This year the amount of student work I read–both as an instructor at UCLA and UTSC and as an MFA student at UBC–was copious. We’re talking around two hundred stories and novel fragments, all of which I critiqued, too. This is what I fit in the cracks:
New Fiction – Novels, Novellas & Collections
Autonomous
Spoonbenders
The Best American Mystery Stories 2016
River of Teeth
Taste of Marrow
The Red Threads of Fortune
Non-Fiction
The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Crafty TV Writing: Thinking Inside the Box
Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel
The Best American Travel Writing 2017
Women & Power: A Manifesto
Fieldwork Fail: The Messy Side of Scence, by Jim Jourdane and 25 scientists
I read lots and lots and lots and fucking lots of non-fiction articles, and I didn’t track them. You can’t track everything. But notable among them is: “City of Villains: Why I Don’t Trust Batman,” by Sarah Gailey
New Short Fiction
This is an incredibly incomplete list… I’m still struggling to capture all my short fic reading, especially the DailySF offerings.
“Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987)
“And then there Were (N-One)” by Sara Pinsker
“We Who Live in the Heart,” by Kelly Robson
“We Need to talk about the Unicorn in your Backyard,” by Mari Ness
“Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me,” by John Chu,
“The Famine King,” by Darcie Little Badger
“Later, Let’s Tear up the Inner Sanctum,” by Merc Rustad,
“Seasons of Glass and Iron,” by Amal El-Mohtar
“It Happened to Me: I was Brought Back to Avenge my Death, but chose Justice Instead,” by Nino Cipri.
“A Hero, I am,” by Kat Otis
“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by @KMSzpara in @UncannyMagazine
”Rivers Run Free,” by Charles Payseur –
“The Witch in the Tower,” by Mari Ness
Rereads
The Blue Place
Stay
Always
In the Woods
Ghost Story
The Trespasser
