I just finished reading Paul Park's novella "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance", from the Jan/Feb issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. What a mind-blowing read. It's a haunting piece of meta-fiction that requires close reading to piece together the clues, but when the story comes full circle -- damn!

Part of the story's power for me is that it resonates with similar family legends told to me by my grandmother (stories of foreshadowing ghosts, angelic miracles, even the tale that the first Reynaga arrived with Columbus and subsequently jumped ship). Another reason is that Paul Park was working on this story for the Clarion West write-a-thon when he taught our class. We left our mark on the story by donating money to the workshop for a tuckerization -- to include the Albanian Kanun tradition of women taking the gender of men in society. Yes, it's our fault that Paul Park's wife has a handlebar mustache. 

All these things aside, "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" resonates because it is a damn good story. The non-traditional style may require your attention, but it is a story well worth paying attention to.