My 2023 short fiction recommendations video is up!

If you’d rather consume the content in written form, I summarise the 5 original stories I had published in 2023, and then it’s on to the recommendations.

As usual, to qualify for this list, a story had to be:

• First published in 2023
• Shorter than novel length
• Free to read online
• And actually read by me (of course, I have only read a small fraction of the short fiction that was published last year)

With all of that said, here are 10 of my favourite stories from 2023:

_­1. The Sound of Children Screaming by Rachael K Jones in Nightmare Magazine.
A stunning and surprising combination of school shootings and portal fantasy. Prose as sharp as a razor. No punches pulled. Had me gripped from the first paragraph.

2. How to Travel Safely in Faerieland by Vanessa Fogg in Fusion Fragment.
Appealing and mysterious, Fogg artfully mixes the grounded experience of a tour group with a visit to Faerieland. A wonderful undercurrent of tension runs through the whole piece: what really are the risks involved?

3. Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont by P.A. Cornell in Fantasy Magazine.
A clever, cosy tale about an apartment building built on a time vortex. Outside its walls its residents all come from different time periods, but inside The Oakmont they can form lovely connections with each other.

4. How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (in Nine Easy Steps!) by Gwendolyn Kiste in PseudoPod.
A sapphic apocalypse story centred around two young women, a struggle for belonging, and a dancefloor. I love the tone here: a background of dark and bleak, with a foreground of some warmth and a couple of tendrils of hope.

5. Salt Water by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Tor.com.
Delicate and slightly surreal, this is also a piece about belonging – and becoming. A compelling world where everyone carries sea creatures in their translucent human bellies, and what that means for culture and socialising, especially when the creatures can change.

6. Bird-Girl Builds a Machine by Hannah Yang in Clarkesworld.
Another one with a pleasing mystery: what is the protagonist’s mother building obsessively for decades? What will happen when it’s done? A fantastic story about the relationship between mothers and daughters, and about cycles. I love stories about cycles.

7. Crawling Back to You by H Pueyo in Kaleidotrope.
A grim sci-fi tale about a deadly competition that wipes your memories for the game. This one kept me guessing until the very end; an excellent fresh twist on a competition story.

8. Pick a Door by B Garden in The Dread Machine.
Fast-paced and compelling, we follow a prisoner as she must choose from a seamlessly endless series of doors. If her luck runs out and she picks wrong, she’ll be launched into space.

9. They Say by Matt Dovey in Nightmare Magazine.
A visceral and memorable piece of flash fiction about who is considered to be people, and who is not.

10. There Goes the Neighborhood by Avra Margariti in The Razor.
Another sharp and beautiful flash piece about children building an ark during a suburban summer. Margariti structures things exquisitely, pulling me effortlessly through their words.

The strongest through-line I found in these stories this year is definitely that of belonging: who gets to belong, and where, and with whom. And connected to that: who is considered to have worth, and who doesn’t. To my surprise, every one of these ten stories explores those concepts in one way or another.

Thanks for a great reading year, where I’ve discovered some excellent new-to-me writers and have also enjoyed new works by some established favourites. I look forward to seeing what stories 2024 will bring.