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Like a holiday in a strange and beautiful, and sometimes scary, country. So sad to leave.
Hard to give this collection a star rating because it's, well, a collection. Some of the stories deserve five stars, while others are just bad. I enjoyed the collection as a whole. I guess the genre would be kind of experimental fiction, with some poems thrown in. The stories I enjoyed are:The Screw That Holds the World Together by Collin Blair GrabarekDifficult at Parties by Carmen Maria MachadoLurky Seven by Leila MansouriThree Tales of a Very Windy Town by Lyubomir P. NikolovThe Great Lonelin...
First off, hardly a story in here was weak or was a miss. I rarely read a collection so tightly packed with intriguing, wildly creative and important stories. Most impressive is their tendency to select stories that go way beyond genre. It may look like a zombie story at first, but it will turn out to have a weirdness and thoughtfulness that goes far beyond this genre. I honestly think they are ahead of their time in highlighting stories that make the very idea of genres obsolete.
The pieces that really struck a chord with me here were Charles Antin's "Maria and the Mice", for the beauty of its irony, and Miles Klee's "Everybody's Bluffing", for the color of its language (though the horror of its ending struck me too, in a rather less titillating way).I also liked Daniel Hornsby's "Asterius", Gabriel Blackwell's "A Model Made out of Card", Erik Anderson's "The Language of Nim", Caitlin Horrocks's "The Untranslatables", and Elizabeth McCracken's "Foundling".
Such a lovely, trippy publication; I hope it continues on and I hope more like it blossom after its example. Maria Romasco Moore's "The Great Loneliness" is the highlight of the collection, in my opinion, though Carmen Maria Machado's "Difficult at Parties" is also very good, as is the headlining novella "The Screw That Holds The World Together" by Collin Blair Grabarek.