I reviewed Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei’s novella The Membranes, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich, for Strange Horizons.

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Novellas are a famously difficult species: neither short stories nor novels, they often can’t find a home, since publishers are hesitant to invest time and money in them. Nonetheless, here we have Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes: “a perfect novella,” by which I mean that it does exactly, and only, what it needs to do in the exact amount of space it needs to do it.

Read the entire review here.