As I did in previous years, in 2022-2023 I continued to share weekly recommendations for short fiction with my library colleagues.

Stories varied from the serious to the silly, the heartfelt to the horrifying. (As usual, I tried not to traumatise my colleagues with anything overly scary or dark.)

So if you’re looking for a good read, here’s the list of short fiction I recommended to my colleagues in 2022-2023:

• It Happened in ‘Loontown by Lavie Tidhar
• The Dog Who Buried the Sea by Andy Oldfield
• Godmaker by J. A. Prentice
• The Vampire of Kovácspéter by P. H. Lee
• Choose Your Own Adventure by Kat Howard
• Civilization by Vylar Kaftan
• Choose Wisely by Fran Wilde
• The Book of the Blacksmiths by Martin Cahill
• I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W)? by Neil Gaiman
• Dragons by Teresa Milbrodt
• The Heaven That They Never Knew by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
• Useful Weapons by Liam Hogan
• Pest Control by Saswati Chatterjee
• One Soul, Parchment Thin by Calder Hutchinson
• There’s an Art To It by Brian Hugenbruch
• Two Spacesuits by Leonard Richardson
• Heavy Possessions by Seoung Kim
• A Best Seller by Helena McAuley
• Dr Daidalo’s Kouklotheatron by Nathan Makarios
• The History Eaters by Marissa James
• Spellbones by Anne Leonard
• The Greenhouse Bargain by Tanya Aydelott
• Glitch by Mark Cole
• They’re Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson
• Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library by Marie Brennan
• The Librarian and the Robot by Shi Heiyao
• The Night Bazaar for Women Becoming Reptiles by Rachael K. Jones
• Undog by Eugenia Triantafyllou
• The gentleman cat’s guide to training human kittens by Jenny Rae Rappaport
• The Fox Spirit’s Retelling by Wen Wen Yang
• Eleanora of the Bones by Kat Howard
• Laws of Night and Silk by Seth Dickinson
• Identification by Tamlyn Dreaver
• Five Things That Go Through Your Mind After the Masked Killer Decapitates You with an Axe and Your Still-Living Head Has a Few Seconds of Consciousness Left to Gaze at Your Twitching Body by Adam-Troy Castro
• Measure Twice, Cut Once by K.R. March
• Upgrade Day by RJ Taylor
• Little Apocalypses by Aparna Paul
• To Slay a Goblin by Dylan Curr
• To my daughter, in the dark of the moon by P. H. Lee
• Bird-girl builds a machine by Hannah Yang
• Long enough for a cup of tea by Aimee Ogden
• Would you still love me if I was a wormhole? by Wendy Nikel
• The Cursing of Herman Willem Daendels by A. W. Prihandita
• The Light of Setting Suns by Samuel Chapman

Happy reading!