Strange new world

May 07th, 2021

Barbara Black’s genre-bending debut short story collection Music from a Strange Planet (Caitlin $22.95) deals with identity and emotional attachment, and its characters are often at their most vulnerable. An awkward child envisions herself as a beetle; an unemployed business analyst prefers water-walking over “rebranding” himself; and a biogenetically-altered couple in a squatters’ district visit an attic to observe a large cocoon. Ranging from subversive to comic, and humane to outlandish, Black’s fiction contemplates a strange world. 9781773860589

Photo by Erin Clayton.

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