Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots
Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.
Ken Liu is one of the most lauded authors in the field of American literature. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus Sidewise, and Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards, he has also been nominated for the Sturgeon and Locus Awards. His short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” is the first work of fiction to simultaneously win the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy A...
- "Who can say the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thought I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the quails of our consciousness are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe."
- "You thought you understood your soul, and you thought you knew how you needed to live your life. I thought you were wrong then, but I didn't have the right answer myself. But now I do. I think you are ready for a state change."
- "For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors -- which is the logic of narratives in general -- over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless."
- "There was a chill in the air around her, a fragile silence that did not want to be broken."
- "Centillion has put us in little bubbles, where all we see and hear are echoes of ourselves, and we become ever more stuck in our exisitng beliefs and exaggerated in our inclinations."
- "We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains. The electronic copies of yourselves that you wanted to destroy are, in literal sense, actually you."
- "The Chinese are like wild flowers, and they will survive and make joy wherever they go. A fire may burn away every living thing in a field, but after the rain the wildflowers will reappear as though by magic. Winter may come and kill everything with frost and snow, but when spring comes the wildflow"
- "But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography...the progression of such "reality-capturing" technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize."
