Each story is spectacularly smart, hybrid in genre, and bold with intention. ' Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st CenturyÂ is for the adventurous reader–someone willing to walk into a story primed for cultural critique and suddenly come across a plot for murder, or to consider the dangers of sea monsters alongside those posed by twenty-first-century ennui. Kim Fu's talent is singularly inventive, her every sentence a surprise and an adventure.' -Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution

'Precise, elegant, uncanny, and mesmerizing–each story in this collection is a crystalline gem. 'How I loved the cool wit of these speculative stories! Filled with wonder and wondering, they're haunted too by loss and loneliness, their imaginative reach profoundly rooted in the human condition.' -Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself The strangest of concepts are tempered by grounded, funny dialogue in these stories, which churn with big ideas and craftily controlled antic energy.' -Naben Ruthnum 'When a collection is evocative of authors as disparate as Ray Bradbury and Stephanie Vaughn, the only possible unifier can be originality: and that's what a reader finds in Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. Kim Fu writes with grace, wit, mischief, daring, and her own deep weird phosphorescent understanding.' -Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories Every story here lights a flame in the memory, shining brighter as time goes by rather than dimming. ' Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of those rare collections that never suffers from which-one-was-that-again? syndrome. 'Fu joins recent maestros Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, 2018), Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You, 2012), and Seong-nan Ha (Bluebeard's First Wife, 2020) in creating irrefutably fantastic fiction.'- Booklist, starred review These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us. 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.

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. The debut collection from PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and ‘propulsive storyteller' (NYT Book Review), with stories that are by turns poignant and pulpy

Lesser known monsters book