Quick Sips - Breathe Fiyah

Art by Eli Minaya

A collaboration between Tor and Fiyah Magazine, this special Breathe Fiyah issue features eight short stories (entirely flash fiction) by Black writers exploring race, oppression, resistance, and revolution through a speculative lens. The stories are largely (though not completely) contemporary, both fantasy and science fiction (with some horror elements thrown in as well at times), and they create a framework, one that ends up resembling perhaps a structure of kindling. Each piece a small addition that, when put together and struck, sets off a blaze. The stories are about resisting, about surviving a world that is actively trying to erase, exploit, and exterminate you. And the works do indeed spark and smolder, ending with a bang that, hopefully, will shake things up, weakening the racist and white supremacist structures that marginalize Black writers. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine May 2018

It’s a full month of fiction at Fireside Magazine, with five original releases (five!). Most are flash fiction, but all of them are powerful and ready to fight. For me, so many of these stories are about resistance. About the refusal to play along with the rules so long as those rules are unjust. These stories are full of characters who find, either through others or on their own, that the way the world works often only works because people accept it. Which means that if the system is broken and corrupt, and people are willing to break the chains holding them down, are willing to believe in a system that doesn’t carry such harm with it, they can start to make that a reality. Here we find characters struggling against prophecy, against rules, against the threat of loss, all to reach somewhere better and freer. It’s a wonderful bunch of mostly very short fiction, so let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Maggie Chiang

Quick Sips - Fiyah Literary Magazine #3: Sundown Towns

The third issue of Fiyah Literary Magazine has arrived and the theme this time is Sundown Towns, the practice where black people had to leave certain cities before sundown or face the prospect of arrest or mob justice. It’s a heavy theme and it shows in many of the stories and poems. These are pieces that look very closely at place, at the idea of home, that complicate how people can feel belonging when they are not truly safe, when they are never really in control of their spaces. Many of the stories deal with protagonists working in nearly-hopeless situations—being exploited and legislated against, being constantly in danger from forces mundane and supernatural. But the pieces all show what community and hope can do, how resistance and beauty still flower in the harshest of realities. The stories are at turns tragic and inspiring, and the issue as a whole is another phenomenal experience. So let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Geneva Benton