Jewel Box: Stories

The strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with astonishing consequences in this collection of twenty-two stories from awardwinning writer E. Lily Yu.

In the village of Yiwei, a fallen wasp nest unfurls into a beautifully accurate map.

In a field in Louisiana, birdwatchers forge an indelible connection over a shared glimpse of a Vermilion Flycatcher. In Nineveh, a judge who prides himself on impartiality finds himself questioned by a mysterious god. On a nameless shore, a small monster searches for refuge and finds unexpected courage.

At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, these stories sing, as the oldest fables do, of what it means to be alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. For readers who loved the intelligence and compassion in Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century and the dreamlike
prose of Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, Jewel Box: Stories collects the acclaimed short fiction of E. Lily Yu, whose work has been praised in the New York Times as “devastating and perfect.”