Hazlitt, Terraform, and
F&SF, plus multiple appearances in Year’s Bests, Yu has developed a reputation for boundary-breaking fiction, wonderful prose, and thorough research. Creatively, she isn’t interested in limitations: she writes poems, plays, novels, essays, stories, songs. She has worked on video games such as
Destiny and
Destiny 2. Her 2015
Uncanny Magazine story, “Woman at Exhibition,” was part of the Discenza-Straub exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; more recently, she taught an Interactive Fiction seminar for Clarion West.
Her debut novel, steeped in research from books, Persian language study, detention center visits, travel, and more, is called
November was another totally locked down month here, with Montreal in the red zone and no socialization allowed. I saw a total of three other human beings, four if you count the time I saw the UPS guy. I read twenty books, and some of them were great. Six re-reads, the rest new, one epic, one non-fiction, three short story collections, and the rest novels.
Cucina Tipica, Andrew Cotto (2018) A romance novel set in Italy, but written by a man with a male protagonist, and also American. In many ways it was very satisfying, but in others it was odd. It strangely kept writing about things I’m quite familiar with but recasting them as elite experiences. For instance, the characters go to Teatro del Sale, but instead of describing the typical experience, he has their experience be mediated and special. The whole point of Teatro del Sale is the democratization of excellent food, making it inexpensive and yet still great, and so this is especially weird. There were some more things like t