Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. This time around, rather than picking out various stories from here and there, I’ll be talking about a single issue of a magazine: Apex #45, edited by Lynne M. Thomas, freshly released for February. The reason? It’s a Shakespeare theme issue. I have a series of feelings about and investments in the work of William Shakespeare—it’s sort of unavoidable as a member of an English department—and the concept of various authors writing speculative pastiches and other tales set in the worlds of Hamlet or Macbeth is, shall we say, seductive.
There are four stories in the issue (in addition to an essay by Sarah Monette and an interview with Kate Elliot): “Mad Hamlet’s Mother” by Patricia C. Wrede, “Zebulon Vance Sings the Alphabet Songs of Love” by Merrie Haskell, “The Face of Heaven So Fine” by Kat Howard, and “My Voice is in my Sword” by Kate Elliott. The last is a reprint from 1994’s Weird Tales from Shakespeare, edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg.
[Onward.]