Kristine Muslim - Age of Blight - Stories

Part II. “Children”: Children’s playground at Ithaca, Red Hill (1918), photographer unknown, courtesy the State Library of Queensland.

Part III. “Instead of Human”: Plate 33 from the illustrated PRACTICAL HYDROTHERAPY: A MANUAL FOR STUDENTS AND PRACTITIONERS (1909), by Dr Curran Pope, courtesy the Internet Archive.

Part IV, “The Age of Blight”: Man standing in a spiracle on a lava plain near Laxamyri, Iceland (1893), by Tempest Anderson, courtesy the Yorkshire Museum (York Museums Trust).

The illustrations accompanying story titles throughout the book are details from Fortunio Liceti’s DE MONSTRIS (1665 edition) and courtesy publicdomainreview.org. “It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art,” Liceti is quoted as saying, “because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can.”

Kristine Ong Muslim has authored several books of fiction and poetry, including the short story collections Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016) and The Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), two forthcoming full-length poetry collections from university presses in the Philippines, as well as We Bury the Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012), Grim Series (Popcorn Press, 2012), and A Roomful of Machines (ELJ Publications, 2015). Her short stories and poems have appeared in such magazines as Boston Review, Confrontation Magazine, New Welsh Review, The State , and elsewhere. She lives in southern Philippines and serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction , a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore.