Amber Sparks

Amber Sparks writes short fiction that moves freely among fantasy, horror, science fiction, myth, and compressed historical narrative. The Unfinished World and Other Stories, published by Liveright in 2016, is her second collection and contains nineteen pieces. Its characters include astronauts, taxidermists, orphans, warriors, artists, and people living alongside the dead. The novella-length title story follows Set and Inge through separate histories of loss before their lives converge, while shorter works use unusual structures to bend time or revise familiar legends. Sparks links these different forms through recurring questions about grief, solitude, love, and the stories people invent to survive catastrophe. Critics have compared the pieces to fairy tales and prose poems because their images carry as much weight as conventional plot. Rather than building one consistent universe, Sparks gives each story its own rules, then uses that strangeness to make ordinary longing and fear newly visible.