Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Rachel Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky is an American literary, speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, and editor living in Oregon. She was the founding editor of the PodCastle podcast and served as editor from 2008 to 2010. She served as vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2013.
She has been published in such literary publications as PANK, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and New Haven Review. Her speculative fiction work has appeared in numerous markets including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, and collected in a variety of year's best anthologies, including Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Jeff & Ann VanderMeer's Best American Fantasy.
Her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window won the 2011 Nebula Award and was also a nominee for a 2011 Hugo Award and for the 2011 World Fantasy Award. Swirsky's short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" won the 2013 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and was nominated for the Hugo award for best short story of 2013.
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Listing 6 stories.
In a retelling of the story of Helen of Troy from the Iliad, King Agamemnon's daughter grapples with rage and sorrow when her father agrees to sacrifice her to appease the gods.
Terrified of human love after being sexually assaulted in childhood, Adriana buys herself a robot for a husband. After realizing her robot husband's adaptive capability, she become obsessed with uncovering his true identity.
In an eccentric take on the afterlife, a recently deceased man in his mid-20s reminisces on his life and marriage--two things he gradually learns were more complicated than he initially assumed.
After a woman's paleontologist fiancé is attacked by five men in a bar and hospitalized, she imagines how their lives might have gone differently—if her fiancé were a dinosaur.
A magical painter who can perfectly capture a subject but must destroy it in the process decides to kill and immortalize her old lover.
In a spin-off of Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter exists stuck in a perpetual tea time that is but one of the many sources of discontentment he reflects upon.