After a powerful sorceress is murdered, she’s summoned over the centuries to witness devastating changes to the land where she was born. A woman who lives by scavenging corpses in the Japanese suicide forest is haunted by her dead lover. A man searches for the memory that will overwrite his childhood abuse. Helios is left at the altar. The world is made quiet by a series of apocalypses.

How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future collects the body of Swirsky’s short fiction to date for the first time. From the emotion and politics of “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” to the family saga of “Eros, Philia, Agape,” these stories envision pasts, presents, and futures that never existed, offering examinations of humanity.