Short stories by Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson is a writer of short stories, novels and occasional other things. Her first sale was in 1987 to a small Minnesota magazine, Tales of the Unanticipated; since then she has sold more than fifty shorter works of fiction, as well as poems, nonfiction, and game materials. Her books include The Fox Woman (Tor, 1999); Fudoki (Tor, 2003, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees (Small Beer Press, 2012, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor.com, 2016, winner of the World Fantasy Award); andThe River Bank, a sequel to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows(Small Beer Press, 2017). There was also a Star Trek: The Next Generationbook with bestseller Greg Cox, Dragon’s Honor. She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (2010, 2011, and 2012), and the World Fantasy Award (2009, 2017, and 2019), and a winner of the Hugo Award (2012), as well as winning the French Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (2017), the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (1992); the Crawford Award (1999); and others Her short stories include the award-winners “Fox Magic,” “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” “Spar,” “Ponies,” “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” and “The Privilege of the Happy Ending.” She’s been translated into seventeen languages, and her work has been optioned for Hollywood twice. Here’s a good list of her fiction that is available online, some here on this website, some not so much. In the past, she’s had all the cool jobs: managing editor for Tor Books, Collections and Graphic Novels Editor for Dark Horse Comics, Continuity Director and Creative Director for various worlds at Wizards of the Coast/TSR, a subject matter expert for Microsoft, and a manager for user educations groups in several tech companies. Currently, she lives in Lawrence Kansas with a cat, Jurat.
Listing 5 stories.
A middle-aged woman leads a traveling circus act through the Midwest featuring 26 monkeys who climb into a bathtub and disappear and then reappear on her bus after the show. The impending death of one of the key monkeys causes her to wrestle with the meaning of life.
The female mantis kills her husband ten different ways.
A young girl must choose between the mutilating her pet pony and fitting in with the other girls.
After surviving a spaceship collision that kills her partner, a woman is condemned to having endless sex with a slimy alien.
Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.