Moon Songs - by Carol Emshwiller (Paperback)

About the Book

A career spanning short story collection by SF/F legend Carol Emshwiller.

Book Synopsis

"A major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist." - Ursula K. LeGuin

Carol Emshwiller's pioneering stories have been praised by and influenced a wide variety writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Grace Paley, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Karen Joy Fowler, China Miéeacute;ville, Connie Willis, and numerous others. Moon Songs is the first one-volume selection from Emshwiller's entire career, with stories from 1958 to 2012. Another admirer, Kelly Link, wrote the collection's foreword. It is unsurprising that Emshwiller, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, two Nebula Awards, a Philip K. Dick Award, and a Pushcart Prize, is so respected by her fellow writers and avid fans. What is surprising is that her work has not enjoyed more widespread success and notoriety. There are so many who still have not experienced the joy of her engrossingly odd narrators, hyper-original imagery, and unguessable plot twists in stories such as "Moon Songs," "Creature", "Mrs. Jones," "I Live with You and You Don't Know It,"and "The Bird Painter in Time of War." Moon Songs selects a representative sample of stories from every era of Emshwiller's work, providing readers new and old with a guidebook to a unique vision and feminist voice. Wry and ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking, poignant and poetic, these tales stand as testament to the vivid imagination of an original and uncompromising writer.

Review Quotes

"A greatest hits collection of unclassifiable speculative fiction This compellingly assembled retrospective gives longtime Emshwiller fans a chance to savor her unique sensibility again, while lucky newcomers enjoy the thrill of discovery. Wickedly astute and surreally funny."-Kirkus Review (Starred)

"Most writers, whether of science fiction or realist fiction, don't aspire to the kind of pure freedom Emshwiller exhibits in her work. For many readers, this challenging work won't be the kind of thing they want to read every day. But when you do want something that is playing its own game, something difficult and slippery yet playful and fun, what a joy it is to have her work at hand."--Washington Post

"Carol Emshwiller's stories are wonder-filled, necessary, and beautifully crafted." --Samuel R. Delany

"An exemplary primer on the work of an extraordinary writer Moon Songs is representative of both the breadth of Emshwiller's career and its peaks, and the selections have been sequenced into a book that works, with illuminating juxtapositions of stories written decades apart. It also becomes the best easily available text for these stories It is a scrupulous book, and it is recommended."--Niall Harrison, LOCUS

"If someone were to compile one of those futile lists of the top hundred writers in the world right Now! I'd have to hack into the results and replace the name of one of the politely-angry young men in the top ten with Carol Emshwiller's.-- Gavin J. Grant

"Emshwiller's readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction." -- Ursula K. Le Guin

"Carol Emshwiller's imagination is fierce and funny, never mean. She creates people, situations, and combinations of words that make me read her sentences and paragraphs again and again for the sheer pleasure of reading." --Grace Paley

About the Author

Kelly Link is the author of Get in Trouble, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. She is also the co-owner of Book Moon, an independent bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts.