The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Author:Ken Liu Ken Liu has quickly become one of the most original and thought-provoking story writers of his generation. Deftly riffing off the power of narrative, this collection is as heartbreaking as it is charming. — In “Simulacrum”, the daughter of the revered inventor of augmented reality is irrevocably divided from her father by the... more » technology that is meant to help her be closer to him. In the title story, “The Paper Menagerie”, a child loses touch with the magical paper menagerie built for him by his mother, a mail-order bride in suburban Connecticut, but then discovers as an adult that love knows no bounds. A young man struggling to preserve his culture in the face of utter annihilation finds peace in the transcendence of fleeting memory in “Mono No Aware”. As a couple explores one of the hidden atrocities of the Second World War, they try to speak for those who no longer can in “The Man Who Ended History”. And in “An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognitiony”, a mother and father who are separated by vast distances must invoke, for their children, a thousand ways love may take form
These fifteen evocative short stories and novellas tour the poignant history that always haunts immigrants, survivors of war and our consistent technological advances as they are explored through love, race, and politics. An award-winning author, Liu and his stories invoke the magical within the mundane in profound and moving ways.« less