Short stories by Amal El-Mohtar
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons,Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month(2010). She is co-author, with Max Gladstone, of the multiple award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com. She has been the New York Times's science fiction and fantasy columnist since February 2018, and she is represented by DongWon Song of HMLA.
Listing 6 stories.
After losing her mother to early-onset Alzheimers, a lonely, grieving girl in Canada joins a test group for an experimental Alzheimers drug. When the drug induces intense, vivid flashbacks to her childhood, she meets a girl within her memories who becomes her advocate and friend.
In this fairy-tale, when two women who are cursed by the men meant to love them meet, they realize that to stay cursed is not to love, and that they have the ability to escape if they do it together.
A librarian's apprentice copies down the contents of a strange green book which contains the trapped soul of a dead woman.
A series of journal entries based in the far future mark a middle-aged female scientist’s descent into Adamancy: a disordered obsession with diamantine structures on Neptune that, when melted, allow for instantaneous travel through space. The diaries, alongside reportage on the creation of “the Melee,” or teleportation technology from these diamonds, tell the story of the scientist’s entrapment by her colleague— and her attempted escape.
A young girl has a frightening power that brings doom to everyone near her, but she finds kindred spirits in owls.
A leech-like, jellyfish-like animal that consumes grief is used for various medicinal purposes, but rituals surrounding these animals have been corrupted in recent years, resulting in these animals' impending extinction.