forestofglory

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, edited by Angela Carter, and Nalo Hopkinson's collection Skin Folk.

Skin Folk took me a while to get into--I don't know if the first half-dozen stories were actually significantly weaker than the rest of the collection, or if I just wasn't in the right move--but I really loved some of the closing pieces, so it's staying on my shelf for now, and I'm definitely hanging onto my copy of Falling in Love with Hominids for later reading. I think "Greedy Choke Puppy" was my favorite entry in the collection.

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women was a revelation: a collection of stories by feminist writers working from about 1875-1975, almost none of whom I'd heard of. Their collected Wikipedia entries make a fascinating side collection in its own right, because many of them lived pretty wild lives. (The only one who doesn't have a Wikipedia article is the queer Latina writer; if I have some time, maybe I will wade into the swamp that is Wikipedia article creation and try to fix that.) It's not overall a happy collection (though some of the individual stories do have happy endings, including the opener), but I recommend it highly.