Vanessa Fogg

New pinned post: my debut collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists, is now officially out from @IntFlightPress Available at Amazon, Indiebound, Barnes and Noble online, and direct from publisher. Link to more info in comment

@YizzyYu Oh, thank you so much, Izzy! This means so much, coming from you 💕💕

@FoggWriter Oh my God! Way deep into the heart, Vanessa and the mind. It has such beautifully important things to say about the cycle of things, and loss and beauty and art. The imagery is just wow. The lines too (mmm!.."it's always winter on the moon"). Love your work!

My latest story is now out in Lightspeed Magazine! It's inspired by Chinese myths of immortality plus a love for tea, and it's one of my favorite things that I've written yet. lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/lotus-…

tea forgives overthinking each sip resets

It's so easy to stay tucked up inside on winter days, when it's cold and damp and dark, but I promise you that there are rich colours, soft light and the delicate tracery of bare trees all waiting for you out there. Wrap up warm, and you always return home with your heart a little lighter than when you set out. 📍 Peak District, England

Thanks to @strangehorizons for this lovely review of THE HOUSE OF ILLUSIONISTS by Vanessa Fogg! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-…

In the Midwest we play a game called “am I still on the road”

Who would expect such an emotional and tender paragraph in a book about physics?

The translator is Prof. Eileen Chengyin Chow (@chowleen), whose name was removed from the original post.

Remember this pensive 12th century Chinese general's poem the next time someone shits on small talk

You have no idea how much I resent AI for completely ruining a perfectly good sentence structure: "It's not just x – it's y." You cannot write that anymore. Everyone will assume it's AI or get derailed wondering if it's AI. We've been robbed of an entire sentence form.

you pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world

Of late I’ve developed the habit of pretending I’m a medieval peasant attempting to survive winter & it’s made my life a million times more joyful. I take walks in the hills & woods, fall asleep to audiobooks, I’m grateful not to die of plague. We were made for a simpler life.

This little poem always wrecks me.

I was reading Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground with a group of 9th graders. One student announced, "There is no way someone could actually feel like this on the inside." A classmate replied: "I feel like this every day." The first student was stunned. His understanding of reality shifted in that moment. Literature had done what it's supposed to do: reveal that other people live entirely within different internal worlds.

05. Dream of the Red Chamber / Story of the Stone (Book 01), by Cao Xeuqin There’s a lovely coming-of-age story here about a group of children growing up in Qing-era China, but the most striking thing about the book is its setting: rain-soaked gardens, gilded dragons, cedar- & sandalwood, tea and incense. The atmosphere it conjures is unsurpassed.

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.” -Luc van Donkersgoed

Not wrong though💀👀🤣

Terrific article on AI writing, its telltale signatures, the origins of its distinctiveness vs. human writing, and how humans are evolving our own writing in response. N.B.: I use a lot of em dashes in my casual writing, but am not an AI—I think. nytimes.com/2025/12/03/mag…

everything that a mainstream ideology lies about / refuses to see / keeps in its shadow is a weapon that it hands to any fringe ideology that is willing to step up and claim it, and the internet makes this process faster and more visible than perhaps it has ever been

At Interstellar Flight Mag, Julie Reeser interviews Vanessa Fogg, author of THE HOUSE OF ILLUSIONISTS, a stellar new short story collection from IFP! magazine.interstellarflightpress.com/the-connecting…