A sharp, queer, emotionally rich collection from one of short fiction’s most versatile voices
Short Story List
- As Good As New
- Rat Catcher’s Yellow
- If You Take my Meaning
- The Time Travel Club
- Six Months, Three Days
- Love Might Be Too Strong a Word
- Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie
- Ghost Champagne
- My Breath is a Rudder
- Power Couple
- Rock Manning Goes For Broke
- Because Change Was The Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy
- Captain Roger in Heaven
- Clover
- This is Why We Can’t Have Nasty Things
- A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime
- The Bookstore At The End of America
- The Visitmothers
WHAT IT IS ABOUT?
In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.
The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.
A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.
Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.
The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”
REVIEW
Charlie Jane Anders’s short stories always span a wide spectrum of emotion and worldbuilding. Some of her stories leave you gut-punched. Others are uplifting. Still others dive deep into science fiction. It is a credit to Anders as an author that she can evoke so many different emotions from her readers in such a small word count.
“Short stories are dangerous: tiny sparks of pure narrative fire that burn hotter because they snuff out sooner. Small, self-contained adventures gave me the freedom to fail — to push my limits, to experiment with styles and ideas that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. And fail I did, over and over. I wrote scores of short pieces before I managed to turn out one that fired on all cylinders. The wonderful thing is, if you blow it with something short, you’ve only wasted a week or three of writing time. And if someone reads your story in a magazine and hates it, there’ll be another story, by another author, on the next page.”
Short stories need to be concise to the point of brutality. There is no time to go mucking around with your reader’s attention. There simply are not enough words. By the time a writer is done fancifully describing a doorknob, the story needs to be over. That is one reason Anders works so brilliantly as a short story writer and, honestly, as a long-form writer too, if you have read her novels. She gets to the point. As a short fiction reader, I appreciate that.
Even Greater Mistakes, her anthology, is a beautiful collection of stories that runs the gamut. While I will not go into each one, there are a few I do want to call out.
“As Good as New” is one of the first short stories I read in the collection, and it felt unique to me as a reader because apocalypses, awful as they are, often erase the individual and the shape of their life afterward. Yes, life is terrible, but people still need to move on. There has to be some joy, or life is not worth struggling for.
“It is astounding to me that Anders wrote so much about human emotions in only 28 pages. I have IKEA instructions longer than 28 pages. But it works, and it is damn good.”
In this case, that joy comes through Marisol and her ability to find hope even among the muck and mire. It is uplifting and genuinely joyful.
The first thing I thought of when I finished “Rat-Catcher’s Yellows” was the Hamlet quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It may seem like an odd quote for this story, but the world Anders creates is vast and constantly changing. Even after a devastating disease destroys people’s minds, they still interact and build kingdoms online with cats. It sounds absurd, but it is grounded in something true. There is more to this world than we know, and depending on the angle from which you approach a problem, almost anything is possible.
“If You Take My Meaning” was one of the more complex stories in the collection for me to read and fully understand. But through the context of Anders’s The City in the Middle of the Night, it makes much more sense. It reads as a continuation beyond the end of the novel and offers a glimpse of what may come next for those characters.
“Six Months, Three Days” is what happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force: two characters, one who can see all possible futures and another who can see only their own fixed path. Nothing deviates. Nothing changes. So what happens if they begin a relationship? What would that even look like? Yes, we know there will be pain. Yes, we know exactly how it is going to end. But there are still beautiful moments here, moments of love and life worth celebrating. Even if you have already seen them in your mind’s eye, you have not yet lived them. The juice is worth the squeeze.
There is a brilliant variety in this collection, all of it delivered by a master short story writer. It is vibrant, queer, and wonderful, while still remaining committed to concise storytelling. These stories may not hit for everyone, but they hit hard for me. They reminded me exactly why Anders remains one of my favorite storytellers.
