Review of “The Paper Menagerie” (2011)
Ken Liu (writer).
Read in 2023.
Magical origami animals and tragedy.
A fabulist sob story. Amazingly, this story became the first work of fiction to win all three of the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards. It’s possibly useful as a case study of the contruction of magic in literature, associated here with identity-political gnosticism and childhood play on the borders of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970).