The Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List

2019 is dead! Long live 2020! Well, perhaps not quite. Before I officially pronounce 2019 over and done, there's some business to get to first, namely looking back and taking stock of ALL THE AMAZING STORIES that I read over the year. Hence, the Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List! Below are 106* works spanning the entirety of the year. I admit, I kind of cheated. This is pretty much a collation of all my weekly recommendations, which I do on my Patreon as my Sip of the Week column. Every Friday I give one Sip of the Week and one Honorable Mention, with a review of the former and brief note on the later. These are patron-exclusive, so if you want to get in on weekly recs (plus lots more), I'd recommend joining.

That said, the Sips and this list have two MAJOR caveats to them. The first is that they reflect my tastes and opinions. I'm not trying to give you the best stories, but rather the stories I liked the most. Secondly, these stories are ONLY taken from venues that I cover in my reviews. This incredibly narrows my field, regardless of how much I try to read. The field is vast and I would totally read more if I could, but circumstances restrict me in what I can get to. I regret not being able to read more and wider, but I do feel that what I read now allows me to get to as much and as wide a sampling of the field as possible. I own that, and while I do make apologies for it, I also stand behind it. This is what I do. This is what limits me. I still think and hope that this list will have value to some, and might help people find some stories they might have missed. The good news is that I have reviewed all of these stories right here at Quick Sip Reviews. You can put the title into the search (at the top left of the screen on desktops...if you're using mobile you can toggle on the desktop mode by going to the bottom of the page and finding the button there). So if you're curious to know more, there will be keywords and notes and all sorts of info. Plus more if you check the posts on my Patreon.

Next some brief stats. These 106 stories came from 26 different publications and 101 different authors (7 authors have 2 stories on the list). Strange Horizons placed the most on the list with 9; followed by Uncanny and Clarkesworld with 8; Beneath Ceasless Skies, Fireside, and The Dark with 7; Lightspeed and Terraform with 6; Apex with 5; Anathema, Fiyah, Nightmare, Tor, and Flash Fiction Online with 4; Diabolical Plots and PodCastle with 3; Escape Pod, GigaNotoSaurus, Glittership, Lackington's, Omenana, Augur, and Translunar Travelers Lounge with 2; and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Mithila Review, and Samovar with 1.

My many thanks to all of the authors, editors, and other people involved with bringing these stories into the world. They are amazing. So, without further delay, the list! Cheers!


The Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List

"The Devil Squid Apocalypse", Alex Acks (GigaNotoSaurus)
"Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Fear", Senaa Ahmad (Uncanny)
"The Null Space Conundrum", Violet Allen (Lightspeed)
“58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever”, Rafeeat Aliyu (Nightmare)
“Where the Rain Mothers Are”, Rafeeat Aliyu (Strange Horizons)
“Early Adopter”, Kevin Bankston (Terraform)
"Flowers on My Face", Geo-Il Bok, translated by Elisa Sinn and Justin Howe, (Clarkesworld)
“Revival”, Lisa M. Bradley (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
"This Is How", Marie Brennan (Strange Horizons)
"Spectrum of Acceptance", Nyla Bright (Escape Pod)
"Elegy of a Lanthornist", M.E. Bronstein (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
"While Dragons Claim the Sky", Jen Brown (Fiyah)
"When the White Bird Sings", KT Bryski (Augur)
"Canst Thou Draw out the Leviathan", Christopher Caldwell (Uncanny)
"No Other Life", Isabel Cañas (Nightmare)
“The Weight of a Thousand Needles”, Isabel Cañas (Lightspeed)
"For He Can Creep", Siobhan Carroll (Tor)
“Abacus of Ether”, Stephen Case (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
"Reunion", Shannon Chamberlain (Terraform)
"A Fistful of Spells", Zach Chapman (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly)
"Failsafe", Tim Chawaga (Escape Pod)
"The Price of Knives", Ruoxi Chen (The Dark)
“The Plague-House”, Maya Chhabra (Anathema)* [from December 2018 but still awesome]
"Beyond the El", John Chu (Tor)
“Probabilitea”, John Chu (Uncanny)
"To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things", M. L. Clark (Clarkesworld)
“Local Senior Celebrates Milestone”, Matthew Claxton (Diabolical Plots)
“A Sharp Breath of Birds”, Tina Connolly (Uncanny)
“The Boy Who Loved Drowning”, R.K. Duncan (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
"The Cost of the Revolution in Three Marvelous Confections", R. K. Duncan (PodCastle)
“Sin Eater”, Chikodili Emelumadu (Omenana)
"Cassandra Draws the Four of Cups", Ruthanna Emrys (Strange Horizons)
"Neighbors and Little Thieves", Monica Evans (Flash Fiction Online)
"The Tailor and the Beast", Aysha U. Farah (Uncanny)
"Aging Elements", Ben Francisco (Fireside)
"The Boy on the Roof", Francesca Forrest (Fireside)
“The Sun from Both Sides”, R.S.A. Garcia (Clarkesworld)
“Flicker On”, Bishop Garrison (Terraform)
“By the Storytelling Fire”, Jaymee Goh (Fireside)
“The Prison-house of Language”, Elana Gomel (Apex)
“Team Work”, A. T. Greenblatt (Fireside)
"Jim", Malcolm Harris (Terraform)
“Dreams Strung like Pearls Between War and Peace”, Nin Harris (Clarkesworld)
"What Cradles Us But Will Not Set Us Free", Nin Harris (Strange Horizons)
"Gloss", Kola Heyward-Rotimi (Fiyah)
"From Her Mouth, the Ashes", Jessica Jo Horowitz (Flash Fiction Online)
"Our Cousins, Whom We Do Not Use As Directed", Claire Humphrey (Flash Fiction Online)
"As the Last I May Know", S.L. Huang (Tor)
"Loneliness in Transit, Sixty Light Years from Earth", Kurt Hunt (Flash Fiction Online)
"The Staircase to the Moon", M. K. Hutchins (Fireside)
"Flags Flying Before a Fall", Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Strange Horizons)
"When You Find a Dragon, Name Them for Me", Tamara Jerée (Fiyah)
“The Ocean That Fades Into Sky”, Kathleen Kayembe (Lightspeed)
"Growing Resistance", Juliet Kemp (Translunar Travelers Lounge)
“The Ghosts of Ganymede”, Derek Künsken (Clarkesworld)
"The Crying Bride", Carrie Laben (The Dark)
“Dustdaughter”, Inda Lauryn (Uncanny)
"2086", T.K. Lê (Strange Horizons)
“Moses”, L. D. Lewis (Anathema)
"Signal", L. D. Lewis (Fireside)
"Seed and Cinder", Jei D. Marcade (Uncanny)
"Death and Other Gentrifying Neighborhood", Sam J. Miller (Terraform)
"Still Water", Ian Muneshwar (Anathema)
“Old Media”, Annalee Newitz (Tor)
"e-race", Russell Nichols (Terraform)
"Tiny Bravery", Ada Nnadi (Omenana)
“Due By the End of the Week”, Brandon O'Brien (Fireside)
"A Song for the Leadwood Tree", Aimee Ogden (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Dune Song”, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Apex)
"Logic Puzzles", Vaishnavi Patel (The Dark)
"Monstrous Attractions”, Cindy Phan (Augur)"One Thousand Beetles in a Jump Suit", Dominica Phetteplace (Lightspeed)
"The Idaho Ghost Job", Laura E. Price (Translunar Travelers Lounge)
"Black Flowers Blossom", Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny)
"Replacement", Isa Prospero (Strange Horizons)
“Saligia”, H. Pueyo (Samovar)
"In This Moment, We Are Happy", Chen Qiufan, translated by Rebecca Kuang (Clarkesworld)
"The Etiquette of Mythique Fine Dining", Carolyn Rahaman (GigaNotoSaurus)
"Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanadons", Jennifer Lee Rossman (Glittership)
"With Teeth Unmake the Sun", A. Merc Rustad (Lightspeed)
"Burrowing Machines", Sara Saab (The Dark)
“We Sang You as Ours”, Nibedita Sen (The Dark)
“River’s Giving”, Heather Shaw, Tim Pratt, and River Shaw (PodCastle)“Professor Strong and the Brass Boys”, Amal Singh (Apex)
"Reclaiming Tess", Brittany Smith (Fiyah)
“Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit”, Cynthia So (Glittership)
"Promise Me This Is Ours", Omar William Sow (Strange Horizons)
"Heavy Reprises of a Dark Berceuse", Priya Sridhar (Lackington's)
“The One You Feed”, Dennis E. Staples (Nightmare)
"Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future", Carlie St. George (Nightmare)
"You Were Once Wild Here", Carlie St. George (The Dark)
“The Last Eagle”, Natalia Theodoridou (Clarkesworld)
"The Great Train Robbery", Lavie Tidhar (Apex)
"Who Will Clean Our Spirits When We're Gone", Tlotlo Tsamaase (The Dark)
"The Horrible Deaths of Helga Hrafnsdóttir", Christine Tyler (PodCastle)
"The Problem From Jamaica Plain" Marie L. Vibbert (Diabolical Plots)
"No Folly of the Beast", Wren Wallis (Mithila Review)
“The Crafter at the Web’s Heart”, Izzy Wasserstein (Apex)
“Fury at the Crossroads”, Troy L. Wiggins (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide”, Eleanor R. Wood (Diabolical Plots)
“Enchiridion of the Soltite”, Xue Xihe (Lackington's)
"Operation Spring Dawn", Mo Xiong, translated by Rebecca Kuang (Clarkesworld)
"Under Their Wings, These Starving Ghosts", Grace Yang (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
"Fossilized", Jessica Yang (Anathema)
"Windrose in Scarlet", Isabel Yap (Lightspeed)
"Many-Hearted Dog and Heron Who Stepped Past Time", Alex Yuschik (Strange Horizons)

*Updated 01/03/2019 with additions of 2 stories. Technically covers Sip of the Weeks #1-53, which cover 2019 content except for 1 2018 story that slipped in there but is really good so I've marked it as such.

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