A great collection of short stories, each with a lesson to be learned that will fill those short periods of time while waiting in the car or the doctor's office. The stories are excellent, some better than others, but all sure to please discriminating readers.

Charlie Jane Anders's short stories always span the spectrum of emotion and world-building. Some of her stories leave you gut-punched; others are uplifting. At the same time, others are deep science fiction. It is a nod to her as an author that she can evoke so many emotions from her readers in such a small word count.

There is a brilliant variety in this collection told by a master short story author. It is vibrant and queer and wonderful but holds to concise storytelling. These stories might not hit for everyone, but they hit pretty hard for me as a reader and reminded me why she is one of my favorite storytellers.

I don't usually read short stories, but this collection may serve to change my mind. I love a book that explores new ideas, or puts a new spin on an existing trope, and these short stories do that, and cover a wide range of them.

I'd already read Six Months, Three Days elsewhere, so that set my expectations, and I'm happy to say they were met. From classics like time travel in The Time Travel Club to the over-the-top gonzo style of Rock Manning Goes For Broke, there was something for everybody here. The medical horror of Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue was probably my least favorite story, but that's partly because of the real-world politics that it mirrors, which are none of the story's faults.

Even Greater Mistakes is a collection of science fiction short stories by Charlie Jane Anders. While I adore Charlie Jane Anders’s adult novels, she really shines with short stories. This collection is brilliant. Each story is well-developed and captivating leaving me in awe after each story. The level of world and character building in so few pages is masterful. This will be a volume that I will reread many times over.

I believe each story is genius, even though I personally did not enjoy each story. The stories are very LGBTQ-centric with a strong emphasis on sexual relationships. They are not romance books, they just include every aspect of human nature. Except, being aro/ace this isn’t nature that appeals to me. I don’t connect with it. But it takes a master to make you care when you do not connect.

To be clear there were stories I adored very much and there are stories that I appreciated even though I did not relate to them. But every story will stick with me forever. These worlds and people are now a part of my soul.

I don’t think everyone will like this book, but I do think everyone should read it.

This collection of science fiction short stories, like any collection, varies in quality. Some of the stories, especially earlier in the collection, were quite terrific and thought-provoking, but for me especially as it went along, a few of them just became a little too gross, dark, and/or out there for me. That being said, this is the first book I’ve read by Charlie Jane Anders, and left me definitely wanting to try one of her novels.

3.5 stars

I love a good short story collection. A story a day just to relax after work. And this is a great short story collection. Charlie Jane Anders collected a diverse group of stories here with introductions to each one. These are mostly sci-fi but mostly about human nature. I was first introduced to her short stories when I heard LeVar Burton read “As Good as New” on his podcast, and that’s the first story in this collection. A woman survives an apocalyptic event and finds a bottle in the wastelands outside, a wish facilitator (he doesn’t like the term genie) provides three wishes. But Marisol doesn’t just ask the three wishes. In “Six Months, Three Days” Judy and Doug can see the future, but they see it in different ways which affects their relationship. “The Bookstore at the End of America”, tells the story of a bookstore that straddles what’s left of America. One side is America and the other side is California and the bookstore is where they meet and it’s not always smooth. And “The Visitmothers” are also wish facilitators, where you also have to be very specific about what you wish for. I enjoyed these immensely and I look forward to reading them from time to time.

I loved the variety in this short story collection. There's such a depth and range here and I'm really excited by the queer representation in these speculative fiction stories.

This collection of 19 short stories, predominantly set in space or a post-apocalyptic Earth, has a little for everyone -- particularly fans of science fiction and fantasy. It won the 2022 Locus Award for Best Collection. As it is meant to show the range of Anders' writing career, it's not an all-at-one-time read. I recommend story-dipping with this book. My favorites: "Love Might Be Too Strong a Word", "Ghost Champagne," and "Time Travel Club."

[Thanks to Tor Books and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy of this book.]

Book received for free through NetGalley

I adored all the stories in this book. I could’ve kept reading until they were done but I ended up doling the stories out one at a time until I ran out. All of them were brand new to me except for “The Bookstore at the End of America” which I didn’t mind as I adored that story the first time I read it and it lasted with me.

Even Greater Mistakes gives readers a fun, unique, and playful assortment of short stories to choose from. All of these stories, though, get to the heart of what it means to be human.

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up because it's that good a collection

<B>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review</b>: This is a collection to dip into not slurp down greedily. I mean, where else do you find, "A whole book of short stories can be overwhelming, like imaginative speed dating." This isn't even in a story! It's in the opening act, the Introduction! She's not keepin' her powder dry, unlikely for a seasoned campaigner who's founded geeky websites; or she's just got that immense an arsenal and knows she doesn't need to pace herself.

The best thing I can say of this epitome of Author Charlie Jane Anders's career is that you are unlikely to become bored. A story about time travel that includes, as I've never seen any other place, the fact that the Earth is moving in space; the Sun is moving in space; and not one bit of that enables a careless time-traveler to land where they began. Another story about time travel, but for an extremely specific time, and how that affects a love affair. Love, in every guise you can imagine, underpins every story. Love unspoken, love requited, love rejected...love all over the shop. Seriously. Get some towels.

You'll note that you're denied the story-by-story breakdown...you must venture blogwards to bring you the flavor of the tales.

This was perhaps not the book I needed when I read it, but for the right science fiction fan, there's a lot to enjoy here. The stories were varied and a little weird, and super queer - this is typically catnip for me, but something didn't click and I found myself rushing to get to the end without enjoying much of what I was reading. Perhaps I'll revisit in the future but it wasn't for me.

An enjoyable selections of stories from an author that I wasn't familiar with prior to picking up this collection. There's a good variety to be found in here, and as a whole more of the stories were hits than there were misses. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys short stories and Science Fiction.

What a treat to have this anthology of Charlie Jane Anders stories, complete with individual intros by the author.
Some reflect our current state, some are pure sci-fi, some give us hope, and some where we cry together. Feminist, and accepting of gender-nonconforming, the stories bid us to look out for one another.

If you are a Charlie Jane Anders stan, for sure pick this up. There's something for every mood.

Charlie Jane Anders is on my automatic to-buy list at this point, and I love her short fiction best of all. All the stories in this collection are standouts. Something I especially appreciated was Anders' commentary on each story - I love when authors do this. There's all sorts of wonderful weirdness in here - I recommend everyone give this a try whether or not they've read Anders' previous work.

You Can’t Go Wrong With Charlie Jane Anders’ Dynamic Short Fiction Collection Even Greater Mistakes

There’s a quote in “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” Charlie Jane Anders’ delightful far-future short story about courtship across class and gender, describing this more-than-infatuation-but-less-than-true-love in floridly hyperbolic language: “Theirs must be a fleeting happiness, but how bright the afterimage!” As it turns out, this also perfectly encapsulates the experience of reading one of Anders’ inventive, provocative works of short fiction: With boldly realized worldbuilding in a fraction of the space that many SFF novels take up, these stories feel almost too short—they often end with the reader blinking back a powerful afterimage, followed by the urge to immediately read another.

That’s where Even Greater Mistakes, Anders’ new short fiction collection from Tor Books, comes very much in handy. These 19 stories, ranging from Anders’ early career to award-winning offerings, will appeal to both readers like myself (who have sought out Anders’ short fiction across such platforms and publications as Uncanny, Asimov’s, and of course Tor.com), as well as those new to her body of work.

Anders’ brief intro to each selection is a much-appreciated bit of context, with details that sketch out her career as an artist and journalist in the SFF sphere: which stories needed another go before she could get at the heart of them, which ones she created accompanying research documents for (let’s be real, that attention to detail is basically all of them), which ones got reworked at the bar at WisCon or another SFF gathering. These bite-size liner notes add to the “greatest hits” feel for the collection, while thoughtful content warnings aid the reader in deciding how vulnerable they want to make themselves.

It will also help readers further determine if they want to read straight through or dart around to find and follow the “subgenres” of Anders’ work: the clever relationship studies (“Power Couple,” “Ghost Champagne”), the utter romps (“Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie,” “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime”), the unflinchingly bleak scenarios in which speculative elements can only brighten so much of a powerfully dark story (“Rat Catcher’s Yellows,” “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”). There is no wrong path, and a linear read has the feel of reaching into a bag of mixed candy (sweet, sour, anise-y) with every turn of the page.

For me, the best surprise from that figurative candy bag is the stories that use SFF premises to really dig into relationship dynamics. For instance, “The Time Travel Club” might have supplanted “Six Months, Three Days” as my favorite of Anders’ time travel stories. Instead of using it as a metaphor for a romance that’s doomed from the start, she examines the even more fraught bonds among a recovering alcoholic and the club of make-believe time travelers she joins—people who cope with their lives by pretending to be displaced in time. Told in appropriately nonlinear order but following protagonist Lydia’s timeline of sobriety (and turning her one-year sobriety coin into a key device for the real time-and-space-travel) grounds this speculative thought experiment in the intensely personal.

That said, “Six Months, Three Days” still slaps.

Less effective are the stories that tie in to Anders’ novels or otherwise larger SFF universes: “Clover” (All the Birds in the Sky) and “If You Take My Meaning” (The City in the Middle of the Night), as well as the serialized novella “Rock Manning Goes for Broke” and “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” one of a number of space opera adventures featuring a pair of con artists who dream of opening a restaurant. It’s not that the reader can’t enjoy these as standalones, but the effort to contextualize them by cramming extra exposition into a smaller space is more obvious. On the flipside, however, readers who fell in love with those books will be thrilled at the opportunity for brief but chock-filled return visits.

If it’s not clear from these tie-in works and the aforementioned intros (like describing one story as “a little bit Vampire Diaries fanfic”), Anders is an incredibly self-aware writer. She treats Even Greater Mistakes as the opportunity to display both her guaranteed hits as well as stories that she struggled to get right. But the very best thing about Anders’ work is how she queers even her own worlds. Her self-professed favorite of the collection, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” gives a slice-of-life glimpse into the soap opera-esque romantic dynamics on a colony ship whose workers possess a half-dozen disparate genders and sexualities. This premise far surpasses any gender or sexuality binary, yet there are still rigid rules about which class can “man” another or allow itself to be “womaned.” When low-level Mab catches the eye of poetry-spouting pilot Dot, she appalls her fellow “dailys” by taking an unprecedentedly dominant role with Dot instead of doing as expected and turning around for the socially-sanctioned back-to-back sex of their particular pairing. This and other stories are proof of a celebrated SFF author consistently challenging herself.

Another lovely running theme through Anders’ short fiction, aside from these multifaceted queer societies, is that of relentlessly hopeful futures. San Francisco could be submerged underwater (“My Breath Is a Rudder,” “Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy”), California could have seceded from America (“The Bookstore at the End of America”), the world as we know it could be but a distant unpleasant memory (“As Good as New”)—but Anders never gives in to the hopelessness of the post-apocalypse. Instead, she guides us to the karaoke nights and flash mobs and play parties and book clubs that survive even in the direst of futures.

As Even Greater Mistakes proves, there will always be muralists painting seawalls, small business owners trying to handsell books across an international ideological divide, playwrights gaining unexpected inspiration—and writers like Anders, chronicling ages we haven’t yet lived but that, through her thoughts and words, we feel as if we have.

I could not find an empathetic link to these stories. Read a handful and dnf. I'm not big on short stories at any time.

I love reading Charlie Jane Ander's Books, but this one was quite challenging f0r me. The tales are intricate, thoughtful, and unique, and frequently quite enjoyable, as was this book. It is a series of unrelated short stories, and only one was difficult to follow, due to all the different gender descriptions used. But that just shows how much we have to learn to accept as far as pronouns go.

I usually don't go for short story collections because I always find it hard to adapt to each new story in a short amount of time. I really enjoyed reading Even Greater Mistakes because the writing was really immersive, and I could bond with each new character immediately. Each story could be its own novel, I really wanted to read more about each new world. but was disappointed when I saw that's the end of the story! Overall, great book, very imaginative!

I had high hopes for this story collection, and I think it might just be a case of this not being right for me as a reader. After a couple of stories early on that I was intrigued by, the collection lost steam. I found myself forcing myself to pick it up, which is never something I like.

Things I liked: some of the ideas here are super unique and fun. There are some unique characters as well. Loved the Queer rep in so many stories.

The writing itself was not my favorite. I think her more casual style was not for me. And there were a lot of random Smurf references?

Anyway, DNF’d at 40%