Selected Stories

"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 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.