検索キーワード： ナレーター "Yelena Shmulenson" すべてのカテゴリー

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rejected by his lover, a man seeks to reconcile with his family. Twitter users miraculously muster enough empathy to help a lost cat find a forever home.

In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabłowski has tracked down—and broken bread with—people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world’s superpowers. Traveling across Stalin’s Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol, he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.