Short stories by Rachel Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and she graduated from Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy and Sturgeon Awards. She’s twice won the Nebula Award: for her 2010 novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and her 2014 short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.”
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.