A Cage for Every Child

by S.D. Chrostowska

A hunter of giant worms is surprised by the sentience of their prey. A flower sprouting in the palm of a hand delivers bad news. In an unknown country, power is transferred in hyper-sensual ways.

Whether fantastic or seemingly mundane, the twenty-four stories united in A Cage for Every Child unfold as uncanny encounters and brief sojourns in parallel worlds. Told in S. D. Chrostowska’s slyly provocative style, each tale questions the stability of our reality and the meaning of our pursuits.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

Published May 18, 2021

About the author

S.D. Chrostowska is an instructor of Social and Political Thought at York University in Canada. Her essays, short fiction, and articles have appeared in The Believer, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Hedgehog Review, New German Critique, Public Culture, New Literary History, SubStance, boundary 2, among others.

Chrostowska was raised in Warsaw and divides her time between Toronto and Paris.

Reviews

[Chris Via]

READING CANADIAN WRITER S. D. Chrostowska’s short fiction is like turning the brittle pages of a fabled, exotic encyclopedia hidden for centuries in a fusty, subterranean bookshop. Otherworldly could describe the atmosphere, but with its grounding in the familiar, uncanny is perhaps more appropriate. A Cage for Every Child is a book meant to disrupt the quotidian without alienating the reader, continuing a tradition of short-form writing that extends from Marcel Schwob to Jorge Luis Borges to, more recently, Ted Chiang. While clearly constructed from complex parts, most of Chrostowska’s stories can be boiled down to simple what-if statements. What if the inauguration of a sovereign included public humiliation at the hands of the masses? What if writing legally replaced speech as our official means of communication? What if worms became the only remaining animal protein available to humans? Or, a bit more pertinent — what if a “strange” substance born in a laboratory somehow escaped and became “lethal”?

Read the rest here: https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/artic...

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an essential read. Compact fictions that have universes inside them.

[Jake Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some literary folks will adore these fictions, but to me they're mostly inscrutable. The writings are more akin to poetry than "stories".

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

[Raoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

The range of this collection is extraordinary, from the prose poem to the fantastic, and even to myth. A story published last year in The Puritan led me seek out more of Chrostowska's short fiction. This is as good as The Eyelid.