Conversation Pieces Books
In Franklin County, when times get tough, people often to turn to bootlegging. But that’s a perilous way to make a living, since bootlegging is both illegal and tightly regulated by distributors like Dennis DeSpain. So when the mysterious and scary alien who calls himself "Turk" openly sets up as an independent operator, flouting both the law and the distributors, all hell breaks loose. In it up to their necks and pursuing their own agendas are: ex-activist Lilly, the alien’s lawyer; Berenice, an aging ’60s radical with a past; Orris, DeSpain’s smart, ambitious wife who believes in doing whatever it takes to achieve the objective; and DeSpain’s ex-lover Marie, a chemical-engineering student who loves working with machines and whose grandmother was a midwife, bootlegger in the Forties, and notorious for having killed a man. "Every writer worth admiring has her place of power: that locale or perspective from which she does her best and most assured work. For Rebecca Ore, it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Though she has lived much of her life elsewhere, the land and its people are in her bones and the rhythm of their speech lodged in her head. It’s not an easy place to love, and she returns to it always with a certain degree of pain and regret. But it’s the forge and wellspring of Alien Bootlegger . "The Blue Ridge area is a region of stunning beauty where guns are common, old wealth holds to traditional values (‘like owning people,’ as Rebecca enjoys explaining), and operating an illegal still is not so much disreputable as a matter of cultural pride." —from the Introduction by Michael Swanwick
The dusky light begins to turn golden. The forest gives way to barren hills covered in blowdown and snags. Some of the blowdown curves over the hills, looking like stilled waves of gray Sargasso grass. There is hardly any color anywhere, just the bleached bone starkness of the tree skeletons. I cannot stop looking at them, still standing after all these years, bare naked, for everyone to see. I cannot photograph them. It would be like taking pictures of the dead in their coffins. So Kim Antieau observes the sun rising on Mt. St. Helens at the summer solstice, 2002. In poems illustrated by Terri Windling, in an original short story set in West Africa, in essays ranging in subject matter from Daphne du Maurier's fiction to excursions in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, Antieau illuminates the richness of our world today, reveling in its wonders, worrying over its degradation, seeking out the possibility of transmutation—with proportion distilled by reflection and a ready dash of humor. Charles de Lint, author of Memory and Dream , writes of her work: "Brilliant...One of the best writers we have today."
Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic "Warlords of Saturn's Moons," first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; "The Grammarian's Five Daughters" offers a playful explication of the uses of the parts of speech; "A Ceremony of Discontent" takes a humorous approach to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People offers a small, potent taste of the oeuvre of an important feminist sf author.
The savants of Institut Sorel, the world center of information mechanics, compute the governing algorithms that give all things their shape and structure. The voyants receive and sort enormous amounts of information. And now the savants say that the whole world, on the brink of a phase transition, is about to change, such that the long-term equilibrium that has locked the world into an "order crisis" will give way to a period of chaos. Dominique, a new, ignorant acolyte voyant, is asked to watch for the random factor that will trigger the phase transition. But the Institut itself is in chaos. Drawn into political intrigue and the savants' and voyants' struggle over his world's very future, Dominique cares for individuals, rather than abstractions and principles. But even so, he's not sure what it is he should be doing…
Absolute Uncertainty collects seven stories—three of them new—by Lucy Sussex, as well as an interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller. In these stories, a fashionista becomes obsessed with the uncanny resemblance of the dazzling, eccentric "Lady Sanspareille" to the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle; a young man loses his virginity in more than one sense of the word; an older writer shares her insight with Philip K. Dick, who really needs it; and in Biocultural Studies 101, a class examines moral ambiguities and the limits of biography in the case of Werner Heisenberg, "a real slippery customer," via a high-tech "interactive template." "Strongly feminist, linguistically muscular, and historically erudite, Lucy Sussex is an Australian writer who deserves to be more widely read outside of her home country[...] This book is your chance to test [bridges between our day and the past] in all their precarious charm, to take them as far as they'll go in hopes of inhabiting a few broken moments of life in another time." — Strange Horizons , September 12, 2006 "It opens with a delicious original, 'Duchess'[...]The other selections range from earthy, political Australian fantasy[...] to ghost story [...] to the title's story time-traveling Watcher in a Nazi Germany where Heisenberg is busy speculating about Uncertainty, and they're told in a corresponding variety of styles and voices." — Locus , Jan 2007
Four spellbinding tales, selected from Wendy Walker's critically-acclaimed short fiction collections Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), showcase some of her finest work as she takes on the themes of art, memory and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. ''Twin Knots'' presents the Goddess of Love's take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In another tale, a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. Publishers Weekly writes, ''Walker's sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood.'' "It's [Walker's] eccentric mingling of ideas and imagery, sensory impressions of a world almost disturbingly alive, that distinguish her work from anyone else's." — Locus , Jan 2007 "Walker uses European poems and fairy tales as her inspiration and source material, merging rich language and modern ideas with classic plot lines to craft complex adult fare[...]Read her work for the history, the complex tales, and the vivid language offered—where the true beauty of Walker's work lies." — Tangent Online , Dec 16, 2006
In these stories, Betty Lindstrom imagines leaving her husband in the town of Lost Road and turning east instead of west and never coming back, but when she does drive west with her husband, alone with the prairie and the wind, she can’t get home; Susan Abernathy undertakes to humanize Captain Groton, the alien charged with removing the residents of Okanoggan Falls, WI, with consequences she could not have imagined; Galena Pittman seeks to recover her lover, Thea, from the mountains of Montana, where she devotes herself to literally painting the landscape under the direction of the mysterious Dirigo; and the Conservator, charged with preserving the many layers of the map of the great river “on whose surface the past was written in cipher,” discovers that the relationship between map and landscape is more complicated than she had thought.
Voices from Fairyland collects fantastical poems by Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Theodora Goss and offers four new essays by Goss. Goss writes in her introductory essay: "I have chosen to focus on poems by Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner because of all the poets I could have included, they are the ones whom I think have been most unjustly neglected -- the most talented among those whose talents have gone largely unrecognized."
After WisCon 20, Sylvia Kelso engaged Lois McMaster Bujold in a rich, snappy correspondence about Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels. That correspondence became “Letterspace: In the Chinks Between Published Fiction and Published Criticism,” which is published here. Also included are three critical essays discussing the intricacies of being an Australian feminist scholar writing about science fiction, colonialism in science fiction by women, and Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels.
Through the Drowsy Dark collects ten stories and nine poems by Nebula- and Hugo-nominee Rachel Swirsky, "a terrific writer who's been making a name for herself with a string of intelligent, perceptive stories," as critic Jonathan Strahan characterizes her. In Through the Drowsy Dark, Swirsky's characters struggle with too much and too little emotional control, with heartbreak, with grief that has gone deep underground; they search for nothingness, for difference, for oneness. One commits a terrible crime because she believes it's the moral thing to do, while another digs up a dead dog because the very thought of kissing it on the lips makes her clitoris throb. Swirsky's explorations of the heart and mind are fearless—and dangerous fictions indeed.
Claire Light's fiction shifts our perspective just enough off-center to render the world we know a strange and unfamiliar place. In this volume, a woman with the most thankless job in space will calculate a new kind of "cold equation" to get her home to port. In a fantastical place where adulthood is the biggest threat to adolescent boys, predators arise from unlikely quarters. In a world with wonky physics and no gravity, a lone human learns the meaning of "reckless endangerment of alien life." And an alien abduction is only prelude to a long phantasmagoric journey. Interspersed with evocative flash fictions, this collection of stories luxuriates in the weird and wonky, half-lit realities and sidelong looks at painful truths.
With Her Body presents three pieces of short fiction by the Nebula-, Lambda-, and Tiptree-award winning Nicola Griffith. What are these three intense stories about? Hope, joy, the body.; mainly joy and the body—feeling the world on our skin, which is the place where Us and Not-Us meet. Nicola Griffith writes about being as well as doing—about life and love and the fears that keep us from having what we want. About feeling stuff, and making decisions, not sitting at home like a passive lump.
[Eve] turned her attention to the monitor displaying Minnivitch's cell. Never had it been so clear what Minnivitch was up to. The bare minimalist space of the cell screamed stage, and some strange, dramaturgical magic had transformed the white glare of the indirect fluorescent lighting into spotlights. Kneeling bald and naked on the floor's glassine surface, Minnivitch her arms, wrists, hands, and fingers as dramatically expressive as her face was telling a story to an audience somewhere outside the glare of the lights, from The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) Sarah Minnivitch, an actor sentenced to prison for acts of civil disobedience, wreaked havoc at the for-profit medium-security facility she was first sent to. When Penco transfers her to a high-security facility, the facility's director assigns Dr. Eve Escher the task of rehabilitating Minnivitch and recovering the corporation s losses. Escher believes she is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that will not only rehabilitate the prisoner but also win the physician fame and glory. But the stakes for both Escher and Minnivitch prove to be higher than either of them imagined.
The Grand Conversation, the first volume of the Conversation Pieces series, collects four essays by L. Timmel Duchamp that explore her conceptualization of feminist sf as a conversation. These essays, which have been previously published in the scholarly journals Foundation and Extrapolation, lay out the thinking behind the Conversation Pieces series.
Winner of the 2008 Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award Honor List for 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Distances is fascinating far-future science fiction, set in a desert city. For Anasuya, mathematics was experiential, a sixth sense that bared before her the harmonies, natural and artificial, that formed the sub-text of the world. So when mathematicians from the planet Tirana, 18-light-years-distant, ask Anasuya's help in solving a series of equations, she finds the new geometrical space they present her with intriguing. But as she explores the new space, she soon comes to suspect that it represents an actual physical system, and that the equations she is being asked to solve have a significance the Tiranis are concealing. "...Individual sections illuminate and provide a rounded backdrop to the whole, until by the end of this finely layered novella I felt as though I had met a fully formed human being—not to mention a number of fascinating characters—and all with a mathematical conundrum of epic proportions with dire import for the cultures of two planets." — Bob Blough, Tangent Online July 8, 2009 "… perhaps the most satisfying thing about Distances is how irreducible it feels, how Singh mixes mathematical, artistic and sociocultural speculation in a way that feels holistic precisely because it is aware of where those different domains intersect and interact.." — Niall Harrison, Torque Control "...a long novella mixing mathematics, gender issues, and an exotic look at human colonization of the galaxy. Echoing Le Guin to some extent, Singh follows Anasuya, who has a visceral ability to understand mathematics, as she helps visitors from a distant planet... It's a complex setup, hinting at quite a fascinating galactic backstory.” — Rich Horton, Locus , March 2009
In this first collection of the stories and poetry of Sheree Renée Thomas, memory is the only force strong enough to counter the terrors of a scarred and forgetful world. Thomas’ characters are people scraping by in slave quarters and institutional margins, people in search of freedom and transformation who come face to face with apocalyptic powers. Thrown back on their wits and their lore, they turn to unexpected sources to make sense of things: to girl-children, old women, old skills, old magic and forgotten ties of kinship with the natural world.
eventeen-year-old Arun emerges from a fire, his memories and identity vanished with the flames. He finds a refuge and home with Janani, and soon he discovers his unique ability to sense and manipulate the minds of others around him. Intimately connected yet isolated by this insight, he inhabits a dangerous place outside conventional boundaries: man/woman, mind/body. When someone who shares his ability, Rahul Moghe, arrives on his doorstep, he senses a power beyond any he has known. Janani warns of the grave danger posed by Rahul and sends Arun on his journey, fleeing the one person who may have answers to the mystery of his past…
According to the Pentagon-owned-and-operated Past-Scan Device, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas were both women in drag. Jane Pendler’s advisor says that’s impossible, that the technology must be bogus, and pulls the plug on Jane’s dissertation research on Leonardo. What’s a feminist graduate student to do? What else, but do the research using the Post-Scan Device behind her advisor’s back, of course…
Uncanny, sweet, and shot through with fairytale weirdness, A Brood of Foxes takes Joey Napoleon into a world as bizarre as anyone’s first adulthood—with a few differences. Set in a place where time has its own logic, human and animal is a shifting perspective, and the people we love are always slightly other—and better—than we imagined, A Brood of Foxes faces us with the moral dimensions of environmental disasters—in a troublingly literal way.
The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor relates a series of stories about the ancient gods Inanna and Gilgamesh from the point of view of Inanna's lover and sidekick, Ninshibur, the Faithful Counselor. As a storyteller, Sheldon performed "Inanna and the God of Wisdom" based on Diane Wolkstein and S.N. Kramer's translation of the 2nd century BCE cuneiform tablets. After telling the story for a few years, Sheldon began to feel the lack of a point of view that is missing from the traditional story—that of Ninshibur, Inanna's Faithful Counselor.
During the 1992 Clarion West Writers Workshop attended by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, one of the students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong—horribly, offensively wrong—and so it is better not even to try. This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual orientation, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about "getting it wrong." Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with "differences." “The book is excellent. I highly recommend it. It should be read by every ‘dominant paradigm’ writer for that is its true audience. Recommended also for schools, colleges, and creativity workshops, and sociology classes.” — The Compulsive Reader “Along with personal experience and examples, the book presents exercises to help writers step outside their own ROAARS. The exercises, developed from workshops the authors have conducted, reward writers with learning more about developing characters—including those who are ‘just like’ themselves—and understanding past and present stereotypes.” —Paula Guran, Writers.com Newsletter Vol 9, no. 3 “This book can help interested writers develop characters to exhibit the complexity of the human experience (and, since we’re talking genre here, multifaceted non-human experiences as well) [...] What I like best about this book is that Shawl and Ward encourage people to acknowledge their fears and concerns, but also to try anyway.” — Broad Universe , November 2007
Anne Sheldon’s heroines have lowered eyes and seditious smiles. They are people of folklore and fairy tales: Penelope, the Crane Maiden, the Fates. Her heroes are outsiders in their own stories—Rumpelstiltskin and Arachne’s father. These story-poems and stories focus on the work that women do with spinning wheel, spindle, and knitting needles. They are accompanied by evocative images of these instruments and the cloth they yield.
Talking Back showcases the epistolary fantasies of eighteen writers, among them Carol Emshwiller, Leslie What, Eileen Gunn, and Rosaleen Love. Invited to “talk back,” the authors penned love letters, fans letters, angry letters, thoughtful letters, letters to dead people, letters to fictional characters, letters to corporations. Carol Emshwiller writes to her beloved Ledoyt; Eileen Gunn, provoked by a New York Times review of Lady Windermere’s Fan, addresses Oscar Wilde; Heather Lindsley tenders friendly advice to Citibank; and Nisi Shawl explains to Jack Kerouac that the joke is on both of them. “Lovely Madame,” writes James Trimarco to Charles Dickens’s infamous Madame Defarge, “you whose eyes flash as your knitting needles click-clack at the table, I spit on the death your father has written for you and burn those pages from my book…” These are letters that will never be sent, intimate and personal, fantasies the authors have agreed to share with their readers.
On Island SG7, one voracious parasite endangers a protected forest and a small community. But the biologist hired to bring the place into balance is already compromised—by a too-narrow view of her duties, and—increasingly—by a love she cannot ignore. This is the love letter of Peta Sutton, who struggles to perceive the full complexities of her place in a foreign ecosystem and an extramarital relationship. As the island roils and the parasites seem to drag people's worst fears into being, Peta struggles to forge a peace at the heart of fears that threaten to consume everything.
"A fantasia of amnesia, of lives that need filling, of writers of every tense, of talent and dry lemons and melted cheese; of giggling and tangled sheets and denture adhesive, competition and tenderness, a bloodless bullfight, the power of a giant smile to diminish greatness—a modern mannerist story around a story." - Anna Tambour
“To speak radical truths — unapologetically, ferociously, rudely when necessary — is the central purpose of Joanna Russ’s influential body of work,” declares Lee Mandelo in her essay on Russ’s radical, groundbreaking literary and critical work. Mandelo’s essay traces Russ’s evolving efforts to speak truth throughout her literary career — examining both Russ’s successes and failures in doing so. She insists that Russ problematized and individualized her ultimate understanding of truth without rejecting its possibility. Rather, Mandelo argues, the trajectory of change in Russ’s work and her revision of prior truths itself constitutes a valuable part of the truthtelling project. Russ emerges in Mandelo’s essay as a heroic though all-too-human intellectual and artist, one whose angry, brilliant work we cannot afford to ignore or forget.
An original collection of seven short stories. Rosaleen Love's stories fairly dance and sing their way along the page, whether the scene is music itself, as in the tale she tells of driving her cousin Bridie, an Australian musicologist and jazz pianist, on a pilgrimage to the source of her music in the US South, or the vast vistas of geological time, or even the arcane science of therolinguistics as it deconstructs the "c(h)oral songs" that are a "series of texts written by air in water." Carmel Bird writes of the final story in the volume, "Once Giants Roamed the Earth": "This story is informed with deep concern for beauty of the earth and speaks urgently for respect and dignity. There is an air of menace and yet a pervasive hum of hope. The writing is firm, confident, and compelling." "Once Giants Roamed the Earth" is a winner of the 2005 Aurealis Award.
"[A] stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, “Zombie Thanksgiving” (T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force." Gwyneth Jones
Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated Surrealism. This is Christopher Barzak’s tribute to them, three stories and an essay that enter into a humane surrealism which turns away from the unconscious and toward magic. Sometimes the stories themselves seem to be paintings. Sometimes painter and writer may be characters, regarding each other through a painful otherness, talking in shared secrets. Barzak’s stories are huge with the spacious strangeness of worlds where there is always more room for a woman to escape her tormenters, or outgrow an older self. Here we find a bird-maker and a star-catcher whose shared history spills over into the birds and the stars themselves; a girl who outgrows her clothes, her house, and finally her town—and leaves to find her body a new home; a landlord, whose marriage, motherhood, separation, sexual exploration, and excursions into self-portraiture all take place within a single apartment building. In “Remembering the body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism,” Barzak comments on the images that inspired these stories and discusses his own position as a writer among painters.
A member of the famed Haldane family, Naomi Mitchison lived an adventurous, politically engaged, and well-examined life even as she wrote dozens of novels and works of nonfiction. From campaigning for women's right to information about and the means of birth control to running for Parliament, from practicing "open marriage" in her own life to exploring a range of sexual arrangements in her fiction, for all of her 101 years, Mitchison embraced change as few people ever manage to do. Along the way she pioneered a new kind of historical novel that combined the immediacy of modern language with an ability to evoke the otherness of the past with great vividness and published her first work of feminist sf in 1962, a few years before the resurgence of feminism with its second wave. In her profile of Mitchison's life and work, Lesley A. Hall offers an overview of this prolific writer's life and work, beginning from her upper-class origins, through her radicalization as a feminist and socialist and her experimentation and examination of sexual arrangements, to her life as a writer repeatedly breaking new ground.
Richard Bowes’ book of modern Fairy Tales, their Fantasy offspring and Legendary ancestors presents eight of his stories including “The Lady of Wands,” in which a Fey cop tells her story, that appears here for the first time. Also original to this book is Bowes’ afterword, “A Secret History of Small Books,” which traces the path of Fairy Tales as a refuge for women, gay/lesbian writers, and LGBT readers from the 17th century on.
Mary Shelley, a young banker’s son, and William, an excessively tall man with a “lividly hued visage, watery eyes, and blackened lips within a straggling beard,” pit their wits and derring-do against Lord Byron, master of steampunk technology, and his thuggish minions.
Jyn, an Asian-American lesbian, makes her living stripping in clubs in San Francisco. But stripping is only her day job. Her true vocation is UFO hunting. One night, working at her day job, she sights a Man in Black and realizes he is stalking her. Jyn’s “not entirely orthodox theories” involve the origins and history of the XY chromosomes. The next day, Jyn packs up her car and sets off on an extended road trip — part “serious UFO tourism” and part flight from the MIB — that takes her though a variety of western states, stripping in clubs and bars as she goes, drawn, inexorably, to New Mexico and beyond…
"This welcomed discussion of the connections between future fiction and stories about human inception emphasizes how mythic roots contribute to the emotional power of narrative. Finch investigates the inexplicable awe and wonder that emanates from close encounters between myth and science fiction. This juxtaposition emphatically indicates that science fiction is the predominant mythic metaphor of our time.” —Marleen S. Barr
The poems in Numa tell the story of a shape-shifting numen. Numa, whose home body is that of a wild feline, learns by trial and error to take the form of other animals, plants, and the elements. As she grows up, she uses her skill to experience and share the divine in nature. She gives birth to a cub and begins raising her to shape-shift. Then an interloper appears, a young man on a quest for glory who believes he should defeat the “monster” in the forest.
Food is the language of love in a near-future world of plague, smog, and alienation. Hardwicke Arar, a relentless perfectionist, is the chef at NoFood, the most famous restaurant in the world. He serves imaginary food to diners who cannot digest it, because they have all had the fashionable surgery Total Gastric Bypass. His wife Seychelles loves him so much that she can actually taste what he creates. Gringo hunts the world for mushrooms and other illegal delicacies in a world of embargo, providing what people desire in an endless act of expiation for his daughter. Fats Bester, an artist among donut-makers, is saved by Carl, NoFood’s zen headwaiter. Donovan Donovan, hardheaded embargo lawyer for Hardy and Seychelles, is transformed by Cena, Hardy’s posthumous daughter.
The supernatural, the animal, and the deadly often find each other in Lisa M. Bradley’s landscapes, tame or wild. Vampires, either restless or filled with ennui; shape-shifters and skin-walkers; demigoddesses of evil and lust; haunted girls and dying fairies — the characters in this collection inhabit worlds of danger, decay, and, sometimes, rebirth. Often rooted in issues of family, ritual, and belonging, the poems and short stories in The Haunted Girl display Bradley’s loving mastery of language, which grants us myriad moments of impish wit and startling beauty.
Three Songs for Roxy tells three inter-related tales: of Kizzy, a foundling raised by a Romany Gypsy family in present-day Seattle, as she is about to be claimed by the aliens who left her to be raised as human; of Scott Lynn Miller, an unstable survivor of Katrina and security guard who is deeply affected by what he witnesses when the aliens contact Kizzy; and of “Natalie,” an alien assigned to retrieve Kizzy— who is befriended by the current champion of the “Night of a Thousand Stevies” and falls in love with Kizzy’s adopted sister Roxy. Three Songs for Roxy explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and what it means to be an outsider.
A lantern hangs for the ghosts, both desolate and numinous. The white road and the black river run down into the dark and return again. In this collection of thirty-six poems and one story, Rhysling Award-winning poet Sonya Taaffe traces the complex paths between the dead, memory, and living. A two-part cycle written over the course of seven years, “Ghost Signs” leads the reader through the underworld of myth to the hauntings of the present, where the shades of Sappho, Alan Turing, and Ludwig Wittgenstein exist alongside Charon, Dido, and The War of the Worlds. “The Boatman’s Cure” follows a haunted woman and a dead man as they embark on a road trip through coastal New England, an exorcism at its end. Sharply imagined, deeply personal, Taaffe’s work in Ghost Signs is at once an act of remembrance and release.
Louise Cavelier Levesque was born in Rouen, November 23, 1703, and died in Paris, May 18, 1745. She was one of the eighteenth-century writers who continued the tradition that had begun in the decade before her birth of creating new versions of fairy tales. In 1723 she married M. Levesque and moved to Paris. The year before her marriage, she had published her pair of fairy tales, “Le Prince des Aigues Marines” and “Le Prince Invisible.” After marrying, she wrote fiction, poetry, and plays. Her two fairy tales were reprinted in 1744 and again as part of the Cabinet des fées. A much-abridged translation of “The Invisible Prince” was included in Andrew Lang’s The Yellow Fairy Book (1894), but “Le Prince des Aigues Marines” has not appeared before in English. In “The Prince of the Aquamarines,” the Prince is cursed by a Bad Fairy with the gift of the death-dealing glance. The heroine, the Princess of the Island of Night, is likewise condemned by a Fairy to live alone in the Dark Tower, until freed by a monster whose sight brings death. In “The Invisible Prince,” the curse is a prophecy delivered by the priest of Plutus, the god of wealth, who announces that the young prince will undergo assorted dangers that will, however, lead in the end to good fortune. The Prince’s guardian fairy gives him the stone of invisibility in the hope that it will help get him safely through the intervening dangers.
''Celeste Rita Baker's stories balance heartache and hilarity with poetic, uncompromising prose. This collection sings ancient songs with a modern beat. It is fully alive.'' --Daniel Jose Older, author of Salsa Nocturna and editor of Long Hidden from History ''Back, Belly, and Side is full of Celeste Rita Baker's special story magic. With tales of wisdom, wonderment, and new world lore, she creates characters that speak and leap off the page to deliver the best gift of all--deep belly laughter.'' --Sheree Renée Thomas, Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems ''...this collection is worth a read. The characters are beautifully drawn and the situations they find themselves in are, simultaneously, real and far-fetched. Wonderful use of language and explorations of parenthood, reality, and love.'' -- Kate O'Conner, Abyss & Apex
1963: Emran Greene is a successful corporate accountant, a hopeful soon-to-be-father, and an unremarkable husband--except for the lingering effects of an experimental wartime truth serum, his ex-boyfriend, the impossibility of his conceiving a child, and all of the other secrets he keeps from his wife and his employer. One of these, the secret of the lonely grave he visits regularly in Riverport's Castleview Cemetery, holds a tragedy that just won't stay gone...
In this powerful debut collection, Rannu Award-winning poet R.B. Lemberg explores the deep-rooted fluidity of gender, tradition, language, and desire in landscapes as familiar as high fantasy and as foreign as San Francisco. Written in the voices of immigrants, shape-changers, sentient ships in a distant future and heroes of a mythic past, her poems inhabit a fragile, vital space of complex identity and story as a conscious act, stubbornly urging the reader's attention toward the marginal, the liminal, and the unheard--a firebird cautioned to burn less brightly, a ghost-child ignored by the gods, a lover laying a road of words for a beloved to follow. By turns devastating and deeply hopeful, Marginalia to Stone Bird writes a fearless commentary on our history and others. Reviews In her debut collection, Lemberg summons elements of speculative fiction to capture a world in which everything is in motion, yet remains guided by language: a song can lead the way in darkness, writing can be a portal from one world to the next, and it's possible to know an incantation "to make the stars unfold/ their arms of ghostly vapor. Publishers Weekly Marginalia to Stone Bird is a testament to how speculative poetry can succeed in capturing voice and plot and movement and feeling while still tackling big ideas and personal truths. The collection crafts a sort of map of forms and intents, a tour of what speculative poetry can be. From magic realism to high fantasy to far off-world science fiction, the poems range far and wide while maintaining a circling consistency, an interest in language and oppression and voice and freedom.... Charles Payseur, Nerds of a Feather
Earth has discovered it is not alone in the universe. The aliens — pink, shapeless, and peaceful — are very nice, but after a string of failed diplomatic missions, they ask Earth to stop with the crazies and send someone normal. In frustration, the UN devises a lottery to pick the next ambassador. Enter Rose Delancy, a Jersey waitress with a grudge against pretty much the whole world. Rose is not happy about winning; she’s not particularly happy about anything. When she arrives on Unpronounceable — the planet having a name she refuses to attempt saying — she is nothing but rude to the Blobs, as she calls them, and they find it refreshing. She likes them; they like her. She settles in and starts teaching the natives all about junk food, movies, and sex.
Sleeping Under the Tree of Life evokes the realm of ancestral knowledge with a deep respect for the natural world, a love of language, and an invitation for survival, and asks: Who survives without being transformed? Beneath luminous layers of imagery and mythology, science and nature, fantasy and the recounting of history, is the grace and tenderness of a poet's heart, the unwavering gaze of an oracle's vision, and the dreamlike whimsy of a storyteller's mind. Hope, love, and hard truths spring from these pages of a writer whose imagination conjures an unforgettable journey. Readers enter these poems and stories the way some souls enter church, a quiet garden, or a stand of trees--for rest, for the blessing of silence and reverie, for beauty if not redemption.
Finalist for the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award Life unfolds in strange ways. You may encounter people from your past living in your former apartments, or realize you have a penis as you engage in war-dreams, or find a planet filled with ghosts that look exactly like the ghosts back home. Is it possible they are the same as the ghosts back home? Wherever you travel, you’ll have tough decisions to make about the aliens you may have harmed and the aliens who may harm you. Other Places , Karen Heuler’s latest story collection, follows travelers as the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes life. Review Heuler's prose illuminates the strangeness of both her characters and her settings. Establishing elaborate themes and morals is no easy feat in such short narrative arcs, but Heuler does it admirably, quickly laying the groundwork for her myriad of worlds, cultures, and travelers. Publishers Weekly
Terran scholar Rachel Monteverde journeys to Aanuk, a paradisiacal planet famous for both its beaches and the generosity and joy of life of its nomadic inhabitants. The Aanukians are not the only people on the planet, however: Rachel is eager to meet the Fidhia, a cave-dwelling people who share a congenital condition that makes them blind. Rachel’s relentless determination to communicate with them despite the Aanukien’s dismissal and the Fidhia’s secretiveness will yield more than she ever hoped for. The first book by Spanish author Lola Robles to be translated into English, Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist is feminist science fiction in the tradition of Ursula K. LeGuin and Naomi Mitchison.
It's the easiest assignment a British intelligence agent could hope for. Lucy Harker needs only see the secret plans of the Nautilus safely across the Atlantic. As German spies are largely a fantasy of newspapers, she anticipates no activities more strenuous than hiding her heritage as Dracula’s dhampir daughter. Then among her fellow Titanic passengers she discovers the incognita Countess Karnstein—and it seems the seductive vampire is in Germany’s service. Can Agent Harker stake Carmilla before her own heart—and her loyalty to the British Empire—are subverted by questions as treacherous as a night-cloaked iceberg?
The personal is political, and the political is personal. This collection of essays and an sf tale explores the intersections of representation, science fiction, feminism, social justice, and fandom, specifically in relationship to the feminist sf convention WisCon. Plutchak argues that to build a new future we need new stories, stories that tell us where we have been as well as show us where we are going, and she uses feminist theory to analyze feminist sf fandom's history, present, and future.
