A City Made of Words
Page 10
“Abduction” (2002)
“No Traveller Returns” (2004)
“Fragrant Goddess” (2007)
“The Blood of Peter Francisco” (2008)
“A Family History” (2009)
“Watchers at the Living Gate” (2010)
“The Persistence of Memory, or This Space for Sale” (2010)
“Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance” (2010)
“Mysteries of the Old Quarter” (2011)
“The Microscopic Eye” (2012)
“Cho Oyu Glacier” (2012)
“The Statue in the Garden” (2013)
“The Mermaid and the Fisherman” (2014)
“A Resistance to Theory” (2014)
“Blind Spot” (2016)
“Creative Nonfiction” (2018)
“Excerpts: Naming Mt. Thoreau” (2018)
“Climate Change” (2019)
“A Conversation with the Author” (2019)
“Dear Sir or Madam” (2019)
These stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies: Fence, Omni, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Postscripts, Conjunctions, Interzone, Lightspeed, and Strange Plasma. They have been published or else reprinted in thirty or so anthologies, either themed or best-of-the-year. My nonfiction has appeared in the L.A. Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the New York Review of Science Fiction, among other publications.
Translations:
Various of my novels and short stories have appeared in Spanish, German, Polish, French, Czech, and Japanese, as well as in numerous UK editions.
Poetry:
A long narrative poem, Ragnarok, a pseudo-Norse pseudo-edda, was published on Tor.com in April 2011 and then reprinted in three later anthologies.
Museum shows:
I provided the text for a permanent sound installation on the site of the old power plant at MASS MoCA, a collaboration with the artist Stephen Vitiello. It opened in the fall of 2011.
In the fall of 2017, I completed a second piece with Mr. Vitiello, a sound installation at a new city museum in West Palm Beach, Florida, on the site of an empty department store.
Awards:
My novels, short stories, and poems have been shortlisted for the following prizes: the Nebula Award (twice), the World Fantasy Award (three times), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the James R. Tiptree Award (twice), the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (twice), the Locus Readers’ Award (twice), the Rhysling Poetry Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award (twice). The Cult of Loving Kindness was a New York Times Notable Book.
About the Author
A NATIVE OF NEW England with Southern roots, Paul Park climaxed his “wanderjahr” in Asia and the Middle East with his Sugar Rain Trilogy, which established him immediately as a writer to watch. His fascinated readers have since followed him into Christian theology, the anatomy of colonialism, and the limits and possibilities of metafictional narrative. His diverse work includes narrations of museum exhibits with sound artist Stephen Vitiello, and lectures on storytelling at New York Comic Con and nonhuman sentience at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute. Meanwhile he has taught writing at several universities. He lives in western Massachusetts and currently teaches at Williams College, where he is both worshipped and feared.
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Report from Planet Midnight
Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-497-7
5 by 7.5 • 128 pages
Nalo Hopkinson has been busily (and wonderfully) “subverting the genre” since her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won a Locus Award for SF and Fantasy in 1999. Since then she has acquired a prestigious World Fantasy Award, a legion of adventurous and aware fans, a reputation for intellect seasoned with humor, and a place of honor in the short list of SF writers who are tearing down the walls of category and transporting readers to previously unimagined planets and realms.
Never one to hold her tongue, Hopkinson takes on sexism and racism in publishing in “Report from Planet Midnight,” a historic and controversial presentation to her colleagues and fans.
Plus… “Message in a Bottle,” a radical new twist on the time travel tale that demolishes the sentimental myth of childhood innocence; and “Shift,” a tempestuous erotic adventure in which Caliban gets the girl. Or does he?
And Featuring: our Outspoken Interview, an intimate one-on-one that delivers a wealth of insight, outrage, irreverence, and top-secret Caribbean spells.
Fire.
Elizabeth Hand
ISBN: 978-1-62963-234-6
5 by 7.5 • 128 pages
Hand, Elizabeth, or Liz as she’s known to her colleagues, students, and devoted fans, is a
maverick in modern fiction: a fearless literary sojourner whose award-winning novels and short stories mix murder and magic, high fantasy and post-punk noir in extravagant and unforgettable new ways.
The title story, “Fire.”—written especially for this volume—is a harrowing postapocalyptic adventure in a world threatened by global conflagration. Based on Hand’s real-life experience as a participant in a governmental climate change think tank, it follows a ragtag cadre of scientists and artists racing to save both civilization and themselves from fast-moving global fires.
“The Woman Men Didn’t See” is an expansion of Hand’s acclaimed critical assessment of author Alice Sheldon, who wrote award-winning SF as “James Tiptree, Jr.” in order to conceal identity from both the SF community and her CIA overlords. Another nonfiction piece, “Beyond Belief,” recounts her difficult passage from alienated teen to serious artist.
Also included are “Kronia,” a poignant time-travel romance, and “The Saffron Gatherers,” two of Hand’s favorite and less familiar stories. Plus: a bibliography and our candid and illuminating Outspoken Interview with one of today’s most inventive authors.
Totalitopia
John Crowley
ISBN: 978-1-62963-392-3
5x7.5 • 128 pages
John Crowley’s all-new essay “Totalitopia” is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. “This Is Our Town,” written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley’s hard-to-find masterpieces, “Gone” is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley’s “Easy Chair” columns in Harper’s, “Everything That Rises” explores the fractal interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities—with a nod to both Columbus and Flannery O’Connor. “And Go Like This” creeps in from Datlow’s Year’s Best, the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies.
Plus: There’s a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.
“Like a magus, John Crowley shares his secrets generously, allowing us to believe that his book is revealing the true and glorious nature of the world, and the reader’s own place within it.”
—Village Voice
Damnificados
JJ Amaworo Wilson
ISBN: 978-1-62963-117-2
5 by 8 • 288 pages
Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, six hundred “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a ragtag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.”
Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse. The ghosts and miracles woven into the narrative are part of a richly imagined world in which the laws of nature are constantly stretched and the past is always present.
“Should be read by every politician and rich bastard and then force-fed to them—literally, page by page.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand
Fire on the Mountain
Terry Bisson with an Introduction by Mumia Abu-Jamal
ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0
5 by 8 • 208 pages
It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.
Long unavailable in the U.S., published in France as Nova Africa, Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.
“History revisioned, turned inside out … Bisson’s wild and wonderful imagination has taken some strange turns to arrive at such a destination.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, Anisfield-Wolf Award winner and author of Devil’s Dream