The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a collection of 15 short stories from the award-winning science fiction author, Ken Liu. The collection includes tales of magical realism, futuristic technology, historical fiction, and gritty noir. Simon and Schuster published the book in 2016.

Through these narratives, which often switch back from past to present or from story to book excerpts or legends, Liu invokes several diverse worlds with many Asian protagonists. In his stories, he references Chinese and Japanese games, language, folklore, and history and covers themes of memory, the implications of advanced technologies, and immigrant experiences in America.

In stories like “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” Liu details the unique storytelling, story recording, and cognitive abilities of different alien species. The first of these functions as a faux nonfiction account of alien species, and the second is a book composed by a mother astronaut who leaves her husband and daughter for a century-long journey into space.

Magical realism appears in several of the stories as well. In “The Paper Menagerie,” for example, the origami animals that the speaker’s mother creates for him come to life. When the speaker,

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