Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

Yes, it was easy to confuse the thick, bonded chains for tentacular limbs, the greater central mass for a body, to imagine its twitching-nerve reactions as movement coordinated by a central mind, but the science assured otherwise. Technically, it was an amalgamation of brainless multicellular organisms-chemically linked, lurching as one. The most popular footage of the monster, taken on a phone by a commercial fisherman off the coast of Hawaii, had already played twice over the course of their meal. CNN played on a TV on a high corner shelf, facing Leah.

News outlets put “sea monster” in quotation marks in headlines and chyrons, usually followed by a question mark.Īrthur and Leah were eating breakfast in a diner. The first reports of the sea monster were broadcast the day Arthur proposed to Leah. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Here’s a writer on the move-come for the thrift-store dress, stay for the shocking denouement. She wasn’t sure when that had changed, why all these things now struck her as grotesque and fetishistic.”įu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction, and her poetry collection, How Festive the Ambulance, and second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, garnered wide acclaim. She’d wanted four children and enough bedrooms to house them all. “She’d once wanted to get married in a big white dress on a beach at sunset. “She had once liked pretty things, the most basic of pretty things, the lingua franca of femininity: candles, mirrors, flowers, pastel colors,” Fu writes. In “Bridezilla,” excerpted exclusively in Oprah Daily, her protagonist, Leah, freezes up on her Big Day-she makes a dash for freedom only to succumb to a mystery as large as the world, caught among the tides and tang of salt air. Born and raised in Vancouver to immigrants from Hong Kong, she now resides in Seattle much of her work is set along the Pacific coast, sifting through webs of human and animal lives. Thirty-five years old, Fu has gained a passionate following for quirky, arresting narratives that explore human bonds and find them lacking. While Hollywood star Julia Roberts is famous for playing commitment-phobes in such classic capers as My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Runaway Bride, many of our gifted women writers also tap the ambivalence of characters on the cusp of unholy matrimony, as in Kim Fu’s recently published collection of short fiction, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21 stCentury.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu