Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri

Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients’ house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species of intelligent weasels.

In the spirit of Laura van den Berg, Emily Geminder, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, and other winners of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Nino Cipri’s debut collection announces the arrival of a brilliant and wonderfully unpredictable writer with a gift for turning the short story on its ear.

Giving five stars specifically for The Shape Of My Name, which punched me right in the heart, and Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff, which I swear to god could be about real people with the way the dialogue was written, but all of the stories were good.

Everything in this book feels simultaneously grounded in reality and delightfully speculative, with sci-fi, paranormal, and horror elements interspersed perfectly with complex queer characters and messy relationships of all kinds and cool story formats. I'm gonna be thinking about this book for a good long while.

trans power (or how more people should absolutely be writing about trans time travellers and trans scientists)

I didn't know it was possible to love EVERY story in a short story collection but I really, really did. Honestly, it shouldn't be a surprise that Nino Cipri is the one who finally accomplished it for me, since I've also loved their novellas.
Mostly sci-fi, some horror but also love and hope. Final story in particular is heart-warming and hilarious. (It might be my own grad school experience that biases me towards it.)
Part of what makes me love their writing so much is the completely natural inclusion of gender expression/exploration in various narratives; then there is the almost casual magical realism/sci-fi/creature elements sprinkled among the day-to-day lives of the characters.
The variety of story telling styles/formats at play here makes it even more fun to read as a collection.
The stories' dealing with themes of gender and queerness (as well as characters of colour) realistically, sadly, include characters encountering hate and prejudice, but there's something so gentle and proud in the characters facing such, this clearly conveyed message that having difficulty with the truth of one's identity is something the other person will have to work through and maybe one day they'll be forgiven for having the wrong/oppressive/offensive mindset/attitude.
⚠️ Transphobia, homophobia, racism