Every now and again, a short fiction author hits me with an opening line so striking I can’t stop thinking about it. Hannah Yang gave me one of those with “Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden.”

“Inheritance” by Hannah Yang is a beautifully constructed story about the relationship between a mother and daughter, told with snippets of memory. It had echoes of “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang.

“Eating Bitterness,” in which a mother swallows her family’s negative feelings with her second mouth, is Hannah Yang’s first foray into horror writing, and it’s a knockout debut. Beautifully innovative and horrifically poignant, this is one you just have to read.