Varsha Dinesh

May 10, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Rebecca Turkewitz |Varsha Dinesh |R. Lazarus |James Cheng

In the lush and dangerous world of Jan Stinchcomb’s immersive novel Verushka, tea can turn to blood in your mouth, bears are fierce protectors of children, and maidens accidentally promise themselves to wood sprites. It’s also a world where new mothers fear the loss of their careers, teenage girls agonize over sleepover faux pas, and fathers grapple with long commutes into the city.

May 8, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Zachary Gillan |Varsha Dinesh |R. Lazarus |James Cheng

In a second-season episode of the American sitcom Community (2009-2015), the study group that the show focuses on is making a diorama. “I can’t believe this is our twentieth and final anthropology diorama of the year,” says one character. “I can’t believe our assignment is making a diorama of us making our nineteenth diorama,” responds another. There’s something about the diorama—minuscule, artificial, toylike, and recursive—that invites ridicule.

May 7, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Varsha Dinesh |Shinjini Dey

dear you’re dead. i saw it happen,the click-clack of the hammer as you cocked it back,the fat tears rolling down your cheeks like pearls fresh from the oyster. it looks so real sometimes. i jumped when i saw you that morning,pale and tired and violet-dark eyes,but breathing. in and out. it happened to my grandmother too:i dreamt of wood cracking and limbs flailingand woke to the sound of my mother screaminginto our bathroom floor. today you smiled at me. and i knew it was over.

May 7, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Varsha Dinesh |R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Shinjini Dey

In his early days in slivermoon, Saki worked the phone lines. Companies in slivermoon stressed in prestige magazines and press releases that it was too hard for them to employ bodies. Bodies were expensive to sustain. Bodies needed food, warmth, and shelter. The market was not what it used to be, and labor laws tied the hands of employers. Having a body in this economy was like throwing a fight before it even began. Bodies were a ticket to starvation.

May 7, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Shinjini Dey |R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Varsha Dinesh

When this novel begins, Jonathan Abernathy is in purgatory—an empty office, a waiting room “located in a strip mall just outside the highway”—and he is desperate. Jonathan Abernathy has defaulted on his debt: “His loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as ‘an ecosystem.’” Death, figuratively speaking, is in attendance.