Grandma The Paganini of Jacob’s Gully Modillion Mrs. Jones Acceptance Speech One Part of the Self is Always Tall and Dark Foster Mother Creature The Project It Comes from Deep Inside Prejudice and Pride Report to the Men’s Club Overlooking Water Master Abominable Desert Child Venus Rising Nose After All
Carol Emshwiller is the author of the collections Report to the Men's Club, The Start of the End of it All, Verging on the Pertinent, Joy in Our Cause, and I Live With You, and the novels The Mount, Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, and Leaping Man Hill.
"These short stories have a mysterious glow."—JANE"Carol
Emshwiller’s stories are wonder-filled, necessary, and beautifully
crafted.”
—Samuel R. Delany"I read one of the stories in Carol Emshwiller's
new collection, Report to the Men's Club, in progress several years
ago and have thought about it ever since. I could even quote you
lines! And now, having read the rest of the elegant, complex,
insightful stories, I know she's done the same thing to me again
eighteen times over! Emshwiller knows more about men and mortality
and love and loss and writing and life than anybody on the planet!
Dazzling, dangerous, devastating writer! Unforgettable (and I mean
that literally!) collection! Wow! Wow! Wow!"
—Connie Willis"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."
—Publishers Weekly"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."
—Kirkus Reviews"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."
—Booklist"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."
—New York Review of Science Fiction"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.""
—Time Out New York"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 Mount and Report to the Men's Club are first rate
books."
—SF Site"Emshwiller sentences are are transparent and elegant at
the same time. Her vocabulary, though rich and flexible, is never
arcane."
—The Women's Review of Books
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