Welcome friend! Letters from an Imaginary Country is the new short story collection by Theodora Goss. It offers a gorgeous blend of literary retellings, speculative twists, imagined selves, and personal myth-making. These stories travel across centuries and genres with elegance and curiosity.
Like me, if you enjoy layered storytelling, you will love this collection. Goss weaves memoir, folklore, and literary homage into something both intimate and wildly imaginative. These speculative stories make me think, feel, and reimagine the classics, while also pondering my life. Read on for my thoughts!
Theodora Goss | Goodreads
Roam through the captivating stories of World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award winner Theodora Goss (the Athena Club trilogy). This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Deeply influenced by the author’s Hungarian childhood during the regime of the Soviet Union, each of these stories engages with storytelling and identity, including her own.
The infamous girl monsters of nineteenth-century fiction gather in London and form their own club. In the imaginary country of Thüle. Characters from folklore band together to fight a dictator. An intrepid girl reporter finds the hidden land of Oz—and joins its invasion of our world. The author writes the autobiography of her alternative life and a science fiction love letter to Budapest. The White Witch conquers England with snow and silence.
Letters from an Imaginary Country – Book Review
Let’s start at the beginning. Do you read introductions to books? Before the stories even begin, author Jo Walton sets the tone with an introduction full of admiration and insight. Her description of the three kinds of readers who approach an intro made me laugh. As this was the first time I was reading Goss, Jo instructed me to skip the rest of her intro and jump right into the stories. So I did. Her praise for Goss made me even more excited to begin.
With a short story collection, there is very little we know about each story in advance. The title may allude to something but overall, the plot and characters are a mystery. There is no 150-200 word blurb to describe what is coming. Since stories are typically not related, I always approach such collections with flexibility, allowing myself to read the ones that grab me and skip the ones that don’t. I read every single one in Letters from an Imaginary Country.
The opening story gathers the daughters of famous scientists and monsters—Miss Justine Frankenstein, Miss Catherine Moreau, Miss Beatrice Rappaccini, Miss Mary Jekyll, Miss Diana Hyde, and Mrs. Arthur Meyrinck (née Helen Raymond). Their club is full of intrigue and intellect, and I fell in love with the group right away. If I could spend a day with any of them, I still don’t know who I’d choose. Each brings her own edges, her own history, her own inherited darkness. The story questions who is a monster and how monsters can find acceptance in their peer group.
Goss draws heavily from her own life and the memoir style/speculative essays/stories are a format I had never come across before. One of the standouts for me was the story about Dora and Dorá—two versions of the author living different lives on either side of a migration. Goss imagines the self who stayed in Hungary and the self who moved to America, and then a third self who watches over them both. Having moved countries myself, this story hit me hard. It nudged me to imagine the Kriti who might have stayed in India. I related to Dora’s sentiments of the places that would feel both familiar and foreign, the way “home” becomes an idea rather than a location. It’s my favourite piece in the collection. Some of my favourite moments arrive when she folds her own experiences into the stories. Readers who know Goss personally might recognize more than an average reader would—certain losses, certain cities, certain memories. Her speculative essay about Budapest is especially stunning, as she blends memoir, myth, and longing into a single shimmering piece, having a conversation with the city herself and acknowledging how it changes with each visit.
Another story is an intricate murder mystery told through book excerpts, letters, and entries from the protagonist’s great-great-grandmother’s diary. It made me think about how little most of us know about our own family history beyond a generation or two—and how easily entire branches of family history disappear. I have heard certain things about my paternal great-grandmother. There is the possibility that my daughter might even meet her great-grandmother.
The ordering of the stories is fascinating—Goss moves from literary reimaginings to personal speculative essays, to metafiction, to invented countries, to fantasy and myth. I visited the world of L. Frank Baum, Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, King Arthur, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker and many other writers. I have never read anything like this that spans centuries, genres, and realities, and places fantasy in a science fiction setting. I just had to take notes after every story.
I think the collection is called Letters from an Imaginary Country because while all stories are imaginary, there are a few where the characters create fictional countries. In one story, some grad students create a country and are invited to visit it. In another three teenage friends invent a country, creating Wikipedia pages and journal articles to make it look authentic. The boundary between imagination and reality fractures in chilling ways in both these stories. Created worlds become nightmares when the invented begins to influence the real. Both explore how powerful imagination can be, and how belief, politics, and magic intersect. I am still thinking about them.
The fact that Goss can do so much in the short story form really makes me curious about her storytelling in a longer format. I want to read a novel! I am thrilled to see that there are indeed books I can read. The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, for example, is the first in The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series about Jekyll and Hyde’s daughters, the very same women I met in the first short story.
Goss has a talent for letting a world bloom in just a few pages—sometimes magical, sometimes unsettling, sometimes warm, always thoughtful. I haven’t mentioned every single story here. I would love for you to discover this book yourself!
Reading Letters from an Imaginary Country felt like stepping into a cabinet of curiosities—full of literary lineage, speculative wonder, doppelgängers, invented worlds, and deeply personal reflections. By the time I finished, I wasn’t ready to leave. This collection is rich, layered, and endlessly imaginative—perfect for readers who love intertextuality, speculative riffs on classics, and stories that tow the line between personal and fantastical. I had to stop myself from writing a question for each story for my interview with Goss. Return tomorrow to see the writer behind these amazing literary works.
Many thanks to Kasey at Tachyon Publications for the review copy and interview opportunity!
Add this book to Goodreads or locate it at your local library, Libby, or bookstore.
Also check out: Within: Short Stories for the Evolving Multicultural Woman
Thank you for reading my thoughts. 🙂
Be First to Comment