Rachel Swirsky (rachel_swirsky) wrote,  Rachel Swirsky's Short
Story Recommendations from 2011  This year, I read about 260
short stories and novelettes. I compiled my list using a
combination of reading magazines and anthologies, querying
authors about their yearly work, asking for recommendations from
critics and editors, and referencing the year's best
anthologies. As always, I enjoyed more stories than I'm listing
here.  Some of the pieces listed as short stories may actually
be novelettes. I double-checked the ones I'm voting on, but for
the rest of my reading, where it wasn't immediately obvious what
category the work belonged to, I guessed.   "Her Husband's
Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed) - A war widow receives
bad news from the front--that her husband is dead--however,
they've managed to save his hands and only his hands. This is
pretty much the height of metaphor-as-story. In that, it's not
dissimilar from last year's "Arvies" in which Troy-Castro
created a physicalized metaphor about abortio