a wide territory in both place and time, but there are recurring themes: aging, mortality, endings and beginnings—extraordinary reflections on ordinary lives.

Gideon the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

The cover blurb promises lesbian necromancers in space, and the pages within do not disappoint.

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller

In this reimagining of the Iliad, the love story is not of Helen and Paris but of Achilles and his beloved, Patroclus.

Vita Nostra

Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko

This story begins when Sasha, on a beach holiday with her mother, notices a strange man keeping tabs on her.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea

Sarah Pinsker

In the titular story from this collection, the world has gone to hell, and those with means have absconded to the sea, in cruise ships where no one gets off at port.

Circe

Madeline Miller

This is a subversive and triumphant retelling of the story of Circe, daughter of the sun-god Helios.

Hard Light

Elizabeth Hand

Fleeing Reykjavik amid a series of murders, Cass Neary lands in London expecting to rendevous with her longtime lover Quinn—but Quinn is nowhere to be found.

Available Dark

Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary has arrived home in New York, after a brief stint in Maine where she just happened to be involved with several mysterious deaths.

Generation Loss

Elizabeth Hand

“My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?”

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell

A group of Jesuit scientists, led by the polyglot priest Emilio Sandoz, set off on a mission to discover the source of music emanating from the direction of Alpha Centauri.

Women Talking

Miriam Toews

A group of Mennonite women suffer for years from mysterious midnight attacks, purportedly the work of demons come to punish them for their sins. Eventually, they discover the assaults are not the work of demons but of men—their own husbands, sons, and neighbors.

The Night Tiger

Yangsze Choo

Ren is an eleven-year-old houseboy with a mission: to find his dead master’s finger, severed and lost years ago, and bury it with his body.

The Other Wind

Ursula K. Le Guin

This, the final book in the Earthsea cycle, returns to the Dry Land—the land of the dead—where the barrier between life and death is crumbling.

Tales from Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

The fifth book in the Earthsea cycle breaks from the path for five short stories, each of which reveals more about the Archipelago and the customs, traditions, and people within it.

Tehanu

Ursula K. Le Guin

Two decades passed between the publication of the third book of the Earthsea cycle and this, the fourth.

The Farthest Shore

Ursula K. Le Guin

The third book in the Earthsea cycle makes plain what before had only been hinted at: the magic of the wizards carries a cost.

The Tombs of Atuan

Ursula K. Le Guin

The second book in Le Guin’s extraordinary Earthsea cycle continues her subversion of the usual wizardly tropes: Ged, the antihero from the first book, reappears, but he serves as an accessory to another’s story—that of a young girl named Tenar.