3.5 Stars ⭐️. Some I loved a lot and a couple, not so much. The one with the ice cube blew my mind! Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾

This short, bittersweet, and deceptively simple 15-page story (which you can read free here) focuses on the unexpected pain of trying to belong, showing it through a boy's troubled relationship with his mother, viewed through the prism of cultural conflict, the inevitable clash between the old and the new, and the soft tinge of origami-shaped sadness. " Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.""What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I kne...

I have a Booktube channel now! Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/petrikleo4.5/5 starsThe Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is an intimately powerful and beautiful collection of stories that encompassed some of the most relatable themes to our society, and some stories contained in this collection felt personal and evocative to me.“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”Excluding translation works, this collection marked my first experience of reading Ken Liu’s original sto...

A review of all short stories in this collection featuring my parents!Herein contains a review unlike any other I’ve done! I get home so infrequently that I drummed up the idea of involving my parents in some of my reading. My parents enjoy the odd book, but aren’t what I would describe as avid readers. So I proposed that I would read them a story a night (for 15 nights) from acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy author Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie. All they knew about the book prior to the reading was

How often does this happen : you have barely passed the introduction of a book and you feel your heart swelling with that very particular feeling of love for the words that drives bookworms such as myself to pile up books in every nook and cranny of the house. Well, this is what happened to me when I curled up in bed one evening last week with Ken Liu’s collection “The Paper Menagerie”. On top of being a very talented author, Mr. Liu is also a translator, and as such, he has a grasp over a layer...

A beautifully written, powerful anthology of first-rate speculative fiction stories.Ken Liu is an impressive guy, besides writing he is also a lawyer and a programmer. Many readers first read his translation of Liu Cixin’s Hugo award winning novel The Three-Body Problem. I read his 2014 Tor.com short work Reborn and so had a good idea he can produce a gem on his own.Building on ubiquitous themes of Asian-American cultural pluralities and Chinese myth and legend, Liu does an impressive job creati...

Frankly, this collection of short stories is one of the best I've ever read, if not the best. It's common, when reading a short short collection, to find some stories less engaging than others, but I was invested in every story in this collection. These stories run through a gamut of genres: science fiction to fantasy to history, often combining aspects from many, but they always had a stark focus on humanity. From what makes us human to human monstrosity to culture and colonialism and how it fe...

I rated each story separate in updates and I could make average rating but I'm not going to do that. Whole is more than sum of it's parts and as a whole this short story collection is an easy 5 stars and only short story collection that I give 5 stars that isn't written by Ray Bradbury. Best stories in this collection are among best I read overall and even "lesser" ones didn't left me indifferent.In genre stories are rather diverse. There is good ol' hard sci-fi, alternative history and historic...

In retrospect I decided to up this book to a full five stars. It truly was a wonderful read and had some many diverse and interesting stories within it. While perhaps not as strongly linked thematically as Stories of Your Life and Others (also by a Chinese-American writer), they nearly all delivered on fascinating and engaging stories.One common motif he employed was writing about various alien (and I mean ALIEN) species and civilizations. One story looked at how they created books (or their cul...

4.75⭐️The day I read a book written by Ken Liu and think it's less than pure magnificent is the day the world will cease to exist.Once again, I'm entranced.I was first introduced to his genius through his Dandelion Dynasty series and the Wall of Storms (second book) instantly became one of my top five favourite books of all time. I knew then he was a once-in-a-generation author and this is by no means an exaggeration, just a simple statement of fact and this beautiful collection of short stories...

This is a wonderful collection of short SFF/Speculative fiction stories all written by the highly intelligent and eloquent Ken Liu. This wasn't my first time reading from Liu as I read his translation of the Three Body Problem, but this was my first time reading his own work and I was thoroughly impressed!What I think I loved most about the stories within this collection is that each one felt unique and genuine. Every voice of the narrator was different and they all had differing themes and topi...

Absolutely stunning collection of short stories which teach and entertain in equal measure. Ken Liu has an incredible imagination and these stories are all so different and yet all so amazing. I, like many others, come to Ken Liu after his superb translations of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem and Death's End and I can see that he was the perfect choice because his love of language and culture echoes that of Cixin Liu in many, many ways. I also saw some commonality in some of their sci fi ide...

4.5 stars, rounding up. (Note: This review is just for the title story, which you can listen to here: https://podcastle.org/2011/07/12/podc.... GR merged my single short story review into this collection. I've read several of the other stories online - they're all excellent. I'd love to read this whole collection but haven't gotten to it yet.) A young boy, the son of an American father and a Chinese immigrant mother, discovers that his mother has the magical gift of making origami animals that l...

A great mix of stories. Very serious sff, without much humor but without getting terribly heavy either. Some of the stories think through big contemporary issues (like tech surveillance) in very thoughtful ways.

This sounds to me like something a college sophomore would write because he's like "If I write about my heritage and sad dead mom my creative writing professor pretty much has to give me an A, right?" And when he reads it in class everyone says it's great because emotions, man, except that one sortof bitchy darkhaired girl who listens to a lot of Tori Amos and everybody hates her except you, you kindof have a crush on her, and in fact next year you will have a brief, disappointing relationship w...

I'm filled with shame for not having read these fantastic short stories earlier. Instead, I just focused on reading Ken Liu's translations of Cixin Liu, and Ken Liu's own enormous epic fantasy, ignoring, (wrongly-so) his award-winning short fiction.*rubs hands together and gets to work*I was delighted by almost all the short, sometimes strange, fiction that filled the first pages. The Bookmaking Species of Select Species tickled all my librophile instincts. State Change made me change tracks HAR...

This collection was beautifully written and powerful. The stories range in genre from historical to fantasy and speculative. They are all Asian inspired and most of them are quite sad and present some injustice or a sacrifice made by the characters. The stories are very well researched and they made me learn more about Asian history and culture. The last story, about the Japanese Unit 731 during the WW2 shocked me because I did not know about the atrocities that were performed there. The Bookmak...

I wanted to love this short story collection, but most of Ken Liu's characters fell flat. These stories contain so much good stuff: fascinating elements of science-fiction and fantasy, themes that include culture and racism and fighting for justice, surprising turns of plot that keep you on your toes - but very few of them create a lasting emotional impact. Throughout reading these individual stories, I envisioned Liu thinking "oh, this could be a really cool *insert magical realism device or un...

A profound and interesting collection of stories. I am hesitant to say I enjoyed reading it. It is a searing and brutal collection. For me it was both an intimate look at Asian culture and history. It was also a detached one. There are a variety of different types of stories: fiction, historical, magical realism, science fiction etc. Liu does all of them very well. In addition, Lui doesn't stay in China. His stories are set In Taiwan, Japan, China, the US etc. People (Americans in particular) do...

4 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum http://bibliosanctum.com/2016/04/07/b...One of my favorite books last year was The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu, but before he published his debut novel he was already an accomplished writer of many award-winning short stories. While in general I am not a big reader of short fiction, I’d happily make the exception for some authors’ anthologies and you can definitely bet Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is one of them.Like many collections, there are stor...