Abstract
INHERITANCE & OTHER STORIES is a collection set in history’s seams. In these eight works of short fiction, characters grapple with ruptures in personal, national, and planetary memory—family histories lost to migration and language loss; national histories erased by violence or disavowal; planetary histories that disappear as environmental record-keepers like glaciers, land, and celestial bodies melt, burn, and are obscured by pollution. In some stories, the fantastical bubbles up to haunt these ruptures: rejected or forgotten inheritances come alive in the form of ghosts, animal spirits, and broken fairy tale mirrors. In others, the past remains silent and unknowable, and our characters have only the stories they tell themselves and the technologies they conjure to make sense of it. The collection spans a wide range of genres—drawing on speculative, fairy tale, and literary traditions—and integrates forms such as transcriptions and field notes to examine storytelling itself as a vehicle of inheritance. How do narrative, language, and form render the past legible—and limit what can be passed down? Ultimately, this collection asks what it means to come from a country, a time, a family, a mythology, or a planet that we have inherited but cannot remember, that no longer exists.