The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by novelist Kim Fu to discuss her debut story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. Kim is in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Artistic Director at The Writer’s Center.
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We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online through Bookshop.org.
Kim Fu is the author of For Today I Am a Boy, winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
About the Book
A dazzling and daring debut story collection by PEN/Hemingway Finalist, Kim Fu.
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.
“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of those rare collections that never suffers from which-one-was-that-again? syndrome. Every story here lights a flame in the memory, shining brighter as time goes by rather than dimming. Kim Fu writes with grace, wit, mischief, daring, and her own deep weird phosphorescent understanding.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
“How I love the cool wit of these speculative stories! Filled with wonder and wondering, they’re haunted too by loss and loneliness, their imaginative reach profoundly rooted in the human condition.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself