Alice Sola Kim’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, among other publications. Kim was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has received grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working on her first novel and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Monstrous AffectionsAn Anthology of Beastly TalesFrom"Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying"
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
Monstrous Affections:An Anthology of Beastly Tales -
Lightspeed MagazineNovember, 2010From"Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters"
Once, Hwang awakes to find no one. He walks around the city for hours before seeing a woman in a coverall. She is pulling vines off the side of a building and stuffing them into a trash bag. I am paid millions a year for this work, she says.
Even for the future, that is a lot of money.
It turns out that everyone has been uploaded into virtual space, but a few people still have to stick around to make sure that buildings stay up and the tanks are clean and operational.
Later, everyone comes back, because it turns out that no one really likes uploaded life.
Lightspeed Magazine:November 2010- Print Books
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Strange HorizonsFrom"We Love Deena"
My ex-girlfriend Deena killed people for a living. She was a Euthanizer for the local health bureau. I think I must be a sick person, because I thought that was sort of hot. But this is really hard to explain. I thought that people were lucky to have someone like Deena to lead them out of life and into the nothing-whatever of being dead. If you do not believe in something like St. Peter at the gates and beautiful angels who look like the best parts of men and women both, but you want that sort of thing, then Deena is your best bet.
Strange Horizons:- Print Books
- Strange Horizons
"In Kim’s tale [“Mother, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying”], three adopted Korean-American girls attempt to summon their biological mothers through a dark ritual. Kim writes with visceral urgency and distills the complex emotions of an adopted child into events of real horror." —Adam Gidwitz, The New York Times [on Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales]
“Whether it’s an essay about Philip K. Dick or a story about monstrous girls, Alice Sola Kim is cutting away that skin on the world and showing us some of the ugly necessary truths: beauty is a white girl, beauty is a lethal disease, love is sometimes sinister, sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes it just gets weird.” —Melissa Moorer, The Toast
Selected Works
- Print Books
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- Lightspeed Magazine Shop
- E-Books
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Alice Sola Kim is gutsy and lithe, funny and buoyant, moving but never mawkish. Staking out new territory with charismatic ferocity, Kim shows us what playfulness and power can be found in the hybridization of genres. Her stories place her young protagonists in worlds that are sometimes a little different from ours (a residence for friendless ladies) and sometimes very different (Venus), but her understanding of her characters makes these worlds seem instantly real. Her protagonists are often trying to define themselves against the expectations of those around them, and so the stories are as much speculations about the shape a life will take as they are explorations of speculative new worlds. She is a writer of great nuance and tenderness, of mirth and mischief, who honors magic and is already a master of human idiosyncrasy.