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Enter the strange mind of Jason Erik Lundberg, hailed by The Guardian for “achieving emotionally resonant effects within just a few pages”. Let his imagination introduce you to an unearthly star girl, a foul-mouthed wombat, slithering immortals, a fish with premonitions, and much more.
These short stories, painstakingly selected from Lundberg’s first three collections, include a brand-new novelette—“Slowly Slowly Slowly” takes place in a future Singapore where an old folks' home takes the form of an actual zoo—and the author's preferred texts of “The Stargirl and the Potter” and “Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)”.
“This is a superb collection of beautifully crafted stories. They range from exquisite miniatures that render entire worlds within a few words to longer stories rich with the complexities of human interactions with the Other—where the Other might be a foreign tourist, a shaman, a fish that speaks or a wombat. Infused with a Southeast Asian sensibility, these tales transcend boundaries in the best tradition of speculative fiction.”
—Vandana Singh, author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories
“Phlogiston (I am assured by usually reliable sources) does not exist…and yet something rare is powering these shimmering, surprising, infinitely combustible stories. Strange energies crackle throughout this most excellent collection.”
—Andy Duncan, author of An Agent of Utopia and three-time World Fantasy Award winner
“Lundberg has the enviable talent of achieving emotionally resonant effects within just a few pages.”
—The Guardian
“Lundberg explores the randomness of magical occurrences and how a life without magic can be just as deadening as it is safe.”
—The Green Man Review
“Jason Erik Lundberg’s stories, launched from the real world on a trajectory to the surreal, fuse the idle daydream with the desperate heart. You should read them.”
—John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus
“What is deemed ‘strange’ becomes movingly conjoined with the familiar and the universal.”
—Cyril Wong, author of Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me
“Lundberg’s writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order: these stories are memories encountered for the first time, but never to be forgotten once they’ve been experienced.”
—James A. Owen, author and illustrator of The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica
Jason Erik Lundberg was born in New York, grew up in North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. He is the author and anthologist of over two dozen books, including A Fickle and Restless Weapon (2020), Most Excellent and Lamentable (2019), Diary of One Who Disappeared (2019), Carol the Coral (2016), Strange Mammals (2013), Embracing the Strange (2013), The Alchemy of Happiness (2012), Fish Eats Lion (2012), Red Dot Irreal (2011), the six-book Bo Bo and Cha Cha children’s picture book series (2012–2015), and the biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series (est. 2013).
He is also the fiction editor at Epigram Books (where the books he’s edited have won multiple awards, and made various year’s best lists since 2012), as well as the founding editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (2012–2018). His writing has been anthologised widely, shortlisted for multiple awards, honourably mentioned twice in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and translated into half a dozen languages. A Fickle and Restless Weapon is his first novel, and twenty-fifth book.
