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A gentle fantasy. Love, paper tigers, mail order bride, culture clash. A Chinese mail-order bride literally blows life into tiny paper animals for her American son. The story, which won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards in 2011, puts Liu in exclusive company with only a few other prestigious science fiction authors who have won all of these awards.

Read this story online for free at io9, or listen to an audio reading at Escape Pod.

A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection--including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), "Mono No Aware" (Hugo Award winner), "The Waves" (Nebula Award finalist), "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), "All the Flavors" (Nebula award finalist), "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King" (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre's history, "The Paper Menagerie" (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
• State Change
• The Perfect Match
• Good Hunting
• The Literomancer
• Simulacrum
• The Regular
• The Paper Menagerie
• An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Comparative Cognition
• The Waves
• Mono no aware
• All the Flavors
• A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
• The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
• The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

Resnick's Menagerie is a collection of previously published short fiction by Mike Resnick, all of which involve animals, whether real or imaginary: from dogs to werewolves, and from elephants to dragons. The collection includes eighteen stories; of them, one winner of the Hugo Award, four nominees for the Hugo Award, one nominee for the Nebula Award, and two winners of the American Dog Writers Award for Best Short Story, in different years.

Table of Contents:

• The Elephants on Neptune (2000) short story
• The Last Dog (1977) short story
• Malish (1991) short story
• Royal Bloodlines (2010) short story
• Barnaby in Exile (1994) short story
• A Better Mousetrap (2007) short story
• Hunting the Snark (1999) novella
• Stalking the Unicorn with Gun & Camera (1986) short story
• Stalking the Vampire (2009) short story
• Stalking the Dragon (2009) short story
• The One That Got Away (2004) short story
• Blue (1979) short story
• Post Time in Pink (1991) novelette
• Old MacDonald Had a Farm (2001) short story
• Darker Than You Wrote (1996) short story
• The Boy Who Cried "Dragon!" (2005) short story
• On Safari (2010) short story
• Travels with My Cats (2004) short story

"It is said that this city rests over the great menagerie. Men who felt tempted to meddle in science were cursed and turned into beasts."

A nameless city on a primitive, rain-sodden planet. The ruling Knights of Kuabris strive to keep order as hideous creatures emerge from the sewers to attack the populace. It seems that there might be some truth in the prophecies after all.

While Jamie languishes in the castle dungeons, the Doctor is forced to lead an expedition beneath the city to search for the fabled Menagerie of Ukkazaal. Meanwhile Zoe has been sold as a slave to a travelling freak show -- and one of the exhibits is coming to life.

When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger's Menagerie, she is an ordinary woman in a not-quite-ordinary world. But under the macabre circus big-top, she discovers a fierce, sharp-clawed creature lurking just beneath her human veneer. Captured and put on exhibition, Delilah is stripped of her worldly possessions, including her own name, as she's forced to "perform" in town after town.

But there is breathtaking beauty behind the seamy and grotesque reality of the carnival. Gallagher, her handler, is as kind as he is cryptic and strong. The other "attractions"--mermaids, minotaurs, griffins and kelpies--are strange, yes, but they share a bond forged by the brutal realities of captivity. And as Delilah struggles for her freedom, and for her fellow menagerie, she'll discover a strength and a purpose she never knew existed.

When their coup of Metzger's Menagerie is discovered, Delilah and her fellow cryptids find their newly won freedom brutally stripped away as they are sold into The Savage Spectacle, a private collection of "exotic wildlife." Specializing in ruthless cryptid cage matches, safari-style creature hunts and living party favors, the Spectacle's owner, Willem Vandekamp, caters to the forbidden fetishes of the wealthy and powerful. At the Spectacle, any wish can be granted--for the right price.

But Vandekamp's closely guarded client list isn't the only secret being kept at the Spectacle. Beneath the beauty and brutality of life in the collection lie much darker truths, and no one is more determined than Delilah to strip the masks from the human monsters and drag all dark things into the light.

1986: Rebecca Essig leaves a slumber party early but comes home to a massacre--committed by her own parents. Only one of her siblings has survived. But as the tragic event unfolds, she begins to realize that other than a small army of six-year-olds, she is among very few survivors of a nationwide slaughter.

The Reaping has begun.

Present day: Pregnant and on the run with a small band of compatriots, Delilah Marlow is determined to bring her baby into the world safely and secretly. But she isn't used to sitting back while others suffer, and she's desperate to reunite Zyanya, the cheetah shifter, with her brother and children. To find a way for Lenore the siren to see her husband. To find Rommily's missing Oracle sisters. To unify this adopted family of fellow cryptids she came to love and rely on in captivity.

But Delilah is about to discover that her role in the human versus cryptid war is destined to be much larger--and more dangerous--than she ever could have imagined.