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Looking for Jake: Stories

by China Miéville (Goodreads Author)

3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 · rating details · 2,304 ratings · 167 reviews

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from China Miéville’s Embassytown.

What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant young writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable i...more

ebook, 215 pages

Published August 30th 2005 by Del Rey (first published 2005)

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May 31, 2012 Joel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Joel by: Jacob

Shelves: signed-copy, chinatown, 2012, short-stories, bas-lag

The name China Miéville isn't generally synonymous with short stories, probably because he doesn't write them that often. In the past decade, he's published 10 novels, and in the same span, produced only 16 pieces of short fiction. I mean, whatever. Dude is busy. I think he also became an economics genius, ran for political office, and did about 3 million arm curls during that decade too. Oh, and got a giant squid tattoo.

Anyway, it's pretty annoying to discover that he also does short fiction a...more

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Aug 22, 2007 Tommy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

Fantastic short stories from China Mieville. It was great seeing this author tackle short fiction so effectively.

There is one Bas Lag story for fans of Perdido Street, the Scar and Iron Council. But I had the most fun reading the other stories, where Mieville's awesomely weird sensibilities are turned upon our own world. 'An End To Hunger' is one of the coolest hacker stories I've ever read. 'Familiar' feels like a Bas Lag creature let loose in modern London. Really, I loved the whole book, with...more

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Jul 26, 2010 Merrilee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

I haven't read Mieville's novels, but he is a master of the short story format. I enjoyed all of the stories in this book, because they made me think and fear and wonder at all the hidden things behind the world that we see.

A fascinating mix. I enjoyed The Tain (the novella) and Reports of Certain Events in London the best, but there was no story where I felt disappointed.

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Jan 07, 2013 Carole rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another reviewer said it -- these stories are actually better than Perdido Street Station. "Jack" has definitely stayed with me after a year, whereas the novel-length treatment did not.

After reading After the Apocalypse, I see why I don't really like "steampunk" as a genre or Miéville's style of writing. His approach to character is simply less personal, less intimate, than that taken by a writer like McHugh (or Octavia Butler, for example). A lot of the genre-splitting inside of speculative fic...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Klytia rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I racconti brevi sono una forma letteraria abbastanza difficile. In poche pagine è necessario introdurre ambienti, personaggi e atmosfere, aprire domande e creare la tensione narrativa e chiudere quindi il racconto in modo consistente, trasmettendo al lettore le stesse emozioni che riceverebbe leggendo un romanzo. Nel campo del fantastico autori come Lord Dunsany, Poe, Lovecraft sono stati dei veri maestri le cui tracce sono state seguite con successo da Neil Gaiman e ora da China Miéville con l...more I racconti brevi sono una forma letteraria abbastanza difficile. In poche pagine è necessario introdurre ambienti, personaggi e atmosfere, aprire domande e creare la tensione narrativa e chiudere quindi il racconto in modo consistente, trasmettendo al lettore le stesse emozioni che riceverebbe leggendo un romanzo. Nel campo del fantastico autori come Lord Dunsany, Poe, Lovecraft sono stati dei veri maestri le cui tracce sono state seguite con successo da Neil Gaiman e ora da China Miéville con la sua antologia intitolata Looking for Jake, una raccolta di racconti pubblicati tra il 1998 e il 2003 per diversi editori.
Come per Gaiman, a cui viene spesso associato (i due sono estimatori l'uno dell'altro), anche per Miéville le città sono un punto focale delle vicende, e un'oscura Londra è spesso la protagonista di questi racconti.
Una città pulsante di vita, dotata di pensieri ed emozioni che penetrano nella testa delle persone risvegliando in un veterano della guerra del golfo dei sensi di colpa dalla conseguenze drammatiche, in Foundations, o tra le cui strade si combattono misteriore guerre di cui lo stesso Miéville, io narrante, viene a conoscenza ricevendo per sbaglio della corrispondenza inviata a un tale Charles Melville, in Reports of Certain Events in London.
Se William Burroughs affermava che "il linguaggio è un virus", in Buscard's murrain un ironico Miéville fornisce una descrizione clinicamente scientifica di una malattia mentale che si trasmette con una parola, una wormword. Il brano era stato pubblicato nel curioso volume The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, una raccolta di trattati scientifici scritti da diversi dottori, tra cui Gaiman, Moorcock, Alan Moore e molti altri, in cui vengono appunto descritte dettagliatamente, con diagnosi, sintomi e cure, malattie eccentrice e sottovalutate.
Le idee politiche di Miéville sono espresse in modo chiaro nei racconti An End To Hunger, in cui un Hacker cerca di scardinare le strane politiche che regolano la beneficenza tramite internet, e in 'Tis the season, dove le multinazionali si sono impossessate delle feste e il Natale è un marchio registrato, tanto che non si possono neppure cantare le canzoni natalizie senza avere pagato i diritti alla YuleCom e bisogna accontentarsi di un albero di Natale fatto con pomodori infilzati in un cactus.
Non mancano inquietanti racconti di bambini e fantasmi, Ball Room e Different Skies, di creature che si nascondono tra le crepe e i profili di ogni oggetto che ci circonda, Details (vagamente ispirato all'universo mitologico di Lovecraft), di temi attuali come terrorismo e misteriose guerre e un omaggio alla città che ha reso famoso Miéville, la New Crobuzon che vive nel mito di Jack half-the-prayer, Jack.
Per arrivare all'ultimo racconto, The Tain, il più lungo e potente della raccolta, ambientato in una Londra conquistata da creature che cercano vendetta nei confronti del genere umano e lottano per la propria libertà ed è stupefacente scoprire da dove provengono queste creature
Lo stile di Miéville è come sempre barocco, poetico, visionario e...terribilmente complesso, una soddisfazione e una sfida continua durante la lettura.
Se mai un giorno tradurranno questa raccolta di racconti, il consiglio è sempre quello di partire da Perdido Street Station per avvicinarsi allo stile di Miéville.(less)

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Apr 08, 2012 Scott Asher rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook

I think I’m officially in love with China. Every time I read another work I am more astonished by the unfettered creativity brough to it. This is not your normal short story collection – it is deeper and wider and more entertaining than most of the books I’ve read in the last couple years.

Looking For Jake
by China Miéville
read by Jonathan Cowley, Enn Reitel, Gildart Jackson, Peter Altschuler, Robin Sachs, Bruce Mann, Dominic Burgess, Steve West Del Rey & Random House Audio
September 2011

There...more I think I’m officially in love with China. Every time I read another work I am more astonished by the unfettered creativity brough to it. This is not your normal short story collection – it is deeper and wider and more entertaining than most of the books I’ve read in the last couple years.

Looking For Jake
by China Miéville
read by Jonathan Cowley, Enn Reitel, Gildart Jackson, Peter Altschuler, Robin Sachs, Bruce Mann, Dominic Burgess, Steve West Del Rey & Random House Audio
September 2011

There are 14 short stories here with topics ranging from ghost stories to horror to straight up interdiminensional science fiction and each of them shines in their own way. Some were stronger than others though and stay with you longer. Consider The Tain, a story that turns on its head any ideas about what we really see when we see a reflection in a mirror and asks the haunting question: what if those reflections don’t want to mimic us? The Ball Room is a modern horror story that takes place in an department store children’s play room where something goes horribly wrong.

Others are less profound but enjoyable never the less. The most humorous story in the bunch is
Tis the Season, a story that wonders what would happen in a world where everything related to Christmas(TM) could be copyrighted. Details is a story about a young boy who spends his days sitting outside the door of an elderly woman who cannot leave her home because when she looks on anything with a pattern she seed It coming for her.

Reading this book made me feel like I was a kid in a candy store except I’m not a kid and the store that I’m in just appeared around me unexepectedly and the candy isn’t actually candy but is something I couldn’t ever have imagined but at the same time realized as I partook that I had always wanted it. A gem.

A note about the audio book version: Each story is narrated by a different reader who brings their own charms to the work. None of the readers suffered from over zealously affecting the work and all brought just enough of their own personality to make each story that much more independant. With this many stories it would be easy to have them run together with the same reader. This version, though, suffers from none of those concerns. Well read from top to bottom.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published at BookGateway.com. This book was provided by the publisher as a review copy.
(less)

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Feb 14, 2012 sologdin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative

A mixed group here: some ghost stories, a couple post-apocalyptic, a dystopian, a couple standard horror, a paranoid spy thriller, a tech thriller, one Bas Lag, and a graphic short (that I didn't really understand).

Standard leftwing concerns generally. The three standouts are the lovecraftian items: a metatextualist's accounting of documents received by postal error concerning viae ferae (best villains ever? maybe.); a bildungsroman taken staight from Paracelsus; and a Borgesian fake encycloped...more

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Jan 14, 2012 Kathryn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, horror, sci-fi-fantasy, short-stories

Something I keep coming back to with China Mieville is how much he trusts his readers to not give up when they get confused. His favorite method of introducing you to ANYTHING is to drop you in the middle of a situation (or a city, or a world), and feed you little tidbits of an explanation until you finally know what's going on. Or don't. And the gaps in the information will stay in your brain so much longer than if he'd gone point-by-point through the story.

The short stories don't leave as much...more

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Oct 13, 2011 David Hebblethwaite rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“‘It lives in the details,’ she said. ‘It travels in that…in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.’”

He may be best known as a novelist, but China Miéville’s short fiction is worthy of attention, too. Reading the stories collected in Looking for Jake, I feel as though I’ve gained a fresh understanding of his concerns as a writer. Miéville has often used the term “weird fiction” in conjunction with his work, and a good number of the tales here exhibit what is for me one of the key characteristics of that type of fiction – namely, the paranoid sense that the skin of reality is as thin as a soap bubble and that, if you’re not careful, you’ll discover what’s hiding beyond.

Take, for example, the story ‘Details’ (from which the quote at the head of this review is taken). As a boy, its narrator would go once a week to Mrs Miller’s house to take her the bowl of blancmange specially prepared by his mother. It turns out that Mrs Miller eats that for breakfast because it’s entirely smooth; she has seen something in the apparently-innocent everyday patterns of lines around the house, and that something looked back at her. Even memories or daydreams with patterns are not safe (“the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake”). Of course, it’s always possible that she’s delusional…isn’t it?

The paranoid uncertainty over the nature of reality is even more palpable in ‘Go Between’, where one Morley finds mysterious packages hidden in the items he buys from the supermarket, with instructions to send them on. What’s in these packages, what or whom they’re for, who sent them – and how they could know what he’d choose to buy – are all mysteries to Morley. One day, he comes across what will seemingly be the last of these packages, and starts to have doubts (did he make a mistake at some point? Might his actions even have inadvertently caused disaster or suffering?) and decides not to forward the parcel as instructed. Miéville brilliantly increases the tension of Morley’s conflicting thoughts as the protagonist watches terrible events unfold on the news – is this what happened because he didn’t send on the parcel, or just coincidence? – until the story ends in just the right place.

Though I wasn’t previously familiar with much of Miéville’s short fiction, I had read the story ‘An End To Hunger’ in a couple of anthologies; it’s interesting to read it again now in light of the other tales collected with it. Probably the least fantastical of all the stories in the book, ‘An End To Hunger’ is set in 1997, when its narrator meets Aykan, a “virtuoso of programming” who already views the internet as yesterday’s news. In time, Aykan becomes incensed by a click-to-donate website named An End To Hunger, whose methods he regards as corrupt; Aykan institutes a series of attacks against the site, until… Even though we’re not talking about somethings on the other side of reality in this case, the sense of secret forces at work in the world still prevails, and is brought into sharper relief by the context of publication.

As well as a writer of weird fiction, Miéville is, and always has been, a writer of the city; this latter is displayed in almost every piece in the book. ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’ is presented as a series of documents sent erroneously to the author; these describe a secret society’s investigations of ‘wild streets’, unpredictable thoroughfares which cannot be trusted to remain in the same place. Miéville’s approach to the story is effective in gradually unfurling the ramifications of its central idea, and the tale has the requisite frisson of uncertainty over whether what’s happening is real or all in the characters’ minds. The title story of Looking for Jake is another of the most strongly ‘urban’ pieces, this time describing a London which has been overrun by entropy, many of whose inhabitants have disappeared; this is one of those stories where it’s not so easy to pick out individual turns of phrase which are key in creating the atmosphere, but there’s nevertheless an accumulating sense of a washed-out, threateningly empty city.

Rounding out the collection are stories that show the variety of colours in Miéville’s palette. These range from ‘Familiar’, the tale of a monster grown from a gobbet of flesh, which has the kind of squelchily descriptive prose familiar from many of the author’s novels; to ‘The Ball Room’ (co-written with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer), which lends a menacing aspect to a children’s play area with considerable economy. ‘Jack’, set in the same world as Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels, is the story of a semi-legendary freedom fighter/terrorist in the city of New Crobuzon – but, in typically tricksy fashion, we never see the man himself directly; and ‘‘Tis the Season’, in which Christmas itself has become licensed, showcases Miéville’s sharp sense of humour.

If you’ve never read China Miéville before, Looking for Jake represents a fine introduction to his work. If you only know him from his novels, this collection will show another side to this singular writer.

This review was first published in the September 2011 issue of The Short Review. (less)

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Feb 10, 2011 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Fans of edgy, eerie short fiction

Recommended to Alan by: Other, longer work

I'll admit that it took me a little while to see where China Miéville was going with Looking for Jake. The first couple of stories didn't really gel for me. But as I grew more accustomed to the voice he was using, to the kinds of story he was telling... I began liking this collection more and more.

It might be hyperbole to call Miéville the Edgar Allan Poe of our age, but only by a little. Miéville displays in this volume a mastery of the frisson like very few others. And the stories that hit me...more

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May 11, 2011 Michael Alexander rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Like all such collections for writers who are primarily novelists, uneven. And I love Mieville and what he is doing to genre left and right. This, though, is almost exclusively on the uncanny/horror end of the spectrum. Fixations of these stories include the Marxist/postcolonial spin on the Frankenstein trick of meeting the monster via his own internal monologue; cities fractured into horror when Something Undefinable Changed; and the Lovecraft warhorse of learning too much and being forever una...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Brian Pickens rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: compilation, fantasy, new-weird, contemporary-fantasy, horror, science-fiction, dystopia

Very good collection of stories, with only a couple of weak points.

Many of these stories seem to be borderline unexplainable, about the places where things slip away and shift. Also, as is often the case with speculative fiction collections, many of these stories are more in the horror genre.

Note: This eBook version only has 215 pages so the story lengths below would be a little longer in other versions, but this still gives a sense of relative length of the stories to one another (a lot of them...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Han Asra rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: uk-ireland, psychology, horror, fantasy, steampunk, new-weird

Ini sudah buku ketiga China Mièvelle yang saya baca. Dua cerita sebelumnya yang saya baca tidak mengeecewa. Seharusnya dengan itu harapan saya menjadi lebih tinggi lagi, tapi kali ini tidak. Karena ini, Looking for Jake and Other Stories adalah kumpulan cerpen dan novella, yang menurut saya kualitas dan ragam ceritanya akan lebih campur aduk.

Looking for Jake and Other Stories seperti yang sudah saya tulis tadi di sinopsis berisi kumpulan cerpen dan novella China Mièvelle yang dia tulis dari tahu...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Nikki rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories-novellas, horror, fantasy

One of those rare occasions where I got to borrow a book from my girlfriend. (She has good taste, but since she lives in Belgium, I tend to encounter books first. But this one I kept meaning to pick up and somehow didn't.) I wasn't sure what I thought of the idea of China Miéville doing short stories: his novels are so often so sprawling, so full of gleefully grotesque imagery, that I didn't think he could contain himself within a short story.

He can.

Some of the stories are more effective than ot...more

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Oct 02, 2012 Zorena rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-story, horror, science-fiction-dystopian, science-fiction-post-apocalypse

Sometimes short stories are a great way to introduce yourself to an author you haven't read before. I found China Mieville while reading an anthology and was intrigued but not sure if I would like him so I found his collection of short stories.

If these are fantasy I would call them dark fantasy for lack of a better word. In all truth I would label them as mostly horror with some science fiction thrown in but it seems that Mieville wants a different label. I'm not saying that I don't like his wri...more

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May 17, 2013 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of two books purchased for me by my youngest daughter who obviously feels her aged father needs to broaden his reading.
The book is a collection of short stories, and they’re mostly set in the ‘now’ or the near future, and most are based around London. They’re also mostly dark. I’m not going to go into details because with short stories it would be too easy to inadvertently give too much away.
My opinion? China Mieville is a good writer, an excellent writer. At one point I did wonder...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Kim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2000s, 2005, action, black-humour, conspiracy, drama, fantasy, horror, comic, male-author, mystery, post-apocalypse, sci-fi, short-stories, thriller

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in this book. Generally I like China Miéville books but this one didn't do it for me. I'm not really a short story fan to begin with but I was hoping such a talented writer could do it. Not this time.

A lot of the stories really felt like he was being clever for clevers sake. Lots of vague endings and cryptic meanings. I read a fiction to be entertained, to be told a story. Sometimes a vague ending can be ok but not in almost every single story. Nothing is eve...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Mate77 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After reading ''Perdido Street Station'' and ''Iron Council'' by Mieville and really liking them both, I had high expectations for this collection. Most of the stories are set in London and all have some supernatural or otherworldly element to it. As in every short story collection some stories fall flat while others really shine. I especially liked ''The Ball Room'' which is a standard ghost story, ''Details'' which is a Cthulhu mythos story and ''Jack'' which was set in the same universe as th...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Mike Shevdon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: different

Looking for Jake is a collection of short stories that, for me, really worked. There is great variety in here, showcasing the authors breadth of imagination and creativity.

One of the marks of a great short story is that it sticks in your head and lingers long after you've closed the pages. There are stories in this volume that persist years later, that have changed the way I perceived certain places and that have sparked my own imagination along new paths.

China Mieville brings together threads...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Craig rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Man, Miéville is really a creepy creepy guy. I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, though it sort of got grating after a little while reading story after story set in the same city (London). I mean, I understand that was sort of the point of the collection, but seeing more than one post-apocalyptic scenario played out in exactly the same location seemed a bit... redundant, even with the diversity in the stories.

Favorite stories:

"Reports of Certain Events In London" - the author wi...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Kersplebedeb rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

While there are some brilliant pieces in here, i was really disappointed by this collection. Mieville normally gets four or five stars from me, but this really felt like reading scraps from a writers' notebook, or reading a series of drafts. Perhaps short stories are not his forte?

The ideas are often great, it's the stories themselves felt a bit rushed and unpolished. i find Mieville's one weakness is how to end a story, and i guess this becomes more of a problem in a short story collection. Tha...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Eris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

To confine this man's genre to that of science fiction would be far to stifling. It would cause the arms and legs to drop off of his work, it's ambulatory nature would cease to exist. He is a master of creep out, a diviner of imagination, he brings forth what you never saw coming down a road that previously didn't exist.

This collection of short stories introduces many facets of the mans writing, some which seem to be in everything and some that are only found in a precious few writings. There ar...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Suzy Trautman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There's a pervasive sense of dread underpinning most of the stories in this compilation. Paranoia and hysteria bubble right beneath the murky surface. More than ever, Mieville echoes Poe and Lovecraftian themes, and he recreates them well while giving them his own twist. I do think his writing style is better suited for longer novels since they allow for more expansive world-building, which is probably his greatest strength as an author. These short stories have convinced me that his imagination...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a collection of short stories (and one novella) by China Mieville, who is a star in science-fiction writing and what he terms as Weird Fiction.

This is the first book by Mieville which I read and I have mixed emotions about it.

The good stuff:

Mieville has a fantastic imagination. Some of the ideas which form the basis of these stories are truly bizarre and wonderful.

For instance, in The Ball Room, one encounters a ghost in the children section of a furniture store. In Reports of Certain E...more

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Jun 15, 2011 Nelson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

London through a very peculiar looking glass. Miéville's primary mode in nearly all of these stories is to look closely at the world and discover that not all is as it seems. So, for instance, the narrator of "Foundation" is a building inspector who can hear the voices of murdered Iraqis in the walls he examines for minute faults; the guard in "The Ball Room" sees, or almost sees, one child too many in a playroom in a superstore; "Reports of Certain Events in London" details how streets themselv...more London through a very peculiar looking glass. Miéville's primary mode in nearly all of these stories is to look closely at the world and discover that not all is as it seems. So, for instance, the narrator of "Foundation" is a building inspector who can hear the voices of murdered Iraqis in the walls he examines for minute faults; the guard in "The Ball Room" sees, or almost sees, one child too many in a playroom in a superstore; "Reports of Certain Events in London" details how streets themselves are mobile and may be at war with themselves--it turns out you have to look closely to notice whether a street is itself or has wandered away from its original location. This mode is perhaps best exemplified in "Details" and "Different Skies." The former tale is one where a witch is a witch because she learns that if you stare long enough at any random pattern or image in the world (bricks in a wall, trees in a forest) they begin to rearrange themselves into stories and images and creatures of enormous power--this vision is both the witch's curse and the source of her own peculiar abilities. In the latter, an old man buys an antique window of colored glass on Portobello Road and installs it in his study only to learn that when he looks through it, he sees another world or time, one hostile to his own. This notion of speculation and other worlds governs the logic of "The Tain," the novella that closes the volume. It may be an award-winning story (about the world of imagos on the other side of mirrors, who are not very happy about being enslaved to mimic this world), but the other short stories feel oddly more rewarding. This notion of looking closely is the key theme in the stories but not the sole one. Almost all of the stories in some way present versions of London, either in post-apocalyptic mode such as the title story, "Looking For Jake" (almost a short story version of Paul Auster's _In The Country Of Last Things_) or "Jack" (another crack at the world from _Perdido Street Station_) or in a weird, slightly off-kilter present as in "Go Between" or "An End to Hunger." Easily the most enjoyable story is the madcap "Tis The Season"--a wildly funny tale of a father and daughter enjoying a special Christmas in a dystopian future. What makes that story so rewarding, apart from the deftly comic mixture of implied economic and social critique, is that it is finally anchored in the relationship between the two central characters. On this outing, Miéville's chief skill seems to be the sheer fecundity of his ideas as he reworks a variety of genre tales. His skill at voices, at interior narratives is considerable. On the whole, quite enjoyable.(less)

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Apr 13, 2012 Eustacia Tan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After reading Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, I went to the library to search for more books by him. Bearing in mind that I'm leaving soon and can't make many (if any) more trips to the library, I decided to get a book of his short stories. I think it's because of the variety, but other than that, maybe it's because I couldn't decide on a novel.

After reading it, one thing sticks in my mind: the prose is fantastic. Especially the Teaser Tuesday quote that I shared with you. Throughout the book, th...more After reading Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, I went to the library to search for more books by him. Bearing in mind that I'm leaving soon and can't make many (if any) more trips to the library, I decided to get a book of his short stories. I think it's because of the variety, but other than that, maybe it's because I couldn't decide on a novel.

After reading it, one thing sticks in my mind: the prose is fantastic. Especially the Teaser Tuesday quote that I shared with you. Throughout the book, the prose is understated and beautiful. In fact, the whole book feels understated. The plot is intriguing, but we are overloaded with details. We get the bare minimum (and sometimes it feels less than that), and then we're left to draw our own conclusions. All these result in stories that feel "alive" with the possibilities of what had/will happen/is happening.

Oh, and if you've read The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, his entry "Buscard's Murrain" is inside. And I don't know if it's a sly reference to the book, but in one of the stories, called "The Ball Room", one character hallucinates that there is always one more child in the ball room than there really is, which is a bit like "Worsley's Supplement" in the book.

I think the most interesting story in the whole book would be " 'Tis the Season", where Christmas has become commercialised to the extent that things like mistletoe and eggnog (what is eggnog?) and Christmas trees have been trademarked/copyrighted. Of course, this implies that society has fallen to such a state that they've forgotten the true meaning of Christmas but only focus on the rampant commercialisation. Hmm... how familiar does this sound?

A word of warning though, the language in this book can become very explicit, with a lot of swear words (this happens most in a few stories). I cringed a few times when I had to read expletives every two or three sentences and I will never understand why it's so necessary. So, I'd recommend that only older (by older I mean late teens) readers (that hopefully won't be influenced to emulate them) read this. Plus, the stories are somehow scary, which is why a. for older readers and b. not so smart to read it before bed (I know, I tried it).

(First posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliiophile)(less)

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Jan 23, 2012 David Eagle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I thoroughly enjoyed this short story collection. If you're unfamiliar with China, this is a great way to "meet the author" before committing to one of his incredibly dense (though wholly worthwhile) novels.

Each story was engaging and left me wanting more. They weren't all scary, but they were mostly scary. And scary in the best way. Scary in the way that lets you fill in blanks with your own demons, your own little horrors.

China paints incredible pictures with words. He doesn't write the short,...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Laurie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This collection of short stories showed me that, while I adore Mieville as a novel writer, I’m less fond of him as a short story author. Written between 1998 and 2005, these stories range from the incomprehensible (Foundation) to the fascinating (Reports of Certain Events in London) to the funny (Tis the Season) to the seriously creepy (Familiar) to the will-this-never-end (The Tain). There is even one set in New Crobuzon, the world of ‘Perdido Street Station’, a very good story. Mieville fans w...more

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Jan 04, 2011 Matt Fowle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think that a short story collection is a good way to check out an author you're curious about. It helps you see their interests, themes and style as well as the depth of creativity. When I read Looking for Jake I was immediately impressed. The eponymous short story 'Looking for Jake' was possibly my favourite of the bunch with the vague and extremely creepy quietness of the apocalypse going on evoked everything I love in horror.
This book has definitely converted me to being a fan of China and...more

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Apr 12, 2013 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i did not go into this knowing it was short stories. i have been put off starting mieville's books in the past because of their girth. (audio/e-books have somewhat put a stop on this barrier.) i have been reading numerous anthologies lately and i am really not into them.

however, there were a few gems in here! some, including the last story, just didnt grasp me at all. the trademark one was good for the first 3/4 but kind of deteriorated.

i liked it enough to retry perdido street station as an au...more

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About China Miéville

A British "fantastic fiction" writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" (after early 20th century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigons. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist W...more

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Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)

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“Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.” — 19 people liked it

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Looking for Jake: Stories

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