New featured story from Barbara Krasnoff
In part in the spirit of awards season, in part in the spirit of promotion, in part in the spirit of sharing a really cool and wonderful thing to an audience, we have made Barbara Krasnoff’s short story “An Awfully Big Adventure” available to read for free on our site.
This story was published for the first time in The History of Soul 2065, Barbara’s short story collection that’s also a mosaic novel, which we released in June.
Over at her blog, Barbara has been publishing a series of entertaining posts describing the stories behind each story in The History of Soul 2065. She hasn’t yet made it to “An Awfully Big Adventure,” but we can say it takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Anthony Cardno’s insightful review of the book at Strange Horizons notes that “’An Awfully Big Adventure’ stands out from the rest of the book because of its ramifications on world history . . . It is 1962, and young Ben is visited by a supernatural entity who hopes to use his innocence against him and draw on that energy to push world events to devastation. But Ben has help from the generations of his family that came before and will come after: his grandmother Sophia leads a host of spirits that includes Ben’s future husband Carlos. Getting glimpses of his family’s tragic past and his own potentially happy future (even if he doesn’t understand why Carlos will be so important to him) give the boy the strength he needs. This is the power of family — both family history and family hope — writ large, and it is one of the most powerful stories in the book.”
Read “An Awfully Big Adventure” here.
