Naomi Kritzer lives in St. Paul and writes really engaging speculative fiction, as well as being a really engaging political blogger. I found about about the first part by reading her work as the second part before last fall's election, and then I requested Cat Pictures, Please from the library. This collection of stories is always inventive, but by turns sad, exhilarating, and suspenseful.
The highlights, for me, were the titular story, in which a search engine has achieved singularity, and it's happy to use its powers for good, so long as you keep feeding it the cat pictures it desires. Kritzer does an excellent job of weaving familiar folk tales into unique stories. For example, "Comrade Grandmother" incorporated Baba Yaga into the siege of St. Petersburg, and "The Golem" sees, well, a golem attempt to save a young pair of women from the Holocaust.
Kritzer is fantastic, and I'm hoping to read more of her stuff. These stories veer from straight sci-fi to magical realism, and I enjoyed them all.
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