Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews
Tue 31 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Authors | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich
– Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award
– A Locus Best Book of 2001
– Bram Stoker Preliminary Ballot 2001
Book Magazine
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line. Almost every one of his stories has a zinger at the end, but not the kind of zinger that chocks the reader or causes annoyance. Often it’s a perfect line of dialogue that opens up the whole story…. Vukcevich is ingenious with the short-story form. Although the stories read as playful vignettes, Vukcevich covertly works in ideas of self, identity, destiny, and obsession. And occasionally, the dangers of outer space.”
Hartford Courant
“. . . the 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme.Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner’s Star.“
Locus
“Vukcevich is a master of radical recombinations, drawing from (amongst others) the Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, O. Henry, Dali, Asimov, pulpish space opera, and the latest in nanotech to produce works that are all his own. Sometimes in as little as four or five pages, he deftly juggles so many ideas, emotions, and perspectives, it produces a curiously refreshing sense of vertigo — a high with no hangover to follow…. It would be…a great mistake to ignore the extraordinary talent of Ray Vukcevich.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“…Ray Vukcevich is a very slick writer, an authentic sprinter in an era of milers and all-out stayers…. Vukcevich can do punchlines, but he does not rely on them. Indeed, his extraordinarily light touch when it comes to narrative closure is his most distinctive feature. Anyone who considers bizarre surrealism and casual absurdity — the main stocks-in-trade of the fantastic ultrashort story writer — easy clay to mold into narrative form has not given serious consideration to the matter of finishing.”
Asimov’s
“These stories niftily propel their characters down the blurred line between fantasy and psychosis, with effects spanning the gamut from melancholy to goofy, from plaintive to outraged…. This is Vukcevich’s gloriously mad world, and we are lucky to share it.”
Publishers Weekly
The same antic spirit that imbued Vukcevich’s mystery novel The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces moves playfully through this first collection of fantastic fiction, whose 33 helium-filled stories achieve just the right absurdist life to escape the gravity of their themes. “By the Time We Get to Uranus” offers a peculiarly affecting take on terminal illness: the afflicted grow buoyant spacesuits that force them to leave loved ones behind. The mysteries of parenthood manifest amusingly in “Poop,” about a couple who discover that their newborn’s diaper fills variously with birds, mice, and symphonic music. Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers, competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness with which the author’s characters accept the incongruity of their situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human condition. In the poignant title tale, for example, a man does not find it at all strange that a lover from decades past has summoned him to a simulated moon landscape at a theme park, reflecting that the meaning of life really is “nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe.” Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction.
Forecast: With blurbs from Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Jeffrey Ford, this collection is a quality item that should benefit from good word of mouth.
Booklist
A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid of amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich’s outlandish virtuosity. Sf fans with long memories will note Vukcevich’s deadpan delivery and jokey-creepy aura, recall the wonder-workings of Fredric Brown (see From These Ashes [BKL Ap 15 01] and smile.
Also:
Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Authors, Meet Me in the Moon Room, Ray Vukcevich, Reviews | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Gavin
Book Magazine
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist”
Review of Contemporary Fiction “Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line. Almost every one of his stories has a zinger at the end, but not the kind of zinger that chocks the reader or causes annoyance. Often it’s a perfect line of dialogue that opens up the whole story…. Vukcevich is ingenious with the short-story form. Although the stories read as playful vignettes, Vukcevich covertly works in ideas of self, identity, destiny, and obsession. And occasionally, the dangers of outer space.”
Hartford Courant
“. . . the 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme. Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner’s Star.“
Locus
“Vukcevich is a master of radical recombinations, drawing from (amongst others) the Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, O. Henry, Dali, Asimov, pulpish space opera, and the latest in nanotech to produce works that are all his own. Sometimes in as little as four or five pages, he deftly juggles so many ideas, emotions, and perspectives, it produces a curiously refreshing sense of vertigo — a high with no hangover to follow…. It would be…a great mistake to ignore the extraordinary talent of Ray Vukcevich.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“…Ray Vukcevich is a very slick writer, an authentic sprinter in an era of milers and all-out stayers…. Vukcevich can do punchlines, but he does not rely on them. Indeed, his extraordinarily light touch when it comes to narrative closure is his most distinctive feature. Anyone who considers bizarre surrealism and casual absurdity — the main stocks-in-trade of the fantastic ultrashort story writer — easy clay to mold into narrative form has not given serious consideration to the matter of finishing.”
Asimov’s
“These stories niftily propel their characters down the blurred line between fantasy and psychosis, with effects spanning the gamut from melancholy to goofy, from plaintive to outraged…. This is Vukcevich’s gloriously mad world, and we are lucky to share it.”
Publishers Weekly
The same antic spirit that imbued Vukcevich’s mystery novel The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces moves playfully through this first collection of fantastic fiction, whose 33 helium-filled stories achieve just the right absurdist life to escape the gravity of their themes. “By the Time We Get to Uranus” offers a peculiarly affecting take on terminal illness: the afflicted grow buoyant spacesuits that force them to leave loved ones behind. The mysteries of parenthood manifest amusingly in “Poop,” about a couple who discover that their newborn’s diaper fills variously with birds, mice, and symphonic music. Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers, competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness with which the author’s characters accept the incongruity of their situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human condition. In the poignant title tale, for example, a man does not find it at all strange that a lover from decades past has summoned him to a simulated moon landscape at a theme park, reflecting that the meaning of life really is “nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe.” Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction. Forecast: With blurbs from Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Jeffrey Ford, this collection is a quality item that should benefit from good word of mouth.
Booklist
A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid of amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich’s outlandish virtuosity. Sf fans with long memories will note Vukcevich’s deadpan delivery and jokey-creepy aura, recall the wonder-workings of Fredric Brown (see From These Ashes [BKL Ap 15 01] and smile.
Also:
Whisper
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories, Ray Vukcevich | 17 Comments| Posted by: intern
And then she fired her parting shot. “And not only that,” she said, as if “that” hadn’t been quite enough, “you snore horribly!”
“I do not,” I said. “I definitely do not snore.” I was talking to her back. “You’re making it up!” I was talking to the door. “Someone else would have mentioned it!” I was talking to myself.
Mistakes were made, relationships fell apart, and hurtful things were said. Life was like that.
Mom’s Little Friends
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | 1 Comment| Posted by: intern
Because he wouldn’t understand, we left Mom’s German shepherd Toby leashed to the big black roll bar in the back of Ada’s pickup truck, and because Mom’s hands were tied behind her back and because her ankles were lashed together, we had some trouble wrestling her out of the cab and onto the bridge.
My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.
No Comet
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Convinced that my slant on Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was our last hope, I bullied Jane, who didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and Sacha into cooperating with a final desperate attempt to save the world.
“This is stupid, Tim,” Jane said, her voice softened a little by the brown paper bag over her head.
“La la, la la, la la,” Sacha sang. She banged the heels of her shoes against the legs of her chair in time to her tune. Wearing a bag over her head was still fun, I thought, but our daughter was seven and had fidgeting down to a fine art. How long would she stick with me?
Stranger Things Happen
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Books | 2 Comments| Posted by: Small Beer Press
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice’s 25 Favorite Books of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.
Cover painting by Shelley Jackson.
Reviews
“My favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
Fifth Printing Note: We are sorry to say some copies of this printing have page 118 reprinted where page 188 should be. There are a couple of remedies. You can download the pdf of page 188 here or you can email us.We are a tiny press and we apologize for our mistake. We hope the replacement page (or the book, below) will satisfy readers. However, if you’d rather, we will replace your book. Please email us if this is the case. How to identify if your copy is a 5th printing: On the copyright page it states “First Edition 5 6 7 8 9 0″Thank you.
July 1, 2005
Kelly Link’s debut collection Stranger Things Happen is now available for as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner. The book is provided below in these formats: Text file, HTML, rtf, and lo-res PDF. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We’ll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below. Please abide by these few rules for file-conversions:
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Send us a link to the reader for your conversion so that we can include it on the downloads page.
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No DRM. If your format of choice has a means of restricting copying, use or playback, please do not use it.
- If the book has been converted to your format of choice but the conversion doesn’t suit you, go ahead and reconvert it for your own use and distribution. We will host the first and only the first version as the few formats we have provided are pretty much all we know anything about. And we don’t know that much about those.
- Enjoy!
Downloads: To get your Free Download of Stranger Things Happen click on the links below:
Plain text file, 462k
HTML file, 483k
RTF file, 790k
Printable PDF file, 2.5MB
– Click to open in browser. Right click (or Control+click) to “Save link” to save the pdf file to your computer.
Bonus conversions!
MobiPocket — Conversion from the html version for MobiPocket reader with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Daniel Rodriguez)
EReader — Conversion for Palm with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Jeff DeLeo)
HTML file, 483k — Converted so that the table of contents is linked as is license info and about the author info. It is also html optimized for reading on a pocket pc. (Thanks Matt Katz!)
iSilo — Converted for the e-book reader iSilo which is available for various mobile platforms. (Thanks: Colin Dunstan!)
Gnutella — The PDF is now on the Gnutella and Gnutella2 peer-to-peer networks. (Thanks: Jules!)
Plucker — Conversion of the HTML file on this site. Plucker is a reader for mobile devices running the Palm operating system. 198k. (Thanks: Mark Hainline!)
Plucker — Second version that includes links for navigating from the table of contents to each story. 198k. (Thanks: Howard Bales!)
BitTorrent — PDF via BitTorrent
PalmDoc — For most ebook readers. 257k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)
TomeRaider — Ebook format for PDA’s: 241k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)
Audio
“Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water” read by Alex Wilson (and released under CC, of course).
– Ogg Vorbis (.ogg); Q2; 14MB
“The Specialist’s Hat” read by Jason Lundberg (40 minute MP3).
1. Why?
Today, July 1, 2005, we are publishing Kelly Link’s new collection, Magic for Beginners. To celebrate we are releasing Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen, as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). (We hope to release Magic for Beginners later this year once all the individual story rights have reverted to the author.)
When we published our first two books, Stranger Things Happen and Meet Me in the Moon Room, we were incredibly lucky and received an incredible (repeated word on purpose: it really was — and still is — amazing) amount of support, advice, help and enthusiasm from readers, publishers, writers, and others across North America and beyond.
So this is one way to say thanks, everyone.
2. Creative What?
We’re interested in spreading the word about Creative Commons. Copyright is a good thing and artists deserve to be paid whatever society is willing to pay for their work. But, do artists need to retain the rights to their work for 70 years after their death? Uh, no.
3. Can’t I buy the book?
Will giving Stranger Things Happen away kill sales? We hope not. The book is available in hundreds of libraries, on print.google.com and Amazon.com’s Search Inside program, in a few used bookshops and on BookCrossing. But there are 6 billion readers out there! This is just a way we can say thanks and give something back (or pass it on) to everyone who helped us.
So, yes, Stranger Things Happen is in its 4th printing and we certainly encourage readers to buy a copy — we’re a tiny indie press: sales are good!
4. Questions
Got a question? Email us and hopefully we’ll post an answer. We are a tiny press, though, so please don’t get jumpy if we don’t answer immediately. We’re busy freelancing or working on our next books.
More thanks:
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Much of the impetus, information and inspiration for using the Creative Commons license came from author, innovator, and groundbreaker Cory Doctorow. (Thanks, Cory!)
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Thanks also to our webhost Utopian.Net (run by artists for artists) for help with this project (and being great hosts!).
Donate?
A number of readers pointed us toward Jim Kelly’s great page of Free Audiobooks and suggested we add a donation button on this page.
Please note: this is not something you have to do (especially if you own the book!). The electronic editions above of Stranger Things Happen are Free — and hopefully just the first of many Creative Commons-Licensed Free Downloads we’ll release (check for updates).
You can buy the book at the following spots: Paypal | Mail order | Your local bookshop | Powells. If you donate below, we’ll send you a thank you email but nothing else (well, unless you go wild!). We’re an indie press, hoping to survive, bent on publishing the best books we can find and in no way a 501(c)3 or whatever non profit. We are ‘for profit’ even if that’s more of a conceptual aim than an actuality as yet.
So thanks for reading. It’s a noisy world and we appreciate the time you took getting here. Enjoy the book, spread it far and wide, come back sometime, and if you really want to, go ahead and donate.
Meet Me in the Moon Room
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Books | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling — frequently managing to be both — these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space.
Read some stories: “Whisper,” ” No Comet,” “Mom’s Little Friends”
Vukcevich’s loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin.
Here’s an interview with Ray Vukcevich.
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist.”
—Book Magazine
“Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line.”
—The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Reviews from Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Locus, SF Chronicle, Tangentonline, F&SF, and more.
- Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
- Locus Recommended Reading 2001.
- Meet Me in the Moon Room and “Whisper“ were on the Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot.
- The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror XV Honorable Mentions: “Pretending,” “Beatniks with Banjos,” “In theRefrigerator,” & “Whisper.”
- “Pretending” was reprinted in The Best of the Rest 3.
- “Meet Me in the Moon Room” was reprinted in the Oregon Quarterly.
- “Miles and Miles of Broccoli,” an essay by Ray posted on the BookSense.com website.
- Read about Ray in the The Hartford Courant and the Register-Guard.
Who is Ray Vukcevich?
Here’s his website (check out that Ziesing link. Mr. Z. puts out a great catalog). Mr. Vukcevich lives in Oregon, has a daytime job at the University of Oregon, and published his novel, The Man With Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces. His short stories are something not to be missed and have recently appeared on Scifiction, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, and many more.
Reader Reviews
“I’ve been reading the Ray Vukcevich stories to people over the phone, so I thought I should send out a couple of the books and save my voice.”
– C.C.F., Columbus, OHRay Vukcevich should be as revered as Donald Barthelme or Salvador Dali in the pantheon of modern surrealists. Unjustly deprived of such honors, he should at least be allowed a few weeks in a time-share vacation condo with Don Webb, Rick DeMarinis, Mark Leyner and James Blaylock, literary peers whose absurdist take on existence Vukcevich shares. Did I mention that the condo would occupy an abandoned ICBM silo, as in Ray’s creepily twisted ghost story, “Pretending”? Or perhaps the luxury beach house would perch on a few square inches of the scalp of the barbershop patron who boasts a monkey-filled jungle in his hair, in “The Barber’s Theme”. The writers’ relaxathon could also take place in the outer reaches of our Solar System, once the lucky vacationers grow their organic spacesuits, as average folks do in “By the Time We Get to Uranus.” Or as a last choice, the writers might congregate in the mysterious highway median of “Fancy Pants”, where metamorphoses that would baffle Ovid occur.
Wherever the greats hold their Beach Blanket Oulipo, Vukcevich will doubtlessly be the life of the party. Alternately melancholy and boisterous, plaintive and assertive, sensitive and outrageous, serious and goofy, Vukcevich’s stories portray a universe not only stranger than the average person imagines, but stranger than he or she can imagine! It’s an uncommon, even scary intellect and vision and talent that can make us believe in wisdom out of a baby’s butt (”Poop”) or nose roaches (”Home Remedy”) or shopping bags over the global head as protection from planet-smasher comets (”No Comet”). And believe we do, thanks to Vukcevich’s honed, transparent, yet unmistakeable prose stylings. Plunk down a blindfolded critic in the middle of a Vukcevich landscape, and within two sentences the savant will know just what capricious deity is in charge. The critic will also be reduced to a gibbering, adoring, spastic wreck, but them’s the breaks.
If you don’t instantly agree to meet Vukcevich in his unique Moon Room club, solely on his terms–well, you’re the kind of timid soul who would turn down a blind date with Destiny even if the demiurge came dressed in the form of Little Kim or D’Angelo.
– Paul Di FilippoWhat other writer could make you start laughing halfway down the first page of a story about a man putting on a sweater? Thurber maybe, a long time ago. Buy this book.
– Damon Knight, author of Humpty Dumpty, An OvalThese stories cannot be compared to anyone else’s. There is no one in the same class as Ray Vukcevich. The stories are uniquely, splendidly, brilliantly original, a surprise in each and every one, and brimming with wit and laugh-out-loud humor. A stunning collection.
– Kate Wilhelm, author of Desperate MeasuresIn Ray Vukcevich’s ingenious stories the absurd and the profound are seamlessly joined through fine writing. Meet Me in the Moon Room is a first-rate collection.
– Jeffrey Ford, author of The BeyondI once heard Ray Vukcevich say about life, humanity, and writing, “All we have is each other.” In the spaces between us lie some very strange territories, and this is the ground Ray explores in his stories. There is no other planet like planet Ray; once you visit, you’ll want to go back as often as you can. In Meet Me in the Moon Room, you get an explosion of guided tours. Grab the bowl with the barking goldfish in it, wind the cat, curl up in a comfortable chair in an abandoned missile silo, and plunge into the wild mind of Ray Vukcevich. No one else can take you on this trip.
– Nina Kiriki Hoffman, author of Past the Size of DreamingRay Vukcevich is a marvelous writer. His perspective is skewed, giving us a whole new take on the world. His use of language is unique. And, perhaps most delightful of all, is that Vukcevich stories are completely unpredictable. I envy the person who will be reading Ray Vukcevich for the very first time.
– Kristine Kathryn Rusch, editor of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology
Leslie What’s report from the Meet Me in the Moon Room launch party.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Bibliography:
First printing: July 2001
Second printing: October 2001 — changes to copyright, contents, and pages 72, 204, 209, 249.
Cover painting by Rafal Olbinski.
Ray Vukcevich is represented by:
Matt Bialer
Trident Media Group, LLC
Carnegie Hall Tower
152 West 57th Street 16th Floor
New York, NY 10019
Tel: 212-262-4810
Fax: 212-262-4849
mbialer@tridentmediagroup.com
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