“Italo Calvino once said that he was ‘known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.’ Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he’ll come up with next, but somehow it’s always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art—and to fishing.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Introduction by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire): “If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you. Bet you can’t read just one.”

The third entry in our Peapod Classics reprint line is a twentieth-anniversary celebration edition of Howard Waldrop’s erudite, gonzo, wistful, funny, and beautifully written debut collection of short stories.

Waldrop has a capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, Mexican wrestlers, world wars, long-dead film stars, oddball television shows, pulp serials, radio plays, fairy tales, scientific expeditions, extinct species, and knock-knock jokes.

• What if the dodo wasn’t extinct after all?
• What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind?
• What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond?

Acclaimed cult author Waldrop’s stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo.

Never published in paperback, long out of print, and extremely collectible, Howard Who? was Waldrop’s seminal debut collection. If you haven’t read Waldrop before, you’re in for a treat.

Table of Contents

Introduction by George R. R. Martin.
The Ugly Chickens
Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen
Ike at the Mike
Dr. Hudson’s Secret Gorilla
. . . the World, as we Know’t
Green Brother
Mary Margaret Road-Grader
“Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me
Horror, We Got
Man-Mountain Gentian
God’s Hooks
Heirs of the Perisphere

Past appearances:

PaMay 26-28 — Conquest, Kansas City, Missouri

August 11-13 – Armadillocon, Austin, TX

November 2-5 – World Fantasy Convention, Austin, TX

Links

• Waldrop’s site.
• Three Ways of Looking at Howard Waldrop (and Then Some) By Jed Hartman, et alia.
• Other books: Dream Factories And Radio Pictures; Heart of Whitenesse; Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations.
• The Howard Waldrop Bibliography — a current listing of first publication for Howard Waldrop’s short fiction kept by Jonathan Strahan.
• Partial Bibliography for Howard Who?
• Waldrop’s occasional blog at The Infinite Matrix.

Praise for Howard Waldrop:

“Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy.”
– Library Journal

“Wise and funny.”
– Publishers Weekly

“An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy.”
– Booklist

“Erudite and gonzo.”
– Science Fiction Weekly

“Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre.”
– The Houston Post/Sun

” The man’s a national treasure!”
– Locus

“The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honkytonk angel.”
– Washington Post Book World

About the Author:

Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bonesand A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”

George R.R. Martin is the author of the bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. His fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award, Stoker, and Locus Awards. He worked on the TV shows The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Credits

• Cover art by Kevin Huizenga
• Download cover for print.
• Download author photo for print.
  Author photo credit: TK.

Publication history

First published as Howard Who? Twelve Outstanding Stories of Speculative Fiction by Doubleday in 1986.

Also by Howard Waldrop:

Novels

The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 with Jake Saunders (1974)
Them Bones (1984)

Collections

Howard Who? (1986, 2006)
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories (1987) 
Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories (1990)
Going Home Again (1997) Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations (2003)
Heart of Whitenesse (2005)

Chapbooks
A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989)
A Better World’s in Birth (2003)

Nonfiction
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (2003)

Forthcoming
I, John Mandeville
The Moon World
Moving Waters

The second novel in our Peapod Classics reprint line is Travel Light, the tale of a marvelous journey by the late Naomi Mitchison. We’ve been fans of both the author and this novel for years — although we never got to meet her. Back in June 2001 (long before this reprint line was ever imagined) Gavin J. Grant wrote a short piece for F&SF on Travel Light:

“A wonderful story that will transport you into Halla’s world where a basilisk might be met in the desert, heroes are taken to Valhalla by Valkyries, and a fortune might be made with a word to the right horse.”

This short and fabulous book transports the reader from a cave in the forest to a dragon’s lair to the wonders of early Constantinople. It’s dense and light, happy, deep, sad, amazing, and short enough that once it’s read all at once you’ll have time to read it again.

Read the new Introduction.

Read the first two chapters.

Reviews:

“A gem of a book.”
– Strange Horizons

“Every page is full of magic and wonder…. well worth seeking out.”
– Rambles

“Combines the best of Rowling and Pullman, being full of magic and fantasy with the hard edge of reality sharp at its edges.”
– The New Review/LauraHird.com

Advance Praise:

“Disarmingly familiar, like a memory only half-recalled. You will love this book.”
– Holly Black (Valiant, The Spiderwick Chronicles)

Praise for Naomi Mitchison:

“No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison.” – The Observer

“Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice.” –Publishers Weekly

“She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which … comes by grace.” – Times Literary Supplement

“One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century…. We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

“Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things — water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
– Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation

About the Author:

Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland but traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Publication history

First published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 1952 (cover scan on the right).

Reprinted: Virago Press, 1985; Penguin, 1987.

“A rollicking outre satire…. full of comic leaps and absurdist genius.”
—Bitch magazine

In this dangerous and sharp-eyed look at men, women, and the world we live in, everything is changing: women are turning into animals, and animals are turning into women. Pooch, a golden setter, is turning into a beautiful woman — although she still has some of her canine traits: she just can’t shuck that loyalty thing — and her former owner has turned into a snapping turtle. When the turtle tries to take a bite of her own baby, Pooch snatches the baby and runs. Meanwhile, there’s a dangerous wolverine on the loose, men are desperately trying to figure out what’s going on, and Pooch discovers what she really wants: to sing Carmen.

Carmen Dog is the funny feminist classic that inspired writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler to create the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. We are very pleased to publish it as the debut title in our new Peapod Press reprint line.

Chapter One:

“The beast changes to a woman or the woman changes to a beast,” the doctor says. “In her case it is certainly the latter since she has been, on the whole, quite passable as a human being up to the present moment. There may be hundreds of these creatures already among us. No way to tell for sure how many.”

Read on

Why this book?

A first novel that combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical panache of Animal Farm. . . . There has not been such a singy combination of imaginative energy, feminist outrage, and sheer literary muscle since Joanna Russ’s classic The Female Man.
–Entertainment Weekly

Carol is the most unappreciated great writer we’ve got. Carmen Dog ought to be a classic in the colleges by now . . . It’s so funny, and it’s so keen.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Changing Planes

Pure essence of Emshwiller. Only she could have taken the women’s movement, opera, and a wolverine and come up with such enchantment.
– Connie Willis, author of Passage

One of my favorite books! Funny, ironic, and wonderfully true in its consideration of women and other animals.
– Pat Murphy, author of There and Back Again

With Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller takes her place beside Mikhail Bulgakov and his great social satire, Heart of a Dog. She is one of the premiere fantasists working today, and her fiction is always more than the sum of the parts.
– Gregory Frost, author of Fitcher’s Brides

The novel asks, in the most humorous way imaginable, where we might be as a civilization without our pets and sacrificial caretakers. The humor helps disguise the horrific implications, but never is the bite taken from the dog.
– Strange Horizons

This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinoceros and The Handmaid’s Tale…. Imagination and absurdist humor mark [Carmen Dog] throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about male-female relationships.
– Booklist

Her fantastic premise allows Emshwiller canny and frequently hilarious insights into the damaging sex-role stereotypes both men and women perpetuate.
– Publishers Weekly

An inspired feminist fable…. A wise and funny book.
– The New York Times

– Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association
– Strange Horizons

About this book
Copyright 1990 by Carol Emshwiller. All rights reserved. First published in the USA by Mercury House 1990. This edition printed on 52.5# Enviro Edition recycled paper in Canada by Transcontinental Printing. Text set in Centaur MT. Titles set in Friz Quadrata.

Cover art by Kevin Huizenga.

About the author
Carol Emshwiller’s stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, Crank!, Confrontation,and many other anthologies and magazines.

Carol is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has been awarded an NEA grant, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant, the ACCENT/ASCENT fiction prize, and the World Fantasy, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Gallun, and Icon awards.

Recently, her stories have appeared in Trampoline, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Leviathan 3, and Polyphony.

Carol Emshwiller is the author of four previous collections of short fiction: The Start of the End of it All (Winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award), Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories,Verging on the Pertinent, and Joy in Our Cause, and five novels The Mount, Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill, and Mr. Boots(forthcoming).

She lives in New York City in the winter where she teaches at New York University School of Continuing Education. She spends the summers in a shack in the Sierras in California.