Nonfiction
Book Review: Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
We know you love short stories, and so does Arley Sorg. He reports on his favorites from this new collection by Lightspeed alum Isabel Yap.
We know you love short stories, and so does Arley Sorg. He reports on his favorites from this new collection by Lightspeed alum Isabel Yap.
At the time that I wrote the story fifteen years ago, our culture was at the height of one of our regularly occurring moral panics around bad boy romances. The theory is that if women are permitted to have sexual fantasies about tortured and angry men, somehow these fantasies will directly cause sexual and interpersonal violence. So I wanted to write a bad boy romance as a way of standing up for myself and my friends who love bad boy romance stories. Because I am the sort of person who likes to ground modern narratives in folklore, when I think of bad boy romances, I think of magical fiancé stories.
Chris Kluwe dives into the kitchen to gives this new cookbook a serious review. Hungry for more? Then don’t miss this review!
This story started with the title. It was just a phrase that popped into my head one day and became a brain worm of sorts. I had no story, no character, and no setting for it, but those two words felt like they had a lot of potential. It was also around this time that my mom was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her condition made apparent to me the connection between our memories and how they coalesce to create who we are. Anything affecting these memories fundamentally alters the self, however the “self” might be conceived.
LaShawn M. Wanak takes a look at this vivid new novel. Is it the right book for you? Find out!
My ideal reader, for short stories at least, has always been someone who is willing to take a journey blind without advance promises of specific story elements, to wit: “This story is about a heroic quest and there is at least one elf in it.” My ideal reader is someone who won’t complain afterward that they only like stories if the main character is “likeable,” if it takes place in a world where they would like to live. And I fortunately meet this kind of reader all the time. I think I’m talking to one now.
Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month’s terrific content.
The entire story also started with another image (years back—I’m a slow writer!): the opening image of the trees that were constantly dropping their leaves in the perpetual autumn of this planet, creating huge piles of dead leaves that never disappear. It’s an image that I find both beautiful and chilling, and that is the tone I hoped to set for the story.
E. Lily Yu received the Artist Trust / LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. She is a writer and narrative designer whose stories appear in venues from McSweeney’s to Tor.com and in eleven best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.
Telling a fairy tale is a matter of assembling these riffs into a shape that fits together in a satisfying way and serves to accomplish the goals that you’re trying to accomplish (education or self-expression or entertainment or all of the above or something else entirely). When you do this, you’re behaving like the bricoleur from Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropological writing: assembling the narrative elements you have available into a Rube-Goldberg machine of a narrative that suits your present situation and understanding. This differs from the way that we normally talk about creative fiction in our culture.