Lite Reads Selection: ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ by Nalo Hopkinson

The Feminist Bibliothecary’s Lite Reads: The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson, #BlackHistoryMonth

Welcome to The Feminist Bibliothecary’s Lite Reads, where we read a different short story every week, and then discuss it here and on social media. This is our 106th selection, and our first selection for Black History Month 2021. This week’s Lite Reads selection is The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson.

The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson is a dark fantasy short story originally published in 2000 in the anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction edited by Nalo Hopkinson. The story was also later featured in the Lightspeed Magazine special issue Women Destroy Fantasy in 2014. The Glass Bottle Trick tells the story of Beatrice, a young woman eager to tell her husband she is pregnant without knowing the secrets that put her in great danger. Content Warning: pregnancy, sexism, colourism, anti-Blackness, violence against women.

Nalo Hopkinson (1960-) is a Jamaican-born Canadian author and editor known for her work in science-fiction and fantasy. As a bisexual Black woman with ADHD, fibromyalgia, and non-verbal learning disorder, she writes diverse novels and short stories of speculative fiction “full of the unreal, the futuristic, the unlikely, the impossible” (quote taken from her website). Her work has won many awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (she was the first author to win this award twice), and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, as well as earning nominations and shortlisting for a number of other awards. She has featured in a number of anthologies, as well as serving as editor for some of them. Hopkinson’s short story collections include works like Skin Folk (2001) and Falling in Love with Hominids (2015), and her novels include Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), and Sister Mine (2013).

You can read The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson in full for free on the Fantasy Magazine website. There is also a “listen” button at the top of the page which has a complete audio version of the story.

Please feel free to leave a comment here, or join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk and the #litereads hashtag. You can find our full review on Saturday, February 6.