At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

This is an incredible collection of stories by one of the best short story writers on the planet. She's won practically every major fantasy and science fiction award and been nominated for all of them multiple times. If you want to read some amazing short fiction, this is a collection you must have. Her work is often featured in the years best collections and her skill at crafting beautiful and thought provoking stories is second to none.I've been a fan of Kij Johnson since I attended one of her writing seminars at Gen Con in 1998 and have read many of these stories before, but I found a lot that I hadn't read. Having them all in one perfectly packaged book was awesome. Small Beer Press did a great job.It's hard for me to describe all eighteen stories in the collection, but I'll go over a few of my favorites.26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in 2008 and if you haven't read this Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy award winning short story, you're in for a treat. The premise is crazy: a woman buys a traveling monkey show . . . because she must. It's deep, amazing, and will get in your head for a long time. It's still in mine years after first reading it.Spar, originally published in Clarksworld in 2009, won the Nebula for best short story, and this one will blow your mind. It's a science fiction nightmare about a woman who is trapped with an alien for a very long time. It's a chilling story. I hear people talking about this one at writer gatherings all the time. It's that good.Fox Magic, originally published in 1993 in Asimov's, and won the Sturgeon Award. It became the basis for the award winning novel, Fox Woman from Tor, which I fell in love with. This is the legend of kitsune, the magical fox who became a woman and seduced a Japanese samurai lord. I loved this story and especially the novel. Fox Magic is incredibly beautiful and poignant. If you love it, read the novel for sure.Wolf Trapping first appeared in Twilight Zone magazine in 1989, and I'd never read it before. The story is about a wolf researcher who meets a strange, feral woman who is trying to become part of a pack of wolves. The ending will leave you sick and in shock.The Empress Jingu Fishes is a great story about a woman who can see the future, and goes through the years ahead with the bitter knowledge of what's going to happen to the people she loves. Fascinating.The Man Who Bridged the Mist won the Hugo and Nubula award for best novella, and I found it to be beautifully crafted. It reminded me of the world I created for my Iron Dragon series a little, with the mists surrounding the land, so I loved that aspect, and was captivated all the way through.The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change, won the World Fantasy Award, and I can see why. I hadn't read it before and loved it. The story is about a woman who becomes close to a pack of dogs after "the Change." Dogs (and all the mammals) gain the ability to speak and it throws off the whole world. Dog lovers will be very touched by this one, I think. I know I was.Ponies, won the 2010 Nebula award for best short story, and I was fortunate enough to hear Kij read it at World Fantasy soon after it came out on Tor.com. This tale is an allegory about growing up, although this one is in a world where all the little girls get pretty winged, talking ponies, but if the girls want to be part of the popular crowd they have to, shall we say, make some changes to their beloved ponies. This is such an awesome story and when I read it in this collection, I heard Kij, in my mind reading it like she did back at World Fantasy, like she was reading a sweet story to kids, when in truth it's a nightmare.There are a lot of other great stories in this collection, and I've savored them, letting the beauty of the words, and the expertise of the writing wash over me. The technical brilliance is one thing, but the way some of the stories stick with me is uncanny.The title story, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, was a new one for me as well, and I saved it for last. It was about a woman (the same one from the Trickster stories) who is on a journey across the country with her old German Shepherd dog, who is dying. They run into a roadblock, the Bee River is flooding, but it's unlike any flood you've ever heard of, and the main character is drawn to find the source of the flooding. It's a journey of the heart and the mind.Kij Johnson has a way of getting you to believe 100% in whatever world she creates, and then slips in some fantastical concept, like a river of bees stopping traffic, and it makes perfect sense.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 5/5 STARSPaul Genesse

I engage with stories - long or short - that resonate with that energetic space within me where lies the yearning and desire to Unfold and Become ... all that I Am and can Be. I hugely enjoyed this collection in all kinds of enjoyments of reading. There are a couple of stories that I love, due to these terms of engagement, and all of them I enjoyed engaging with. Additionally, for writers and aspiring writers, there is much here to learn about 'craft' and 'techniques'.In a nutshell, there are 18 tales, originally published across the span 1993 - 2012 (one published here for the first time) and their collective scope, taken together, is 'broad'. I like 'broad' in a story collection. That does mean that there are some stories that I may not 'like'. Which is true here. Even those ones I don't feel resonant with or enjoy as story I do engage with as writing, quality writing, and can learn from.The standout story for me is "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles". This story is a true treasure; and it would make a most wonderful (short) animated film. The central character is Small Cat, whose home (ideal for the tribe of cats who commune and dwell together) is destroyed by earthquake and fire. And so Small Cat embarks on a journey and a quest ... to find. Always yearning, and never giving up the heroic goal, through both danger and support, Small Cat does find what she journeyed a thousand miles for. My Spirit danced as I read. I cried a little. I can't and don't ask for more.Similarly, the story "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" also enticed me to dance within and with it. It is set in "Empire", where all the people seem to me to be of goodness (this is not an explicit declaration of the story), and all communities are ones of goodness. Kit is the architect of the bridge that is essential for Empire and Rasali is a ferrywoman who ferries across the river of mist, inhabited by fish and "Big Ones" - very dangerous work. It begins 'quietly'. Then, it stays 'quietly'. It is long, and so I had time to wonder; "how will it end?". And the story progresses - quietly - and I wonder again the same question. Which intrigues me greatly. And so I let myself be drawn into the story. At the end of the story (which is told across five years or so) Rasali makes a commitment to her yearning - to further, And Kit also. Very beautiful. Plangent, with the wistfulness that sometimes accompanies our relationship to our own yearning.Other stories are very different. Some edgier. Some 'experimental'. "Wolf Trapping", another high, is 'about' our understanding of other sentience. The morality of the scientist, Richard, conflicts with the yearning of Addie, who is developing a relationship with a pack of wolves way beyond the experience and comfort of science. The opening story is wonderfully Ray Bradbury-esque, and is its own trueness. I mean this as a compliment of lineage. "Ponies" scared me in the same feeling way that reading the classic "Mimsy were the Borogoves" did all these years ago. And more good reading besides all these named. I have focused on 'yearning'. I read it in other stories here too. But then, yearning calls to me. You may equally love and like these stories and not experience them as ones of yearning.Finally ... to return to writers and aspiring writers. There is lots of craft and techniques here. I distinguish the two. One of the highest of the high, for me, is when a story is written such to tell itself and it seems like it is not through the intermediation of these thing called words, but rather, it just flows into the imaginal mind. Frictionless. Telling. That is high craft. Both "The Cat Who Walked ..." and "The Man Who Bridged ..." were that for me. Straight telling into. Let me repeat. That such telling is high craft.Be quiet and patient with these stories. And ... "The Cat Who Walked ..." is a treasure.

Great short story collection - really enjoyed dipping in and out of these stories. Of course there were some that I enjoyed more than others but overall I just really enjoy Johnson's writing. This collection really shows Johnson’s talent as a writer. She seems to effortlessly switch styles and genre between the stories. I struggled through Spar and I found Schrodinger’s Cathouse to be very bizarre. Some of my favourites included: Fox Magic and The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles. There are definitely parallels between the short story Fox Magic and her other book The Fox Woman. I definitely recommend this author.

Kij Johnson's amazing stories in her first collection range across time and space with fluent ease. Her imagination is vast and boundless and she'll carry you wherever her mind travels to and settles -- Heian Japan, the far future, smalltown USA; nothing is impossible for her. No one has punctured the membranes holding different worlds separate -- in space, time, genre, imagination, or in any other taxonomical category of apartness you can think of -- with such intoxicating results. Her vision of the interfaces between animals and humans, and their occasional dissolution, is alone worth the price of admission. The stories are all uniquely affecting too: I defy you not to tear up after you finish the title-story. Seek out this book, it'll enlarge your soul.

This book is truly a mixed bag. It stuns, disorients, angers, disappoints, rewards and bores.Often one is compelled to think, has the author taken the readers for granted? How else can one interpret such trash being poured into our throat?Next story makes one almost cry with delight and wonder, sensuality and pathos, violence and beauty.My favourites were~1. 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss;2. The Bitey Cat;3. Dia Chjerman's Tale;4. Schrodinger's Cathouse;5. Wolf Trapping;6. Spar.And then I must mention "The Man Who Bridged the Mist".In my humble opinion, this work alone makes the entire book worthy to be read, remembered, and re-read. It's so good that one is forced to delete the impact of other so-called stories which the author had burdened us with, in the name of experimentation etc.Your call.

Du rarement vu; on glisse sans savoir comment du quotidien le plus banal à un autre monde, beaucoup tendre et sensible.Une technique narrative sans faille permet à Kij Johnson de créer en l'espace court d'une nouvelle des personnages d'une épaisseur, voire d'une complexité que l'on ne trouve que dans les meilleurs romans.Un lointain écho de Sturgeon....