The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Ken Liu's first collection brings together fifteen of his award-winning stories from the previous decade, including the title piece, which became the first work of fiction to sweep the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards in the same year. The stories braid science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction with East Asian myth, twentieth-century war, and contemporary American immigration. The Paper Menagerie itself follows a Chinese American boy whose mother makes him origami animals that come alive when she breathes on them. Other stories examine the long shadow of Unit 731 in Manchuria, simulated minds, the algorithmic afterlives of dead loved ones, and a Tibetan goddess in San Francisco. Liu, also celebrated as the English translator of Cixin Liu's Three-Body trilogy, writes with the precision of an engineer and the elegiac care of a translator, and this 2016 volume is one of the strongest single-author collections of recent speculative fiction.
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What you might want to know about The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Ken Liu collects fifteen short stories spanning Chinese folktale, alternate history, and hard science fiction, including The Paper Menagerie, in which a Chinese American boy slowly stops speaking Mandarin to his mother, and the origami zoo she folds for him goes still.
Yes. The title story The Paper Menagerie won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards in 2012, the first piece of fiction to sweep all three. The collection won the Locus Award.
Yes. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a 2016 collection of 15 of Ken Liu's short fiction. Liu is also the author of the Dandelion Dynasty epic fantasy series.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories was written by Ken Liu, published in 2001 by Saga Press.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a standalone novel by Ken Liu, not part of a series.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
