Here are 88 books that The Hidden Girl and Other Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
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I grew up on a diet of dystopian fiction, and when I first began taking craft more seriously and diving into short stories, that was the genre I found myself writing most. I suppose what draws me to the genre is how dystopian fiction has the ability to illuminate society’s faults and injustices and humanity as a whole, the bleak futures that it could create if certain ideologies were allowed to persist, the way individual behaviours and actions can well shape the future and dictate whether it becomes one filled with hope or one that falls into disaster.
What fascinates me most about this novella is its ability to capture such depth and fullness in such a short length.
This book explores the concept of time and language, and how the way humans perceive time vastly differs from the alien species, and the way language ultimately affects time perception and decision-making as well.
'A science fiction genius . . . Ted Chiang is a superstar.' - Guardian
With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose.
From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of…
I have always been fascinated by science and everything mysterious. I love to read science fiction and mystery stories. I use art and literature to explore reality. Writing or painting allows me to link seemingly unrelated topics together to create my own explanations for why things are the way they appear to be. The biggest things in the universe are replicated on Earth right down to sub-atomic size. I call that life imitating stars. Life is an endless resource found everywhere in the universe, and it's not restricted to just light or heat to grow; it only needs energy.
I liked this book because it's a collection of stories about unrelated people's exploits, real and imagined, as they work together to make their mark in a new frontier.
The stories portray amazing accounts of people ranging from the mundane to the supernatural. It's one of the last stories to describe Mars with a somewhat hospitable climate, and that doesn't matter.
The incredible storytelling of Ray Bradbury makes anything that his characters are doing always believable no matter where they are because he writes from the heart.
The Martian Chronicles, a seminal work in Ray Bradbury's career, whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage, is available from Simon & Schuster for the first time.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor— of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. In this classic work…
Hi! My name is Ben Berman Ghan, and I’m the author of the short story collection What We See in the Smoke and the novella Visitation Seeds. I’ve spent pretty much every day of my life since 2015 thinking about short fiction, writing it, or editing it. In many ways, the traditions and strengths of the genre of SF are owed to the short fiction writers and the magazines that have published them over the years — magazines that I keep on reading to this day. There is something electric to me about the short story, the concentrated fervor of an SF writer having to concentrate all that imagination and emotion into something tight and sharp.
What shall we do, when at last the intricate oppressions, we have built for ourselves are pushed plainly into view? Cory Doctorow’s collection of novellas bills itself not fictions of tomorrow, but stories of our present moment. Immigration, police brutality, tech monopoly, online radicalization, all bubble sharply and brilliantly to the surface here, in a world that, frankly, doesn’t seem that far from ours. What will you do, when your toaster tells you that the bread you bought is not a compatible product? Cory Doctorow might tell you. You might not like the answer very much. Either way, with stellar writing and keen insight, Radicalized is the best kind of political fiction, unapologetic, and empathic.
If you want a better future tomorrow, you're going to have to fight for it today.
Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near - all too near - future.
'Unauthorized Bread' is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster.
In 'Model Minority' a superhero finds himself way out his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system.
'Radicalized' is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet…
Hi! My name is Ben Berman Ghan, and I’m the author of the short story collection What We See in the Smoke and the novella Visitation Seeds. I’ve spent pretty much every day of my life since 2015 thinking about short fiction, writing it, or editing it. In many ways, the traditions and strengths of the genre of SF are owed to the short fiction writers and the magazines that have published them over the years — magazines that I keep on reading to this day. There is something electric to me about the short story, the concentrated fervor of an SF writer having to concentrate all that imagination and emotion into something tight and sharp.
There’s a story in here about a former hockey player from the moon that had to move to Earth to try to avoid retribution after killing another player, and he gets stashed at an artist’s retreat. A big part of this list has been beautiful, but often very sad stories. Think, then, of Alias Space as a kind of antidote. If you have any familiarity with Robson from her published short fiction, this is a great collection to help you fill in the gaps in your collection. If you’ve never heard of Robson? Then this is a great dive into one of the best writers working in my hometown of Toronto!
Alias Space and Other Stories is the first fiction collection from Nebula Award-winning writer Kelly Robson, who vaulted onto the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror stage in 2015, earning spots in multiple Year's Best anthologies. This volume collects Robson's best stories to date, along with exciting new work, and notes to accompany each piece. Robson's stories are noted for their compassion, humanity, humor, rigor, and joy. This volume includes the chilling gothic horror “A Human Stain,” winner of the 2018 Nebula Award; the madcap historical fantasy “Waters of Versailles,” which was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy…
I grew up in a family of journalists. My great-grandfather, grand-aunt, and father were newspaper editors and master raconteurs. I followed in their footsteps, spending 50 years as a small-town newspaper editor. Among family, friends, and neighbors, I was expected to know the stories behind the headlines, and in so doing, I became a raconteur. In a good story, there is a fine line between fact and fiction. The novels I chose for a long road trip are as believable as the true stories I was told and ended up telling when it was my turn. It only takes asking “What if?” to cross the line from fact to fiction.
Whether I’m reading or listening to one of James Lee Burke’s novels featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux, the main character in his gritty crime stories set in New Iberia, not far from New Orleans, I have a hard time stopping.
I’m sucked into the story as Robicheaux and his rough-and-tumble partner Clete Purcel follow leads while dealing with their own personal demons, including PTSD and alcohol addiction. They are imperfect heroes, perhaps the only kind who can deal with the sick and twisted criminals they must stop.
Even in their hostile environment, I want to join in their efforts, which means I don’t want to stop until the end.
Detective Dave Robicheaux is caught in the crossfire of Louisiana's oldest and bloodiest gangland feud...
From the wreckage of Louisiana's oldest and family rivalry, Detective Dave Robicheaux faces his most sinister enemy yet . . . Isolde and Johnny - the star-crossed teenage heirs to New Iberia's criminal empires - have run away together, and Robicheaux is tasked with finding them. But when his investigation brings him too close to both Isolde's mother and her father's mistress, the venomous mafioso orders a hit on Robicheaux and his partner, Clete Purcel.
I've always been obsessed with time travel, which transcends science fiction and offers ways to experience and reinterpret history, explore philosophical ideas, comment on the past, and imagine the future. I love the possibilities for humor and character development and plot twists across every genre and audience. One feature of all of the books I’ve chosen for this list is that they’re about contemporary young people and grounded in real lives, and time travel happens in all sorts of ways: through magical, mysterious forces, an app, tap shoes, a diary, a rideshare vehicle. I’m less interested in imaginary worlds and more fascinated by the way time travel can shed light on our own times.
It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.
Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.
She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.
I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world.
When Nephele has a terrible freshman year, she does the only logical thing for a math prodigy like herself: she invents a time travel app so she can go back and do it again (and again, and again) in this funny love story, Groundhog Day for the iPhone generation.
Fourteen-year-old Nephele used to have friends. Well, she had a friend. That friend made the adjustment to high school easily, leaving Nephele behind in the process. And as Nephele looks ahead, all she can see is three very lonely years.
Nephele is also a whip-smart lover of math and science, so…
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
Bradbury remains my favorite author of all time, and this collection of short stories contains some of his best work, including my favorite time travel tale, “A Sound of Thunder.”
Imagine an avid hunter given the opportunity to stalk the king of prehistoric beasts, the monstrous T-Rex. Then imagine that things don’t go exactly as planned. The world will never be the same.
I love historical fiction because it’s the next best thing to the invention of time travel. Books can immerse you in a time and a place in a way that comics and movies can only gesture at. For books likeNever SleepI even make sure to cook the foods my characters are eating, to make sure the era is evoked for the readers in all five sense.I love fantasy and science fiction as the next person, but the idea of transporting people to times and placesthat actually happened, to the best of my skill as a dramatist and researcher, is a challenge I find irresistible as an author.
This is cheating a little bit because it’s about a modern-day American boy who gets whisked back to Shakespeare’s time and befriends the playwright as a young man.
Our young actor has to figure out why he’s been sent back to this time and escape before a terrible plague wipes out much of London. I bought this book at the Globe Theatre gift shop (!) on an overseas trip on the basis of Susan Cooper’s name alone.
She wrote The Dark Is Rising Seriesand this is a thrilling modern classic by her.
I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had gone mad. The plague? Nobody's had the plague for centuries . . .
Nathan Field, a talented young actor, arrives at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As rehearsals begin, eerie echoes of the past begin to haunt Nat, and he falls sick with a mysterious sickness.
When he wakes, Nat finds himself in 1599, an actor at the original Globe - and his co-star is none other than the King of Shadows himself: William Shakespeare.
I began my own writing journey in 2007. I skipped many HS classes just to stay home and read. I want to know the ending of a story. I want happy ending. Life is hard, but when I have the ability to write the stories I write with the ending that so many are deprived of, at least I know I can find it in a book of my own choosing. That is my love of romance.
Back to romance! This is a time travel story about a woman who is keeping something vital from her family.
She’s the middle child and suffers from that insecurity of not quite having found her place. She is seriously depressed. But the moon, an eclipse, timing, the house she’s in… all play a part in this excellent tale that brings the medieval times front and center.
The author really delivers a knock-out punch to the gut and hope really is lost until this hero comes to his senses. But when he does… well, suffice it to say, you won’t be disappointed.
On New Year’s Eve, she tumbles 700 years back in time--and into the bed of a darkly dangerous knight.
Sir Gaston de Varennes wanted a docile bride who would fit into his plans for vengeance and justice, but a trick of time finds him married to a thoroughly modern American lady who turns his castle, his life, and his heart upside down. Will her desperate secret tear them apart after only a few bittersweet weeks of stolen passion—or will they conquer mistrust, treachery, and time itself to discover a love that spans the centuries?
I’ve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essential—what it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.
Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.
Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
