Words for Thought — Short Fiction Review
Join Words for Thought reviewer A.C. Wise each month as she examines works that speak to each other through theme or tone.
Stories about the mixed emotions of hope and despair.
Stories about longing.
Stories about love, romance, and other breeds of relationships.
Stories about complicated family relationships.
Stories about family and new beginnings.
Stories about transformation.
Focusing on small moments of great importance.
Speaking volumes without words.
Stories focused on ghosts, memories, artificial intelligence, and other forms of consciousness.
Stories focused on family—found family, birth family, blood family, and family by choice.
Stories focused on ghosts, monsters, and the undead.
Themes of water in short fiction.
Revolution, upheaval, and change.
Death, loss, and grief.
Bodies–How they are viewed, how they are treated, their autonomy, and the ways in which we relate to other people’s bodies and our own.
Worlds intersecting, liminal spaces, and people who are in one way or another caught in-between
Some outstanding stories from 2017
New beginnings and seconds chances
Stories of loneliness and isolation, but stories that offer hope, as well
Uneasy and haunting tales about hidden things being revealed that stick with you long after you finish reading them
Assumptions, perceptions, and characters who are more than they seem beneath the surface of their skin
Isolation, people cut off from society and humanity
Families by choice, and families by blood – losing them, finding them, and trying to understand them
New worlds, new modes of existence, and shifting to new ways of thinking after encountering the unknown
The cycle of death and rebirth, new life emerging from the blanket of winter
Tension between the self and the other, suspicion, distrust, but also healing and hope
Humanity and nature
Power and resistance
Self and the struggle within
Places we call home
Life beyond death
Water, transformation, and family
Death, loss, and memory
Destiny and disguises
Flying, falling, jumping, and staying aloft, as well as the uses and abuses of bodies, consumption, what remains hidden, and what people choose not to see.
