Greer Gilman

by Greer Gilman

Bio

Greer Gilman’s novel, Moonwise, is decidedly thorny. It won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. “A Crowd of Bone” is one of three linked stories, variations on a winter myth. The first, “Jack Daw’s Pack,” was a Nebula finalist for 2001, and the subject of a Foundation interview by Michael Swanwick. A sometime forensic librarian, Gilman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.

Reviews

Cloud & Ashes

“A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origins. Seasons, weather, lust, pain, sacrifice … the stuff of old ballads becomes intensely real, with the natural contradictions of a cold wind that both chafes and dances…. And the payoff is immense. I finished Cloud & Ashes almost tempted to write a thesis that compares it favorably to what James Joyce did in Ulysses and tried in Finnegan’s Wake, yet feeling like I’d lived through it all.”
—Locus

“Moving, engaging, mysterious, glorious…In her flying pastiche of words and images Gilman does in the fantasy vernacular what Joyce aimed for.”
—Tangent

A Crowd of Bone

“Gilman’s ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“Greer Gilman’s diamond of a novella . . . might reward a lifetime of re-reading. A question like ‘What is it about?’ is as useful applied to Gilman’s novella as asked of a snow leopard. Both simply are.”
—Locus

Moonwise

“Greer Gilman is a writer like no one else. Many try to employ the matter of myth and folktale, but their tongues are inadaquate—Gilman can employ words as the bards of Ireland did, to make realities . . . Moonwise doesn’t resemble a work of the past age—it is the past age come back new, in its clothes and its language and its dark riddling heart. Moonwise simply has no peers.”
—John Crowley

Interview

Trampoline: an interview

Two more interviews: -1-, -2-

KL: Were there any particular writers or stories that influenced the writing of the story that will be appearing in Trampoline? If so, how exactly did they influence the writing of your story?

GG: Folk songs and ballads, mostly, ravelled out and rebraided. Lots of Anon. Some formal poetry: Hopkins and the Gawain poet, for the hedge-entangled language; Andrew Marvell, for the mowers. And for the soliloquies, a slew of playwrights. It’s a winter’s tale, a late romance. I wrote it for the ear, as much as for the imagination. There are two sorts of voices here, in counterpoint: Cloudish vernacular and a high Jacobean iambic, endlessly enjambed.

I owe the vision of the Scarecrow/Hanged Man/Child Sacrifice to the late miraculous Lal Waterson. Her song, “The Scarecrow,” haunts me, and it has for years.

Oh, and Thea’s magic is inspired by the art of Andy Goldsworthy.

KL: Is your Trampoline story generally representative of the sort of story you usually write? To elaborate: is this story a departure in style or subject matter (or any other sort of departure, for that matter) for you? If so, what was different or new for you in the writing of this story? Do you think it is a new direction for your writing, or simply an experiment?

GG: I keep moving inward. It gets bigger.

KL: What’s your favorite cocktail?

GG: Chocolate.

KL: Which of the seven deadly sins is your favorite these days?

GG: Don’t know whose friends they are, but Sloth and Gluttony keep hanging around my kitchen playing cards.

KL: What’s your favorite rule of thumb?

GG: When you come back for it, it won’t be there.

KL: Do you have any pets? How many? And if so, how do they affect your writing (if at all)?

GG:No. None. Not at all.

KL: What is the writer’s role in inhabiting the commercial spaces of publishing?

GG:Waiting anxiously in hallways.

KL: Best trampoline story you know (or, in lieu of story, rules for best trampoline game you’ve played).

GG: The one with the castellated blancmange and the roller skates has seldom been attempted.

KL: Where do you hope to haunt when you’re gone (or, I guess, when you come back)?

GG: A kitchen table with old friends. A library. Woods in autumn. An English wood in spring. A winter hillside on a starry night. My desk when I’m writing well. The seacoast of Bohemia.

KL: What are your favorite kids’ books? What was your favorite when you were a kid (say, 10)?

GG: Say five, six, seven.

I always loved Mary Poppins and Irene’s Great-Great-Grandmother (in The Princess and the Goblin). They were my first intimations of godhead. Mary Poppins is Artemis. (“Is this a Nursery or a Bear Garden?”) Prickly, aloof, but a great protectress if she’s yours. And the sun, moon, and stars dance for her: she’s a strange attractor for the numinous.

But Irene’s Grandmother — ah, she indwells. I’ve been writing about the moon ever since. And threads and labyrinths and rings, and children lost in houses which are dreams.

Alice got into my warp as well. Everyone she meets is so rude. And that row of asterisks as she’s shrinking — chin to foot — gave me a sense of the magic in typography, of spell.

What else? I loved The Golden Almanac, which gave me my fascination with the turning year. October had “The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies, O!” in a whirl and tatter of leaves — so ballads keep for me that vivid restless melancholy.

Oh, and fairy tales. “The Snow Queen” for the shards of mirror and the puzzles of ice; for the winter hag who is fell and beautiful, the crones in their reeky hovels, and the robber girl. And “The Twelve Swans” and “The Dancing Princesses.” I loved the nettleshirts that bound winged creatures to the earth, the wood of silver underground.

The Oz books, alas, have faded for me, though I read them all with passion. I still have my Scarecrow and my Witch, but she’s indelibly Margaret Hamilton.

There are other children’s fantasies I love — The Wind In the Willows, Earthsea,and Green Knowe, stories by Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones — but I found them long afterward.

And a little later on–at eight, nine, ten — I read and loved The Secret Gardenand A Little Princess; Hitty: Her First Hundred Years; all the Alcott books; Elizabeth Enright…All the girl books, and whatever I could lay my hands on. But the fantasies came first.

KL: Tell me a little about when you left home to live on your own.

GG: Oh, I just snailed away, carrying myself with me.

KL: If you could have a writer of your choice come live with you, who would it be and what writerly stuff would you want to talk to them about?

GG: Dear me. I wouldn’t dream of imposing my company on strangers. They have their own friends, or ghosts of friends; their own rooms on earth or elsewhere. Unless by chance we meet in that publisher’s hallway…? And then drift away for tea. I’d love to talk with Sylvia Townsend Warner. And Angela Carter. Hope Mirrlees? I’d be shy of Shakespeare, though I’d love to watch him in rehearsal. And I’ve always wanted to take Jo March to the movies.

KL: When’s the last time you changed your mind about something? I think I mean a radical shift of personal values — regarding art (“Suddenly, I’m not crazy about Billie Holiday, in fact, I’m not even sure I’m spelling her name right”), regarding anything (“Actually, you can go home again”).

GG: I do change my mind, but glacially. Hard to remember what I thought in the Mesozoic.

KL: What book or books do you press upon friends?

GG: Whatever book is Three-Bearically right for that friend. I get a huge kick out of perfect matches. I don’t press.

KL: What can we, as a group, do to increase the popularity of multi-stage bicycle racing as a spectator sport in America?

GG:Free lemonade?

KL: I once had a creative writing teacher tell me that he didn’t understand why authors used science fiction or magical realism to tell a story or impart a theme. Why do you think we do, when good old realism might do the trick?

GG: For the tang of it, the taste of Otherwise; for all the flavors of quark: not just Truth and Beauty, but up, down, charm, and strangeness.

KL: My story has a semi-wild chimpanzee in it; does yours?

GG: Alas, no.

KL: Have you found that during the Reagan-Bush-Bush-Quayle-Bush-Cheney era the quality of your writing has gotten a little dodgier?

GG: No. My life, maybe. Not my writing.

KL: What, in your opinion, is the relationship, if any, between the so-called real world and your particular imaginary one?

GG: Aslant. Their landscape is like the north of England; but their laws are otherwise. It’s as if the White Goddess and the Golden Bough were true, as if metaphor and myth were physics. Metaphysics. Cloud has the same stars as this world — our sky is their Wood Above — but their constellations are strange. Somehow this world is bound to theirs: the back side of their brighter tapestry.

Can I quote myself?

“Not that there aren’t quilt knots here and there, stitching heaven and earth. Houses, in the astrological sense; or sacred places, which are realer than the world, and have a way of disappearing like the egg in Alice. Woods, stone circles, sheepfolds. And the one long seam, the Milky Way.”

KL: If you could live in a book, which one would it be?

GG: Oh, I’d like to travel in many books. Sadly, I can’t envision stories while I’m reading them, so I’d dearly love to see a score of other worlds. And talk with their denizens. But here’s where I live.

KL: Can you say something, particularly in light of these grave times, about the writer’s role or responsibility in the creation of work that is purely literary, that is the work of the imagination, as opposed to work that serves more overtly and directly as a voice of conscience?

GG: With all respect for the voices of conscience, it would be a sad grey world without works of pure imagination. Wodehouse. Austen. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”

KL: Gertrude Stein said: “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense, to get to the very core of this problem of communication of intuition.” The relationship of form to content. Form as it facilitates communication, particularly communication of the remote, of the mysterious. Form as it permits the dramatization of states of mind. As it serves to make comprehensible the incomprehensible. What are your views on this subject?

GG: Fugue, rhyme, rainbow — I love all sorts of patterns and forms. Conjugations and crystals. Self-assembly. Mathematics. I think people are made to make patterns, to see them with delight. Defy entropy!

O

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Couch – Competition

by Benjamin Parzybok

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our couch photo competition: Gina Teh and Lea Deutsch, both of whom will be receiving copies of Couch.

Gina Teh:

Lea Deutsch:

And a bonus shot of Will Ludwigsen:

Also: a fun link (via Scott Beeler).

Thanks to everyone who emailed in pics and those who spread the word. If you come across any, we’re always interested in more couch-carrying or weird couch pics.

Original rules:

1. Carry a couch somewhere unexpected: take a picture of it. (Or, take a picture of a couch in a weird place.)
2. Email your picture (or a link) to us by November 30, 2008 and we will send a couple of winners copies of Couch and maybe some other books.

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Couch – Reviews

by Benjamin Parzybok

Reviews of Couch
Benjamin Parzybok

“Meet Erik, Tree and Thom, three unlikely new roommates sharing a Portland apartment with an inherited handmade gigantic orange couch. Here’s the plot: the three, thrown out on the street after a freak flooding of their apartment, and told to take the couch with them, appear to be compelled to carry their possibly “magical” couch on a journey of the couch’s making through the streets of Portland west to the Pacific and a different reality thousands of miles away. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe it. Parzybok, in his debut novel, sketches the three roommates and the various characters they encounter with an amazingly sure hand for one so new to the trade, and the outrageous storyline (is the couch really the “seat of power” spoken of in ancient South American legend? Is there really an ancient but still vibrant hidden civilization that is calling the couch to itself?) provides a fascinating framework on which Parzybok hangs his social and political observations and off-the-wall humor. A perfect Portland fantasy.”
—Willamette Live

“Couch hits on an improbable, even fantastic premise, and then rigorously hews to the logic that it generates, keeping it afloat (at times literally) to the end.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Couch shouldn’t be half as entertaining as it is…. In the end [Parzybok] pulls it off, even though he shouldn’t be able to.”
—Adrienne Martini, Locus

“Once upon a time, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Lethem, and Umberto Eco attended a film festival together. The featured flicks were Kiss Me Deadly, Fitzcarraldo, and Repo Man. Inspired by this odd bill of fare, the trio set out to collaborate on a novel. The result was Benjamin Parzybok’s debut, Couch.”
—The Barnes & Noble Review

“Couch is a quick and funny read, a short fable that ensnares us in its quixotic intentions and encourages us to believe for a short time in something magic, even if it is just a couch.”
—About.com

“A fun adventure with a seductive premise.”—Popmattters.com

“My wife has a set of stories that she describes as ‘guy stories,’ a category that contains such notable tales as Easy Rider, City Slickersand Deliverance. In such a story a group of young males decide to set them selves to some inconsequential task. The journey is filled with adversity, strife, joy and tragedy as the men struggle to finish their quest. In the end the characters discover who they really are. Couchby Benjamin Parzybok is one of these stories with a healthy dose of magic realism added for seasoning.”
—SF Site

“The essential message of Couch appears to be that the world and our lives would be better if we all got off our couches (literal and metaphorical) a bit more often.”
—The Zone

“The world of furniture has been given an Odysseus. I was completely swept into the story of three loafers who burden themselves with a couch and are given a chance to risk everything and maybe save the world a little. It’s easy to look at the world today and feel a sense of hopelessness, but Couch reminds us that there is still magic in the world and that we are the heroes of our own stories.”
— Mara Lynn Luther, Chapter One Book Store, Hamilton, MT

“Beyond the good old-fashioned story, Couch meditates on heroism and history, but above all, it’s an argument for shifting your life around every now and then, for getting off the couch and making something happen.”
—The L Magazine

“The book succeeds as a conceptual art piece, a literary travelogue, and a fantastical quest.”
—Willamette Week

“Hundreds of writers have slavishly imitated—or outright ripped off—Tolkien in ways that connoisseurs of other genres would consider shameless. What Parzybok has done here in adapting the same old song to a world more familiar to the reader is to revive the genre and make it relevant again.”
—The Stranger

“Delightfully lighthearted writing. . . . Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the enthusiastic prose carries readers through sporadic dark moments . . . Parzybok’s quirky humor recalls the flaws and successes of early Douglas Adams.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A lot of people are looking for magic in the world today, but only Benjamin Parzybok thought to check the sofa, which is, I think, the place it’s most likely to be found.Couch is a slacker epic: a gentle, funny book that ambles merrily from Coupland to Tolkien, and gives couch-surfing (among other things) a whole new meaning.”
—Paul La Farge

“One of the strangest road novels you’ll ever read. It’s a funny and fun book, and it’s also a very smart book. Fans of Tom Robbins or Christopher Moore should enjoy this.”
—Handee Books

“It is an upholstered Odyssey unlike any other you are likely to read. It is funny, confusing in places, wild and anarchic. It is part Quixote, part Murakami, part Tom Robbins, part DFS showroom. It has cult hit written all over it.”
—Scott, Me and My Big Mouth

“An amazing debut novel about three roommates who get evicted and take their couch with them on a journey that becomes a epic quest that becomes one of the most truly weird and original books I’ve read in ages.”
—Karen, A Stranger Here Myself

Reviews of “The Coder” (LCRW 21)

“My favorite story in the issue was “The Coder” by Benjamin Parzybok. Set at a software company, Brian is given the job of taking care of the one actual programmer who writes code that no one really understands but somehow works. This is pure fantasy but the story felt like myth.”
—SF Revu

“A simple enough story about a mystical programmer who produces perfect code for Nebbets Inc. and their apparently petty software. The Coder is a hermit-like figure who lives on Nebbets Inc.’s roof and who deals only with Brian Gorman, the story’s narrator. Brian modestly exploits his unique position for his own benefit—though less than others might—and his job largely involves delivering food, collecting screeds of handwritten code, and hiding from everyone, except the company’s most senior managers, the fact that the entire organisation exists on the whim of a madman on the roof. The end of “The Coder” will hardly come as a surprise, but it is nicely handled, and it maintains a neat air of mystery and irony.”
—The Fix

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Benjamin Parzybok Bio

by Benjamin Parzybok

Benjamin Parzybok is the creator of Gumball Poetry, a (now defunct) journal published through gumball machines, the Psychic Book Project and the Black Magic Insurance Agency, a city-wide mystery/treasure hunt. His projects have twice been selected as Best of Portland for the Willamette Week: “Best Guy Who Walks His Talk” and “Best Quarter’s Worth of Culture.”

Parzybok’s previous jobs include: congressional page, ghostwriter for the governor of Washington, web developer, Taiwanese factory technical writer, asbestos removal janitor, potato sorter, advertising copywriter, waiter, house painter, caterer, UPS unloader, alphabetizer, grocery clerk, and carpenter’s apprentice. Besides freelancing, his most recent start up is Walker Tracker, a walking community for pedometer enthusiasts.

He received a BA in Creative Writing from the Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA. He has lived in Central America, Taiwan, R.O.C., Ecuador, up and down the Pacific Northwest, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with the writer Laura Moulton and their two children.

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Joan Aiken Bio

by Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken (1924—2004) was born in Rye, Sussex, England, into a literary family: her father was the poet and writer Conrad Aiken and her siblings, the novelists Jane Aiken Hodge and John Aiken. After her parents’ divorce her mother married the popular English writer Martin Armstrong.

Aiken began writing at the age of five and her first collection of stories, All You’ve Ever Wanted (which included the first Armitage family stories), was published in 1953. After her first husband’s death, Aiken supported her family by copyediting at Argosy and working at an advertising agency before turning full time to writing fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Women’s Own, and many other magazines.

She wrote over a hundred books (including The Way to Write for Children) and was perhaps best known for the dozen novels in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She received the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction and in 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her contributions to children’s literature.

Author photo by Rod Delroy.

About Lizza Aiken

Born into a family of writers (grandfather Conrad Aiken, mother Joan Aiken) Lizza rebelled by becoming a mime and going to study in Paris with master teachers Etienne Decroux and Jacques LeCoq. She toured with fringe theatre groups appearing at International Theatre Festivals all over Europe in the 1970s and ’80s, performing with Hesitate and Demonstrate at London’s ICA Theatre and for Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre New York. Married to osteopath David Charlaff, and then mother of two she settled in Highgate, London and directed Youth Theatre groups and wrote screenplays for Children’s BBC TV based on Joan Aiken’s popular Arabel & Mortimer stories. Lizza is now curating the Joan Aiken literary estate and designing the official website for this much loved writer at www.joanaiken.com

About Andi Watson

Andi Watson (lj, Flickr) grew up in Yorkshire. He wanted to be a mechanic when he grew up but having no aptitude for anything practical, drew and drew and drew instead. He drew at school, at college and for his degree. Then he began drawing comics, which required even more drawing but with the added difficulty of writing.

When he isn’t drawing comics he’s drawing illustrations.

He likes to draw and lives with his wife and daughter in Worcester, England.

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John Crowley

by John Crowley

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 14th volume of fiction (Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land) in 2005. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

Photo credit: Zoe Crowley
Download for print.

Endless Things
John Crowley
“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking…. [Graham Sleight]'”
— Locus Notable Books

“A beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory.”
— Seattle Times

“Endless Things is the fourth and last installment in a vast, intricate series of novels collectively entitled “Aegypt.” The series (which is really one long novel) began in 1987 with the publication of Aegypt (soon to be reissued as The Solitudes) and was followed by Love & Sleep(1994) and Daemonomania (2000). It was clear from the start that Crowley was on to something special, and the appearance of this final volume confirms that impression. In its entirety, “Aegypt” stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.”
— Washington Post Book World

“With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”
— Book Forum

“The miracle of Endless Things is that it takes these pieces — and the rest of the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books — and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility.”
— Locus

“Crowley’s prose, on a sentence-by-sentence level, has never been stronger or lovelier. His epigrams and observations on the core nature of existence continue to be wise and, well, piercing, at once novel and, with a moment’s reflection, undeniably primal. This is a book that conveys the uncanniness of the mundane, and the mundanity of the uncanny. Readers who have followed Pierce’s travails for two decades will find that the ending of his story resonates as brightly as the Aeolian harp that is the book’s final image.”
— Paul Di Filippo, Sci Fi Weekly

“Endless Things is the perfect ending to a true master work which offers a densely detailed exploration of the connections between story and history, the fictions which inspire our imagination and the desires which inspire our visions of the future. At its heart, however,Endless Things is a love story about books and readers, and such is a treasure trove for any reader who wishes to delve into the timeless mysteries of books and stories.”
— Green Man Review

“Solemnity is out of order in a review of a book that ends with a mountain-top pastorale accompanied by heavenly music from an Aeolian harp played by no human hand.”
— John Reilly

“Crowley’s eloquent and captivating conclusion to his Ægypt tetralogy finds scholar Pierce Moffet still searching for the mythical Ægypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world’s myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm’s existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft’s unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing traces of Ægypt’s mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians, the mysticism of John Dee, the progressive thoughts of heretical priest Giordano Bruno and the “chemical wedding” of two 17th-century monarchs in Prague. Like Pierce’s travels, the final destination for this modern fantasy epic is almost incidental to its telling. With astonishing dexterity, Crowley (Lord Byron’s Novel) parallels multiple story lines spread across centuries and unobtrusively deploys recurring symbols and motifs to convey a sense of organic wholeness. Even as Pierce’s quest ends on a fulfilling personal note, this marvelous tale comes full circle to reinforce its timeless themes of transformation, re-creation and immortality.”
— Publishers Weekly

Praise for the Ægypt sequence:

“A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A master of language, plot, and characterization.”
—Harold Bloom

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
—James Hynes, Boston Review

“The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic. . . . Ægypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49.”
—USA Today

“An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

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Reviews of John Crowley’s Endless Things

by John Crowley

Endless Things
John Crowley

Reviews

“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking.'”
— Locus Notable Books

“A beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory.”
— Seattle Times

“Endless Things is the fourth and last installment in a vast, intricate series of novels collectively entitled “Aegypt.” The series (which is really one long novel) began in 1987 with the publication of Aegypt (soon to be reissued as The Solitudes) and was followed by Love & Sleep (1994) and Daemonomania (2000). It was clear from the start that Crowley was on to something special, and the appearance of this final volume confirms that impression. In its entirety, “Aegypt” stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.”
— Washington Post Book World

“With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”
— Book Forum

“The miracle of Endless Things is that it takes these pieces — and the rest of the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books — and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility.”
— Locus

“Crowley’s prose, on a sentence-by-sentence level, has never been stronger or lovelier. His epigrams and observations on the core nature of existence continue to be wise and, well, piercing, at once novel and, with a moment’s reflection, undeniably primal. This is a book that conveys the uncanniness of the mundane, and the mundanity of the uncanny. Readers who have followed Pierce’s travails for two decades will find that the ending of his story resonates as brightly as the Aeolian harp that is the book’s final image.”
— Paul Di Filippo, Sci Fi Weekly

“Endless Things is the perfect ending to a true master work which offers a densely detailed exploration of the connections between story and history, the fictions which inspire our imagination and the desires which inspire our visions of the future. At its heart, however, Endless Things is a love story about books and readers, and such is a treasure trove for any reader who wishes to delve into the timeless mysteries of books and stories.”
— Green Man Review

“Solemnity is out of order in a review of a book that ends with a mountain-top pastorale accompanied by heavenly music from an Aeolian harp played by no human hand.”
— John Reilly

“Crowley’s eloquent and captivating conclusion to his Ægypt tetralogy finds scholar Pierce Moffet still searching for the mythical Ægypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world’s myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm’s existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft’s unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing traces of Ægypt’s mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians, the mysticism of John Dee, the progressive thoughts of heretical priest Giordano Bruno and the “chemical wedding” of two 17th-century monarchs in Prague. Like Pierce’s travels, the final destination for this modern fantasy epic is almost incidental to its telling. With astonishing dexterity, Crowley (Lord Byron’s Novel) parallels multiple story lines spread across centuries and unobtrusively deploys recurring symbols and motifs to convey a sense of organic wholeness. Even as Pierce’s quest ends on a fulfilling personal note, this marvelous tale comes full circle to reinforce its timeless themes of transformation, re-creation and immortality.”
— Publishers Weekly

Praise for the Ægypt sequence:

“A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A master of language, plot, and characterization.”
—Harold Bloom

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
—James Hynes, Boston Review

“The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic. . . . Ægypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49.”
—USA Today

“An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

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Kate Wilhelm

by Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm was born in 1928, is the author of more than thirty novels including Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang andThe Unbidden Truth. Her work has been adapted for TV and film and translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded the Prix Apollo, Kurd Lasswitz, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. In 2003, she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Her short fiction appeared in landmark anthologies such as Again Dangerous Visions, Orbit, The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, andThe Norton Book of Science Fiction.
A cofounder of the Clarion Writers’ Workhops, she continues to host monthly writing workshops in Eugene, Oregon.

Photo by Richard B. Wilhelm
Download for print.

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Storyteller – Reviews

by Kate Wilhelm

Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop
Kate Wilhelm

* Hugo Award Winner for Best Related Book.
* Locus Award Winner
An alternate selection of the Science Fiction Book Club

“There are many books of writing instruction out there, but what setsStoryteller apart is the sense that Wilhelm really knows students and knows how to teach them to craft a professional story.”
— The Oregonian

“A useful, compact, and entertaining guide to writing that is neither bound to a particular genre or market.”
— Locus

“Its strength, I think, lies in some of the pointers she offers to beginning writers as to help them shorten the time it takes to get published.”
— New Pages

“If you are a budding writer, please spend $16 on this book before raising the money needed to attend Clarion. You’ll get much more out of the workshop if you do.”
— Emerald City

“For such a short book — just barely 192 pages — there is a lot here, and a lot that I’ve never found in other writing books, and it’s all on-point. It’s also delivered as part of the story of one of the most significant institutions in the history of science fiction and fantasy, as told by a true storyteller.”
— Green Man Review

“Satisfying in its own right, presenting an informative, and entertaining, blend of history, memoirs, and writing lessons.”
— Steven Silver

“This book should be on the reference shelf of every aspiring writer. Not only is it a gift of insight and experience of a wonderful writer but it’s also a fine story of the growth of a renowned writing workshop. Highly recommended.”
— SF Revu

“Teaching writing is a balancing act between compassionate encouragement and firm, blunt criticism. Kate is a master of it. The book uses reminisces about the founding, development and running of Clarion to frame a series of practical, plainly stated lessons for the beginning (and professional) writer. I learned a great deal reading it — something that can be accomplished in a deceptively short time, for Kate is also a master of simply and clearly setting out complicated, muddy issues, a skill honed both in her award-winning fiction (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sangis a personal favorite) and in her long years of teaching.”
— Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“Oh, but this is a lovely book…. Wilhelm fills Storyteller with lessons about how to write, and just as important, how not to write.”
— Strange Horizons

“Full of pithy, relevant advice for writers, amusing recollections of the field’s current giants during their early days, and the fullest published account to date of how a revered program was established.”
— Scifi Dimensions

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Reviews for Wilhelm’s previous books:

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang:

• Hugo Award Winner
• “Richly deserves the praise it won. . . . It richly deserves to be read — or read again — for its insights that remain startlingly fresh.”
  — L.D. Meagher, CNN.com
• “As well-crafted and sympathetic as it is scientifically rigorous.”
  — Nalo Hopkinson, scifi.com
• “The best novel about cloning written to date.”
  —Locus
• “Wilhelm’s cautionary message comes through loud and clear.”
  —The New York Times

And the Angels Sing:

• “An outstandingly fluent, sensitive writer.

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Jennifer Stevenson

by Jennifer Stevenson

Jennifer Stevenson: An Interview
Gabrielle Moss

What led you to start writing fiction?

I’ve always written fiction, ever since I was old enough to read. My mother and my maternal grandparents all wrote, and my father wanted to write; I guess it was just assumed I would, too. Sometimes I think I’m living out their ambitions.

What inspired you to write Trash Sex Magic? The setting is vivid and powerful, and almost a character unto itslef. Where/what did you draw from to create this world?

I started working on this book in 1986 while on jury duty. It started out as a short contemporary horror novel called Early Spring. Eighteen years and many, many revisions later, Kelly Link and I carved away everything that wasn’t Trash Sex Magic. I can’t say enough about her support, her appreciation for my vision of the book, and her writerly acuity. She talks about words in a way that awes me.

The setting for Trash Sex Magic is drawn from a place where my brother and I and our dogs played as kids: Wheeler Park in Geneva, Illinois. Natives of that area will recognize a lot of landmarks, some of which have disappeared. The trees in the park are really there, but the houses across the road, by the water, were very nice houses indeed. As a kid I never got to visit them or the river. I wanted to, though. The ridge really has a railroad track on top of it, and I wanted to sit up there at night and hear the freight train go by. I wanted to see the river smash into the ridge. I wanted to see a tornado hit the water. This book let me do all that. Nature is the truest, most powerful force on earth. I wanted to keep saying that.

Other inspirations were Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine and a Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy Spacek movie, Coal Miner’s Daughter. Without these examples before me I would never have thought I could write about this kind of life.

Why did you choose to tell your story with fantasy?

Joe Haldeman talks about a kind of progression he has noticed in veterans who write about their Vietnam War experience. First they do some very autobiographical fiction, or a straight autobiographical account. Then later they expand the scope of their stories, fictionalize their personal experience a bit, include experiences that other people had but they did not, so as to make the war more accessible to more readers. Finally, maybe 20 years later, they start writing wildly fantastical stuff with extravagant imagery and “unreal” things happening, because the fantasy element is the only way they can express the violence and extravagance of theiremotions about the war.

For me, many parts of this book describe internal experiences I had as a child that I couldn’t talk about. In fact I find it impossible to talk about them now, except by telling a wildly unreal story that illustrates these feelings in a lurid, over-the-top way.

Do you do any other kinds of writing?

I’m writing raunchy romantic comedies, erotic romantic fantasy, some short fantasy stories, some experimental short funny stuff that’s all dialogue. Terry Bisson started doing that a few years ago; his stories blew me away and inspired me to try it myself. Those all-dialogue stories are bags of fun to write.

Trash Sex Magic deals with a lot of issues pertaining to class. Did you intend to write a novel with a political message?

Kind of. I wanted to respond to a trend I saw in fantasy writing and in fantasy criticism that treated magic in fiction as if it were an extension of academia. The taller your pointy hat, the longer your white beard, the better a magician you are, right? Sure, and your full professors are smarter than everybody else. This is the Tolkein/Harry Potter model. In reality, tenure doesn’t make a person smarter. I felt that in fiction, magic ought to be treated with more respect, and not as a game whose rules must have “internal consistency”–a fantasy lit-crit phrase that drove me nuts for years–but as an extension of the mysterious and marvelous and very real natural world.

If you look back through the history of science, you find the history of magic. The dividing line falls at the point when scientists stopped thinking of nature as a lover to be wooed (Paracelsus is an example) and started thinking of nature as a wife to be mastered, plowed, and dominated (as did Roger Bacon). If you squint, you can kind of see the clash of these ideas, like a battle of mastadons in the swamp, in Trash Sex Magic.

I also wanted to point out that when the Somershoe women use magic, they are flying blind, without training, without vocabulary. “Internal consistency” aside, vocabulary is a good thing. Because they have a bone-deep belief that what they are doing is “trashy,” Rae and Gelia don’t talk about it. If they were “fantasy” heroines they would, but they’re as realistic as I could make them–irrevocably outside society and yet eternally standing at its edge, half-acknowledging its rules, unable to ignore the rules. Stupid, maybe, considering their powers. It could only strengthen them to talk. But they don’t have a pointy hat. No one has given them permission to be themselves; they feel they’ve had to steal their powers under the noses of society. They’re half-right to hesitate: they live under the constant awareness that their power is in the minority; their tree can be cut down; their land can be taken; their kids can be put in foster homes. People silence themselves all the time, and they suffer accordingly.

The worst thing these people do is call themselves trash in their secret hearts. You can overcome that if it’s from the outside, but not if you’re using that word on yourself. Am I talking about class?

What books have influenced you?

Most deeply? Rudyard Kipling, especially the Mowgli stories and Kim. Ray Bradbury. Andrew Lang’s fairy tale series. Georgette Heyer, Howard Pease, Terry Pratchett, Sax Rohmer, Clifford Simak, Rex Stout, PG Wodehouse. A handful of little-known writers whose very few books hit me hard, by luck: Jody Scott, Ruth Nichols, Lorna Novak. Later, in my adulthood, Carolyn Chute, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Crowley.

Some writers who hit all the same buttons for me, but who didn’t get to me soon enough to be major “influences”, are Terry Bisson, James Blaylock, Glen Cook, Nalo Hopkinson, Barry Hughart, Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, Dan Pinkwater, Rachel Pollack, Sherri Tepper, Gene Wolfe. I read Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel last year and flew over the moon; I’m hoping for more from her.

What are you working on now?

Two things: a romantic erotic fantasy about an incubus and a farm girl, and a raunchy romantic comedy that’s kind of a cross between a contemporary blue-collar regency romance and a Romeo and-Juliet farce. The erotic fantasy is hard; I keep having to redesign my heroine because the book gets more serious the farther in I plot it, and she needs to get stronger so she can carry that weight.

The comedy is just a blast. It’s the second in a series I’m writing about stagehands. Stagehands make wonderful alpha male heroes. They’re very physical guys, sometimes bad boys, serial monogamists with a blue-collar form of chivalry that balances their sometimes-chauvinistic ideas about women. They work in the glamorous world of show biz but they get their hands dirty. Unlike performers, they don’t wear makeup or let themselves get too skinny to be strong. They’re coarse and funny and relaxed about their masculinity. I’ve been married to a stagehand for 27 years and I’m here to testify. Ya gotta love ’em.

—

Gabrielle Moss is on a train west. Her zine is My Life as a Liar.

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Trampoline – Readings

Trampoline: an anthology
Edited by Kelly Link

Readings

Many authors, many cities, a grand time, thanks to all involved! (Apologies for the camera destroying the Mac’s Backs pictures.)

August 5, 7 PM — Quail Ridge Bookshop, 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27607 — 919-828-1588

Dave Shaw, King of Spain
Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
Kelly Link
O

August 7, 7 PM — Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 161 Lexington Green Circle, Suite B1 Lexington, KY 40503 — 800-248-6849

Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
Kelly Link

Columbia Magazine
O

September 9, 7 PM — Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, 1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 — (216) 321-2665

Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
John Gonzalez, Impala
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
Kelly Link
O

September 11
— 11 AM — KFAI Radio
— 7.30 PM — Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105 — (651) 699-0587
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
Kelly Link
O

September 18, 7 PM Housing Works, 126 Crosby Street, NYC 10012 — (212) 334-3324

Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Shelley Jackson, Angel
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
Kelly Link

Special Guest: Karen Joy Fowler

Subway: S,F,V, 6 to Broadway-Lafayette. N, R to Prince St.

Download flier
O

October 12, 1.30 PM — Lilish Fair, Central Florida — (407) 929-4348

Beth Adele Long, Destroyer

O

October 16, 7 PM Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, 353 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115 — (617) 266-7746

Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Kelly Link

Download flier

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Trampoline – Bios

Trampoline: an anthology

Contributors

Christopher Rowe, Ed Park, Shelley Jackson, John Gonzalez, Samantha Hunt, Alex Irvine, Greer Gilman, Alan DeNiro, Maureen McHugh, Dave Shaw, Susan Mosser, Vandana Singh, Glen Hirshberg, Jeffrey Ford, Beth Adele Long, Carol Emshwiller, Christopher Barzak, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Richard Butner, Karen Joy Fowler

O

Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
— interview
— chapbook
Christopher Rowe lives in Kentucky. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in many magazines, webzines and zine zines. He runs a small press, the Fortress of Words, and edits a zine, Say… He likes outside better than inside, brick better than vinyl and made better than bought.

You can buy Say… if you poke around on this site a little bit more. You can read some of his stories online at The Dead Mule, Ideomancer, and maybe even Small Beer.

Bittersweet Creek, a chapbook
— “Sally Harpe“

O

Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts

Ed Park is the author of a few published stories that have changed the way we see the world, two unpublished novels that haven’t, an unpublished memoir in which every paragraph begins with “In,” and two books illustrated by the fabulous Michael K. Carter. He is a senior editor at The Village Voice, where he reviews films, books, theater, and music. With Heidi Julavits, he co-edits The Believer. He contributes to the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope and belongs to the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, the New York Society Library, and the Duane Reade Dollar Rewards Club.

O

Shelley Jackson, Angel

Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, and several children’s books. She lives in Brooklyn.

O

John Gonzalez, Impala
— interview

John Gonzalez grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, the Cereal Capital of the World. He spent much of his early life trying to escape, but the attack dogs seemed to anticipate his every move. After several years in graduate school and employment as a social worker, John landed a job as the house writer for Outrage Games, a videogame developer in Ann Arbor whose next game, the fantasy-SF action-adventure Alter Echo, is due out in August 2003. In 2001 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. “Impala” is his first publication.

O

Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)

Samantha Hunt is a writer and artist from New York. Much to her delight, her stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney’s, Jubilat, Swerve, The Iowa Review, Literary, Colorado and Western Humanities Reviews. Her first play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, is currently in production. Hunt’s artwork can be found at the New York Public Library. Of late, she is completing a novel.

O

Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man

— interview
— chapbook

Alex Irvine‘s first novel A Scattering of Jades appeared in 2002 from Tor Books. His second, One King, One Soldier, is scheduled for July 2004. In between, a short-story collection, Unintended Consequences,will appear from Subterranean Press. He has published short fiction inF&SF, Asimov’s, Sci Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and anthologies including Starlight 3, Polyphony 2, and Live Without a Net.He teaches English at Gardiner Area High School in Gardiner, Maine — the home of Edwin Arlington Robinson — and lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, Beth, and twins, Emma and Ian.

O

Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
— interview

Greer Gilman’s novel, Moonwise, is decidedly thorny. It won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. “A Crowd of Bone” is one of three linked stories, variations on a winter myth. The first, “Jack Daw’s Pack,” was a Nebula finalist for 2001, and the subject of a Foundationinterview by Michael Swanwick. A sometime forensic librarian, Gilman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.

O

Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
— interview

Alan DeNiro is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and he also attended Clarion in 1998. His fiction has appeared in many literary and genre venues, including Santa Monica Review, 3rd Bed, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fence, Talebones, and his work has been shortlisted for the O. Henry award. Along with Chris Barzak, Kristin Livdahl, and Barth Anderson, he is a member of the writerly and publishing co-op known as the Ratbastards. He has recently completed a novel, The Memory Palace of Ray Fell, which involves the perils of dating imaginary people. He regularly reviews fiction for Rain Taxi, and is a correspondent for the weblog Ptarmigan. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Black Hare and Atari Ecologues. Finally, he is a failed trapeze artist…no, just kidding.

O

Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
— Mothers and Other Monsters

Maureen McHugh (1959) has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award. Her latest novel is Nekropolis, which was a BookSense 76 pick and a New York TimesEditor’s Choice. Right now she lives with her husband, son and two dogs next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins look over the fence at them.

O

Dave Shaw, King of Spain
— interview

Dave Shaw lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife Natalie, three-year-old daughter Mia, and newest child, Henry (born May 17, 2003). Father was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Here Comes the Roar, which will be published by University of North Texas Press in 2003. His stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in England, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S., including Best American Mystery Stories, The Southern Anthology, Literal Latte, Stand Magazine, and publications you’ve never heard of. He has received The Literal Latte Fiction Award, The Southern Prize for Fiction, a North Carolina Arts Council Writer’s Fellowship, and other awards for his work, and he completed his MFA in Fiction Writing at UNC-Greensboro. With that out of the way, he’d like now to point out that in 2000, 2001, and 2002, his team won Carrboro, North Carolina’s Co-Rec Softball Championship.

O

Susan Mosser, Bump Ship

Susan Mosser has been writing for a while now and finds it to be just the very best part of sentience. By grace of unemployment, in the steamy wastelands of central Florida, she is writing two books (one novel and one mostly not) and ghost-editing a third, and lately has taken to scribbling bits of subtly rhythmic verse on gasoline receipts while driving. Susan is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

O

Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
— interview

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and now lives in the United States with her husband, daughter, dog and innumerable books. She draws upon her background in physics and her experience as a woman and an Indian to spin wild tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her first published story appeared in the original anthology Polyphony, Volume 1.

O

Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach

Glen Hirshberg‘s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was published by Carroll & Graf in December, 2002. Kelly said she liked it. His ghost stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Dark Terrors 6, and have been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and twice for the World Fantasy Award. Carroll & Graf will publish The Two Sams, a collection of his supernatural fiction, later this year. When he sent this bio, Glen lived in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and daughter, but he probably doesn’t anymore.

O

Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
— interview

Jeffrey Ford is the author of a trilogy of novels from Eos Harper Collins — The Physiognomy (winner of the 1998 World Fantasy Award and a New York TimesNotable Book of the year for ’97), Memoranda (a New York Times Notable book for ’99), The Beyond ( a selection for Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2001 list). His most recent novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Morrow/Harper Collins), was published in June 2002 as was his first story collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press). His short fiction has appeared in the magazines — Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Event Horizon, Black Gate, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, MSS, The Northwest Review, Puerto Del Sol — and in the anthologies — Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Vols. 13 and 15, The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, Leviathan #3, and The Journal of Pulse Pounding Narratives. “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant,” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2001, and “Creation” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula in 2002. Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

O

Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
— interview

Beth Adele Long‘s short fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Electric Velocipede. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s workshop and a former writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. By day she works as a graphic arts jack-of-all-trades for a fantabulous little company in Cape Canaveral. She lives in Florida and still complains about the cold winters, much to her northern friends’ disgust.

O

Carol Emshwiller, Gods and Three Wishes
— interview

“I was a dreadful student. Just squeaked by with Cs and a few Ds. Failed freshman English and had to repeat it. Almost failed again.”

I went all the way through music school, playing the violin, but I had slow fingers so failed at that.”

I went to war. ALL! the men were gone so, though I was a pacifist, I went with them. After war, I went to art school. First thing I didn’t fail at.”

I always hated writing. It’s too hard. But, like finally learning to love lobster, now Lobster is my favorite. I’ve failed at even that though. I’ve become allergic to it. Now I love writing. I love that it is so hard–that you never stop learning how to do it.”

I’ve just had two new books with Small Beer Press. These are my seventh and eighth books.”

O

Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
— interview

Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of literary and speculative fiction magazines, including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy,Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has recently completed his Master’s Degree in English at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. He grew up in rural Ohio, now lives in post-industrial Ohio, has lived in California and Michigan, now lives in an attic back in post-industrial Ohio, has no pets to speak of, no longer smokes except socially, and likes to dance. He is 27.

O

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
— interview

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s fiction and prose poems have appeared in Conjunctions (Web Conjunctions); Washington Square; Skidrow Penthouse; Phantasmagoria; Literal Latte; Reflections (published by the United Nations Society of Writers); No Roses Review; and White Crow, among other literary journals. Her prose poems “The Maria Axiom” and “Soul Murder” have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her short story, “The Guest,” won the Anne and Henry Paolucci fiction contest for Italian-American writing, and the Negative Capability annual fiction contest. Rosalind lives in New York City where she is currently completing a second collection of short fiction.

O

Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
— interview
— chapbook

Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you.

Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference with John Kessel. For some reason he holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering (with an English minor) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from North Carolina State University.

His stories have appeared in magazines such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,(read “Other Agents” here), Scream, and RE Arts & Letters, as well as in anthologies such as Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, which he co-edited with John Kessel and Mark L. Van Name. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

O

Karen Joy Fowler, King Rat

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of two story collections and three novels and is a frequent teacher of writing workshops. She lives with her husband in Davis, California. She wishes someday to have published more books than you can count on the fingers of both hands. She wishes this more often than she manages to actually make herself work on book number six. She’s starting to think the opposable thumb is not all it’s cracked up to be.

O

Kelly Link

Kelly Link co-edits the zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her first collection,Stranger Things Happen, was nominated for the Firecracker Award and was selected as a best book of the year by Salon, Locus, and The Village Voice. She is working on more short stories.

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James Tiptree Letter to Carol Emshwiller

by Carol Emshwiller

A letter to Carol Emshwiller from James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), with spelling and puctuation left intact. See a jpg of the original.

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Carol Emshwiller Reviews

by Carol Emshwiller

Reviews: The Mount : Report to the Men’s Club : Joint Reviews

The Mount

• The Village Voice: Our 25 Favorite Books of 2002
• San Francisco Chronicle: 10 Best SF&F of the Year
• Book Magazine
• Locus
• Fantastic Metropolis: 1, 2

* Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute in its delineation of the complex relationships between masters and slaves, pets and owners, the served and the serving, this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times.”

School Library Journal
“Adult/High School – This veteran science-fiction writer is known for original plots and characters, and her latest novel does not disappoint, offering an extraordinary, utterly alien, and thoroughly convincing culture set in the not-too-distant future. Emshwiller brings readers immediately into the action, gradually revealing the takeover of Earth by the Hoots, otherworldly beings with superior intelligence and technology. Humans have become the Hoots’ “mounts,” and, in the case of the superior Seattle bloodline, valuable racing stock. Most mounts are well off, as the Hoots constantly remind them, and treated kindly by affectionate owners who use punishment poles as rarely as possible. No one agrees more than principal narrator Charley, a privileged young Seattle whose rider-in-training will someday rule the world. The adolescent mount’s dream is of bringing honor to his beloved Little Master by becoming a great champion like Beauty, his sire, whose portrait decorates many Hoot walls. When Charley learns that his father now leads the renegade bands called Wilds, he and Little Master flee. This complex and compelling blend of tantalizing themes offers numerous possibilities for speculation and discussion, whether among friends or in the classroom.”

Laura Miller, Salon
“Emshwiller’s prose is beautiful”

The Women’s Review of Books
“The Mount is a brilliant book. But be warned: It takes root in the mind and unleashes aftershocks at inopportune moments.”

Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Carol Emshwiller has been writing fantasy, speculative and science fiction for many years; she has a dedicated cult following and has been an influence on a number of today’s top writers…. it is very easy to fall into the rhythm of Emshwiller’s poetic and smooth sentences”

F&SF Magazine
[A]s Carmen Dog and “Mrs. Jones” – Emshwiller balances delicately on the beam, carrying the tale straight-faced with a combination of precise language, gentle humor, a near-perfectly pitched voice, and a tenderness toward her characters that draws us in and beguiles us…. As Kim Stanley Robinson observes in his blurb forThe Mount, we are all mounts — we’re all caught up in one way or another in systems like Hoot servitude, kept in our places by fear, or a love of ease, or inertia, or sheer laziness. Emshwiller reminds us of this, shows us how it happens, and how very difficult it can be to escape.

The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Emshwiller’s themes — the allure of submission, the temptations of complicity, the perverse nature of compassion — are not usual fare in novels of resistance and revolt, and her strikingly imaginative novel continues to surpass our expectations to the very last page.”

The Village Voice
“Carol Emshwiller’s elegant new novel, The Mount, is both fantastical and unnerving in its familiarity. And like her work in romance and westerns, its genre-twisting plot resists easy classification.”

Locus
“[Carol Emshwiller] may be the most brilliantly perverse dreamer of them all…. What is it like to spend a few days alone with Carol Emshwiller? Startling, a process of immersion very different from encountering the occasionally piece in an anthology, and a revelation for anyone unfamiliar with her history….”

San Francisco Chronicle
“Emshwiller uses a deceptively simple narrative voice that gives The Mount the style of a young-adult novel. But there’s much going on beneath the surface of this narrative, including oblique flashes of humor and artfully articulated moments of psychological insight. The Mount emerges as one of the season’s unexpected small pleasures.”

Booklist
“A memorable alien-invasion scenario, a wild adventure, and a reflection on the dynamics of freedom and slavery.”

Asimovs
“…a profound novel of amazing depth and intimacy.”

Bookslut
It’s a brilliant piece of work…

Rambles
“In a recent interview with Science Fiction Weekly, Ursula Le Guin called Emshwiller “the most unappreciated great writer we’ve got.” The Mount proves Le Guin right…. If Emshwiller is not already on your top bookshelf,The Mount will put her there.”

BookPage
“…a beautifully written allegorical tale full of hope that even the most unenlightened souls can shrug off the bonds of internalized oppression and finally see the light.”

Fearless Reviews
“While whimsical and entertaining at times, The Mount raises some potent questions. It will make you laugh, but it will also make you think. This would be a wonderful book for classroom or book club discussions. Buy it, read it, recommend it to your friends.”

Challenging Destiny

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Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories

The Women’s Review of Books
“Emshwiller sentences are are transparent and elegant at the same time. Her vocabulary, though rich and flexible, is never arcane.”

Jane magazine, October, 2002:

Locus
“The Mount combines elements of E.T., Black Beauty, Huckleberry Finn, and some very twisted fairy tales in a way that’s uniquely Emshwiller. It’s crazy, horrific, absurd, moving — and it works, as account of both individual maturation and a conquered planet’s coming of age.”

Publishers Weekly
“Carol Emshwiller (Carmen Dog, etc.) lends her elegant wit to Report to the Men’s Club, a collection of 19 fantastic short fictions treating the war between the sexes. Such tales as “Grandma,” “Foster Mother” and “Prejudice and Pride” are brim-full of wry insights into male-female relationships. Testimonials from Samuel R. Delaney, Maureen McHugh, Terry Bisson and Connie Willis, among other big names, should send this one into extra printings. Emshwiller is also the author of a new novel, The Mount.“

Kirkus Reviews
“A daring, eccentric, and welcome observer of darkly human ways emerges from these 19 motley tales. Often writing in an ironical first-person voice, storywriter and novelist Emshwiller (Leaping Man Hill, 1999, etc.) assumes the persona of the outsider or renegade who flees the community as if to test boundaries and possibilities. In “After All,” the narrator is a grandmother who decides to set out on a “makeshift journey” in her bathrobe and slippers simply because it is time. The setting is vague: she flaps through the town and then into the hills, pursued, she is sure, by her children, and, in the end, she is merely happy not “to miss all the funny things that might have happened later had the world lasted beyond me.” Both in “Foster Mother” and “Creature,” the mature, quirky narrators take on the care of an abandoned, otherworldly foundling and attempt to test their survival together in the wilds. In other stories, a character’s affection for a scarred pariah forces her out of her home and through a stormy transformation-as in the sensationally creepy “Mrs. Jones.” Of the two middle-aged spinster sisters, Cora and Janice, Janice is the fattish conspicuous one who decides to tame and civilize at her own peril the large batlike creature she finds wounded in the sisters’ apple orchard. Janice does get her husband, and through skillful details and use of irony, the story becomes a chilling, tender portrait of the sisters’ dependence and fragility. At her best, Emshwiller writes with a kind of sneaky precision by drawing in the reader with her sympathetic first person, then pulling out all recognizable indicators; elsewhere, as the long-winded “Venus Rising” (based on work by Elaine Morgan),the pieces read like way-far-out allegories. A startling, strong fourth collection by this author-look for her upcoming The Mount.“

Booklist
“This strange collection of stories is populated by creatures of all sorts, human and alien. The collection-closing title piece takes the form of a speech given to a men’s club by someone who has just been initiated into membership, despite the accident of birth that made her biologically female. The other stories range topically from the faith of a scribe in “Modillion” to love at first sight in “Nose.” What makes them satisfying is the personalities of their characters. Even the shortest pieces present characters who possess all the force of real persons who might be standing beside us. For the most part, Emshwiller keeps the stories simple, engaging us with their characterization rather than fast, copious action. We stay engaged because they render enough emotion to sustain our creaturely interest.”

Asimovs
“…the news that she has a new collection out, and that the collection includes seven hitherto-unpublished pieces, is joyous…”

NYRSF
“her long-awaited fourth collection of short fiction is…a real joy to read. This is a collection to delight and intrigue readers and writers of all persuasions. Go out and buy it now.”

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Joint Reviews

The Boston Globe

Time Out New York
Carol Emshwiller is often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” an ostensibly laudatory term that usually refers to artists who aren’t getting the attention they deserve. An eminence at 81, Emshwiller is also almost exclusively categorized as a science-fiction writer or fantasy writer when the truth is that she uses genre elements in ways that usually subvert the genres she’s supposedly writing in. A sad formula: writer’s writer + genre = obscurity. Thank God, then, for Small Beer, a Brooklyn-based press dedicated to publishing short-story writers, has released Emshwiller’s two new books: Report to the Men’s Club, a short-story collection, and The Mount, a novel.

Let’s start with the stories. Elliptical, funny and stylish, they are for the most part profoundly unsettling. In “Mrs. Jones,” a spinster tries to one-up her sister in an ongoing codependent battle by trapping and seducing the angel (demon? alien?) that is living in their orchard. In “Creature,” a man cohabitates with a massive female monster — one of a race that has been engineered to kill him. In “One Part of the Self Is Always Tall and Dark,” a woman, happily convinced that she is going crazy, dreams of long sentences composed of nothing but three-letter words: “She was far out and tip top too.”

As wonderful as the stories are, the real treat here is The Mount, a fable/fantasy/cautionary tale along the lines of, say, Animal Farm. It’s the story of Charlie, a preadolescent human who’s being used as a horse by shoulder-riding alien invaders known as Hoots. Charlie wants nothing more than to become a great Mount, a loyal slave and servant, until his father, a renegade Mount who has fled from the Hoots and now lives in the mountains, comes to take him away. Like so much of Emshwiller’s work, The Mount asks difficult questions — in this case, What is freedom? The issue is particularly appropriate at a time when “freedom” in America is increasingly defined as “security”– freedom from uncertainty, freedom from fear, freedom from want. All of which is, in the end, not really freedom at all.

SF Weekly

SF Site
This is a wonderful collection of short fiction, marked by tremendous variety, a wonderful, funny, knowing, and sympathetic voice, and a truly off-center imagination…. Carol Emshwiller is a real treasure. She seems underappreciated to me, but this late burst of productivity may help remedy that situation. Both The Mountand Report to the Men’s Club are first rate books.

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On to:

Carol Emshwiller

The Mount

Report to the Men’s Club

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Carol Emshwiller Bio

Carol Emshwiller was awarded a Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Award in 2005.

Read the Letter of Intrigue: James Tiptree to Carol Emshwiller.

Notes Toward an Article on Carol Emshwiller. (WisCon 27 program book)

Read her story in Trampoline. (And her hilarious bio and the 2-question interview.)

Carol’s own webpage.

Besides her novel, The Mount, and collection of short fiction, Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, who is this writer? It’s not just the vast staff at Small Beer Press who think she’s an incredible writer, check out what happy readers and writers are saying about her new books on those pages above, and have a look below too see that this is one writer who has been making readers very happy for a good amount of time!

Carol Emshwiller’s stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ninth Letter, 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.

Carol was Guest of Honor at Wiscon 27, May 23-6, 2003 (bio).

Recently, her stories have appeared inTrampoline, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Leviathan 3, andPolyphony.

Carol Emshwiller is the author of three previous collections of short fiction: The Start of the End of it All (Winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award), Verging on the Pertinent, and Joy in Our Cause, and three novels Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, and Leaping Man Hill. So, how have her previous books been received? Or her books released by us?

(Click on the images to order the books from your local bookshop)

Strange Horizons devoted a special issue to Carol Emshwiller in which they posted an interview, a story (“The Circular Library of Stones“), and a review of Ledoyt by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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.

Interviews

Bookslut, interview by Joseph J. Finn

Fantastic Metropolis — reposted here by Robert Freeman Wexler

Strange Horizons, interview by Patrick Weekes

Fantasy Magazine, interview by Jennifer Konieczny.

Stories

“Boys”

“Mrs. Jones”

“Josephine”

“Water Master”

“The Circular Library of Stones”

Films

Pilobolus and Joan (based on Carol Emshwiller’s story “Metamorphosed”)

Family Focus (voiceover)

Skin Matrix

Skin Matrix S (short version)

Links

Carol Emshwiller’s website

Fantastic Metropolis: Three essays by Carol Emshwiller:
How My Husband’s Death Changed My Writing
Resonance
Writing Rules I Like to Break

Download photo for print.

Author photo by Susan Emshwiller.

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Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews

by Ray Vukcevich

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:

• F&SF
• Tangentonline
• SFSite
• Pathetic Caverns

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Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews

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:

F&SF

Tangent

SFSite

Pathetic Caverns

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Stranger Things Happen reviews

“I love that book! Her imagination goes beyond any known boundaries. She is like Magritte: the eye, the regard, ‘behind every visible object lies another object, an invisible one.'” — Angélica Gorodischer

“Kelly Link’s collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores.”
— Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

“Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy.”
— Washington Post Book World, Aug. 26, 2001

“Quirky and exuberantly imagined….the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.”
— Publisher’s Weekly, June 25, 2001

“Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.”
— Kirkus Reviews, June 2001

“It is the tradition of the dust-jacket “blurb” to exaggerate the excellences of a book in hopes of enticing readers between its covers. But I do not follow that custom when I say that Stranger Things Happen is one of the very best books I have ever read. These stories will amaze, provoke, and intrigue. Best of all, they will delight. Kelly Link is terrific! This is not blurbese. It is the living truth.”
— Fred Chappell, author of Family Gathering

“Finally, Kelly Link’s wonderful stories have been collected. My only complaint is the brevity of her oeuvre to date; as an avid reader of her work , I want her to continue to create more gems for me to read. I predict that “The Specialist’s Hat,” winner of the World Fantasy Award, will become part of the canon of classic supernatural tales.”
— Ellen Datlow

“I’ve been impatiently awaiting a collection of Kelly Link’s stories. Now that it’s here, it will sit in my library on that very short shelf of books I read again and again. For those who think Fantasy tired, Stranger Things Happen is a wake-up call.”
— Jeffrey Ford

“A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they’re not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don’t happen.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

“Link’s writing is gorgeous, mischievous, sexy and unsettling. Unexpected images burst on your brain like soap bubbles on a dog’s tongue. I’ve been trying to imitate her since I first read one of her stories. It’s impossible. Instead I find myself curling up with a satisfied sigh and enjoying once more.”
— Nalo Hopkinson, author of Midnight Robber

“Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.”
— Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Kelly Link is a brilliant writer. Her stories seem to come right out of your own dreams, the nice ones and the nightmares both. These stories will burrow right into your subconscious and stay with you forever.”
— Tim Powers, author of On Stranger Tides

“Of all the books you’ll read this year, this is the one you’ll remember. Kelly Link’s stories are like gorgeous tattoos; they get under your skin and stay forever and change your life.  Buy this book, read it, read it again, congratulate yourself, and then start buying Stranger Things Happen for your friends.”
— Sarah Smith, author of A Citizen of the Country

“Kelly Link makes spells, not stories. She is the carrier of an eerie, tender sorcery; each enchantment takes you like a curse, leaving you dizzy, wounded, and elated at once. Her vision is always compassionate, and frequently very funny–but don’t let that fool you. This book, like all real magic, is terribly dangerous. You open it at your peril.”
— Sean Stewart, author of Galveston

“If Kelly Link is not the “future of horror,” a ridiculous phrase, she ought to be. To have a future at all, horror in general, by which I might as well mean fiction in general, requires precisely her freshness, courage, intelligence, and resistance to received forms and values. Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. Story by story, she is creating new worlds, new frameworks for perception, right in front of our eyes. I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.”
— Peter Straub, author of Magic Terror

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