For a long time, I’ve been meaning to read Karen Russell’s short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. But somehow, every time I reached for it, a novel of some sort got in my way.

I love short fiction, but it seems I have to be in a certain mood to read a great many fantasy stories all at once. This week I was finally in that mood. I gobbled up Russell’s surreal and tragicomic stories and then turned my attention to another anthology: Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.

The Steampunk! collection had stories by Kelly Link, Holly Black, and Dylan Horrocks. Definitely, it was good. (Especially Link’s story “The Summer People”!) But I’ve been reading fantasy literature for a long time, and many of the stories in Steampunk! were working with genre conventions I knew fairly well. As a result, I often felt that I was on familiar ground.

Here’s the thing about genre conventions: they exist so that you’ll think you know what you’re going to get. Genre conventions are comforting and (sometimes overly) familiar. They help you make sense of where you’re going, what kind of a vehicle you’re in. Along the way, you’ll certainly be delighted if you get a surprise of some sort, but if you encounter too great a surprise–too strong a deviation from convention–then you’re no longer reading in the genre you thought you were. Plus, you’re working hard. Which can be either liberating or disappointing, depending upon the kind of reader you are.

Lately, I’ve been the kind of reader who wants something I haven’t seen before.

Reading Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves , I found myself working hard and loving it. (Like many of the narratives in her anthology, the title story was about children being stripped of their joyous innocence. It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was.) Russell’s stories are surreal and funny and moving and hard-to-define, and I’ll definitely want to read them again.