Published in 2022
232 pages
6 hours and 27 minutes
Kim Fu is the author of For Today I Am a Boy which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle.
What is this book about?
An NPR, Book Riot, Chicago Public Library, Tor.com, South China Morning Post,Ms. Magazine, and Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2022
Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Prize, 2022 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction & The 2023 Washington State Book Award in Fiction
A BuzzFeed, WIRED, LitHub, ALTA, and PureWow Best Book of Winter
“The strange and wonderful define Kim Fu’s story collection, where the line between fantasy and reality fades in and out, elusive and beckoning.” ―The New York Times Book Review
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.
Titles included:
Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867
Liddy, First to Fly
Times Cubes
#ClimbingNation
Sandman
Twenty Hours
The Doll
In This Fantasty
Scissors
Junebugs
Bridezilla
Do You Remember Candy
