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The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Audiobook15 hours

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Written by Ken Liu

Narrated by Corey Brill and Joy Osmanski

4/5

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About this audiobook

A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection-including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), "Mono No Aware" (Hugo Award winner), "The Waves" (Nebula Award finalist), "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), "All the Flavors" (Nebula award finalist), "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King" (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre's history, "The Paper Menagerie" (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.

Editor's Note

Award-winning, original collection…

The titular story of this collection has won every single prestigious speculative fiction award — the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award. One of the most original collections of sci-fi short fiction around.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
Release dateMar 8, 2016
ISBN9781442397200
Author

Ken Liu

Ken Liu is an award-winning author of speculative fiction. His books include the Dandelion Dynasty series (The Grace of Kings), The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the Star Wars tie-in novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics like futurism, cryptocurrency, the mathematics of origami, and more. He lives near Boston with his family.

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Reviews for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

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  • 5/5
    First word that springs to mind: wow. I turned the last page and considered just starting right back over at the beginning. Lovely, deeply affecting, thought-provoking short stories. I'll be coming back to this one often, I have no doubt.
  • 5/5
    I cried a little.

    I had heard of this short story some time ago, but only recently when I discovered the podcast, Lavar Reads (Lavar Burton from Star Trek) did I actually get a chance to partake. First of all, Lavart did a wonderful job with the narration. The story itself was very moving, covering the lifespan of a Chinese-American boy dealing with the effects of race/fitting in. There's an element of magic, and it worked.

    Great story.
  • 5/5
    I absolutely loved this collection of short stories by Ken Liu. I stumbled upon this collection from listening to Levar Burton Reads - he read The Paper Menagerie and it was magical (and also incredibly heartbreaking - I bawled at the end). I loved it so much I worked it into a few English lessons (and the kids adored it as much as I did). Such a good one - highly, highly recommend!
  • 5/5
    These stories may be the best literary science fiction/fantasy I've read in years. Each story is superb and each is unique, and most are intensely moving. The characters are wonderful.Liu incorporates history and classic fiction into some of his stories, for example, the story "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King," which brings the Journey to the West and the Chinese detective story tradition (e.g. Judge Dee) together with the historical Manchu Army massacre of Yangzhou at the start of the Qing Dynasty.The story "The Man Who Ended History" incorporates the grotesque history of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army in Pingfang, outside of Harbin, in north China, during World War II. The story is structurally interesting, as is the fictional science. The title story, "The Paper Menagier," is sad, magical, and beautiful. "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel" is terrifying; in an alternate history in which World War II was averted, the people are still frighteningly and tragically human.I've already reread some of the stories; if I could give this book 6 stars, I would.
  • 5/5
    (posted at the same time via my Amazon.com profile)I first ran across the author, Ken Liu, as translator from Chinese to English of the Hugo award winning novel The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Out of curiosity I looked up his primary work and initially read his 2012 short story, "The Paper Menagerie" which was also a winner of the Hugo AND Nebula awards. Note: The Hugo is voted on by fans, the Nebula is voted on by writers.The titular work, "The Paper Menagerie" is one of the most wonderfully evocative tales in this collection. In all of Mr. Liu's works I consistently see echos of other writers. In the case of "The Paper Menagerie" I am reminded of the fantasy short stories of Orson Scott Card. This story reminded me specifically of Mr. Card's "The Porcelain Salamander," a tale of a young girl's magical porcelain lizard that should it ever stop moving it will die. "The Paper Menagerie" is a tale of a similar gist with a similar bitter sweet story arc.The opening short story in this collection, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species," resonates of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by describing fantastic methods of creating books by alien species. If I have any quibbles, one would be that I wish "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" were a longer piece.Whether Mr. Liu is explicitly standing on the shoulders of literary giants that came before him, or whether he merely evokes them naturally, is not that relevant. More relevant is that his best writing is every bit as good as short stories by Italo Calvino and Orson Scott Card, as well as the soft breezes of Ray Bradbury, the humorous cybernetic convolutions of Stanislaw Lem, and the literate socio-cultural awareness of an Ursula K. Le Guin.I truly believe he's that good. Not because of the numerous writing awards he's already acquired, but because I have read the work of these (and many others) and he stands beside them as well as on their shoulders.