Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

I wanted to move through the world without you in it. Poison said: I wanted you to not exist for a while. Then why not just leave the house? Why not go for a walk? No, it said more than that.

Poison said: I wanted to be apart from you for a while. So I didn't have the defence of passion, a momentary loss of reason. I had poisoned her, a great wallop of poison in her morning coffee. I could watch the printing, which still fascinated me, the weaving and webbing of each layer of tissue, the cross-sectional view of her internal workings like the ringed sections of a tree trunk. I could clean the house, as a show of contrition, and when she returned to find me sitting at the shining kitchen island, knick-knacks in place on dusted shelves, a pot of soup on the stove, we might not even need to discuss it.

Read an excerpt from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century below.Īfter I killed my wife, I had 20 hours before her new body finished printing downstairs. She has published two other works of fiction, For Today I Am a Boy and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, and a book of poetry, How Festive the Ambulance. Fu was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2022.

Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century peers into the magical, transportive power of short storiesįu is a Washington-based, Canadian-born fiction writer and poet.

Short stories do that in this tight compact little form.' You get to have experiences that you never would have otherwise. You get to see so much more of the world and what is possible. 'One of the things I like about books especially, but art more generally, is that your life is so small. You're trapped in this body and this one life we have and you get to expand your universe. You can have this very short experience that sticks with you for the rest of your life,' Fu told CBC Books in an interview. You read them over a lunch hour or a bus ride. In that tiny space of time, you have the opportunity to be transported into a whole other world - and you have lived a whole lifetime with this character. The stories deal with themes of death, technological consequence, guilt and sexuality and unmask the contradictions within humanity. In the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu turns the familiar on its head to weave tales of new worlds where strange happenings, like a girl growing wings on her legs or toy boxes that control the passage of time, are the ordinary trappings of everyday life.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu