The Musical Illusionist: and Other Tales by Alex Rose
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
The Musical Illusionist is a work of strange fiction, the sort most notably practiced by Borges in works like "The Total Library." Traditional concepts of character and plot dwindle almost to the vanishing place, replaced by bizarre anecdotes and conjectures that are located in his postulated Library of Tangents. The experience of reading these stories is closer to that of reading essays than that of traditional stories. They deal in possibility rather than in the definite, couched in Rose's dryly speculative prose. If a Victorian entomologist had chanced to step through a looking glass to a parallel Earth, this might have been the result.
Each story is framed as part of a words-and-pictures Special Exhibition, inviting the reader to examine the grouped stories as much as consuming them. If you're looking for something unusual to read, a flight of fancy that will leave you thinking new thoughts and dreaming strange dreams, this is your book.
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories is exquisitely well-crafted and worth a read, even if you tend to shy away from short stories. Several stories do touch upon the theme of cultural identity explored at length in her later novel 
This collection of short stories is a representative offering, showcasing Murakami's skills from his beginnings as an author in the late '70s to today. Shadowy jazz clubs, bizarre metaphysical conditions, high and low culture, Japanese work culture, political violence, nameless and subtly attractive women: all of his recurring obsessions appear here. The book has a loose, freewheeling feel, and is a fine place for a Murakami beginner. Read a few paragraphs of a story, and if you don't like it, move on to the next. Diverse as this collection is, you will eventually find something you like.
Angela Carter's stories are Byzantine, richly layered affairs. She draws on fairy tale themes and writes in a style that could easily be called "purple" or "hothouse," if not for its intense focus. Some, like this 1978 collection's eponymous tale, are actual retellings of well-known classics like "Bluebeard" or "Beauty and the Beast." The violence and sexuality that Carter sees inherent in nature always lurk just around the corner here, if not in plain view. "The Erl-King" is an absolute tour-de-force, revisiting Romantic views of nature and creation even as it tears them down. "Wolf-Alice" is a fine conclusion to the volume, pulling together themes from many folk tales and weaving them together with a postmodern Gothic sensibility. It's no wonder that Carter's stories, continually subverting authority and questioning who is in control, are regarded by critics as highly feminist.
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is an Aladdin's cave of treasures, containing more than thirty short stories, poems, vignettes, and literary forms in between. From a novella about a modern-day demigod's travels in Scotland, to a short story about some far-out exchange students, to a set of poetic instructions for traversing fairy tales, 
"What good is science fiction to Black people?" If you have ever wondered this, or if you've ever thought that the future was limited to shiny, cybernetic miracles, you need to read Bloodchild and Other Stories. A collection of five short stories and two wonderfully spare essays on the art of writing, this book serves as a fine introduction to the works of 
