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"A major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist.” — Ursula K. LeGuinCarol 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 Miéville, 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.
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.
