Author: Emera

“Princess,” “Homecoming”

Reviewer: Emera

Err, couldn’t think of a semi-clever conglomerate title for this string of short story reviewlets, but onwards!

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Jeanne Desy‘s “The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet” (1981; read 4.19.10) is an obvious but not uncharming feminist fairy tale about a tall princess, her faithful (talking) Afghan hound, and a prince with questionable values.

For a bit of background, this apparently first appeared in Ms. magazine in 1981, became quite popular, and has since been frequently republished. Also, someone pointed me to it when, on behalf of a friend, I was trying to find out the title/author of a story (not this one) about a prince who thinks he’s a dog, and ends up having to be wooed by a princess who also thinks she’s a dog. If anyone’s read that one, let me know! The source remains elusive – the friend’s not even sure if it’s a short story or a side episode within a longer novel.

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Kelly Barnhill‘s “Homecoming” (2008; read 4.4.10, from Underground Voices) is a vignette about return from war, and small mercies. The prose often feels over-labored (“They tilted their faces to the ground and held their weapons weak, as though they were a great weight that they alone must bear”), but I like the earthy little details of the moment of hedgewitchery on which the story turns.

Go to:
Jeanne Desy
Kelly Barnhill
Tales of madness and depravity

Nebulous destiny

And the 2010 Nebula winners have been announced!

I think I never got around to posting about the nominations here, but there was, of course, a lot of overlap with the 2010 Hugo nominees, and the winners included some familiar faces. Kij Johnson’s “Spar” won for Best Short Story, and Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making won the Andre Norton Award for best young adult novel, which marks the first time that a self-published novel has won a major literary award.

Woo hoo!

Also, I really really want to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl…

– E

“Song of Wandering Aengus”

Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

– W. B. Yeats

—

No real commentary, just some Yeats love. I love the coolness and silvery-darkness of all of the images in the first and second stanzas contrasted with the “fire in [his] head,” and the way the meter and slant rhyme/consonance of “hollow lands and hilly lands” echo the rolling, repetitious feel of the image itself.

– E

What’s weighing on your shelf?

…and hard on the heels of authorial astrology, comes bookshelf psychoanalysis! The New Yorker’s book blog feature “The Subconscious Shelf” taps into that singular pleasure of scoping out other people’s bookshelves: readers submit photos of their libraries, and the blog’s contributors offer up lighthearted analyses of their tastes, concerns, aesthetics, and whatever else they can glean from their bibliophilic snapshots.

e.g. (on a photo featuring precariously free-standing towers of books) “The point is that while your system is aesthetically pleasing and features all the “right” authors—Updike, Agee, Chekhov, Keats, Capote, Orwell, and Roth, with a little Wells Tower thrown in—it does so at the expense of practicality and, furthermore, safety.” (har)

or, on the twin shelves of an engaged couple:

“Michael, you’ve got Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise of O,” Kafka’s Complete Stories, a couple James Baldwins, and lots and lots of philosophy. This, coupled with Jessica’s above claim that you wanted to take the shortest route through your pre-marital counseling, leads me to believe you value rationality highly. Jessica’s books are perhaps a tad lighter in spirit, but still quite serious and thoughtfully selected—your collections complement each other.”

Once I get back home to my primary bookshelves, I’d be way tempted to be self-indulgent and submit a shot or two…

– E

Astrological Angela Carter

Expect to see a lot of random posts about Angela Carter these days, because as part of my academic-year-end cool-down I’ve been indulging in a lot of re-reads of The Bloody Chamber, accompanied by munching of whatever academic essays I’ve been able to find for free through Jstor. wheee. (If you are not, like me, a babbling Carter fangirl, feel free to move along – when I get enthusiastic about things, I get very enthusiastic.)

So this has been one of my absolute favorite finds: the blogger at The Cantos of Mutabilitie has written, in great detail, an astrological analysis of Carter. I can’t pretend to understand any of the technical (?) aspects of it, but it’s both highly entertaining, and a wonderful tribute to Carter’s style and career. Some of my favorite bits:

“There’s a huge stellium (or planet cluster) in Taurus – Mercury, Saturn, Sun, Moon and Uranus all huddling together, with Jupiter just over in Aries – and then we find Neptune and Pluto swung out to one side. Accordingly, this is an extremely ‘earthy’ chart: the other elements are all relatively weak. This intense concentration on earth evokes the baroque celebration of the mundane in Carter’s writing, her heady ability to work mud and blood into her otherwise very mannered and super-sophisticated prose.”

…

“One senses that Carter’s taurean Mercury liked to hoard words like trinkets, cherishing dialect words and obsolete terms for the tackle and trim of various trades. … There’s almost a hunger to possess – a Taurus keyword – language, rubbing words as though they were pieces of smooth bottle-glass on the tideline, grubby and history-filled.”

…

and this particularly amusing part about Carter on Lovecraft:

“I find interesting that in a piece of criticism she derided H. P. Lovecraft for his horror writing, for two reasons. First, for his naivety; she saw that Lovecraft thought of evil as visible horror, and no one with a strong Pluto could fall for that one. Secondly, she wrinkled her nose at his sheer gloopiness, his childishly putrid slimes. She was a hard-edged writer; in contrast to Lovecraft, her kind of horror is the lurid glamour of the knife in the hand of the insane surgeon, always with the frisson of style – not deliquescence and gunk.”

(worth noting that the blogger is himself decidedly unfond of Lovecraft – he explains why at length in an equally ornate and amusing post here.)

– E

Tales of madness and depravity

Reviewer: Emera

I liiiiive! Somewhat. There are still exams to come, but I have a comfortable breathing space at the moment, so I’m going to work on whittling down my absurd backlog of short story reviews. To start, here are two helpings of dark fantasy/sci-fi.

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The nurse said that when I’m moved to my permanent home, there will be mirrors to see my reflection and windows made of glass instead of plexiglass. I do not know what a mirror is. I have read the word in the dictionary, of course, and heard it spoken. I know the press of the “m”, the sensuous delicacy of the “r”, as though biting a very soft peach. But the mechanics of the word — its sensation and definition — are different than the thing itself. I must have looked in a mirror before, although really, who knows?

Kelly Barnhill‘s “Tabula Rasa” (read 4.4.10, from The Three-Lobed Burning Eye) plays out a well-worn premise – an amnesiac patient recovering from an unknown operation slowly recovers troubling memories of her past – but even if none of the ideas are new, the execution is suspenseful and atmospheric, with great details and often lovely prose. I can never help imagining a moody graphic-novel adaptation, complete with blotty ink washes and scrawled lettering, whenever I read a story like this.

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Michael S. Dodd‘s “The Madwoman” (read 4.4.10, from The Three-Lobed Burning Eye) makes a lot more sense if you read the bit in his bio where he says that it was inspired by Storm Constantine. Transfigurations with cosmic consequences, combined with high-pitched melodrama and mild abuse of the English language – vintage Constantine. Unlike Constantine, though, Dodd creates too-portentous-for-you protagonists who are irritating and implausible rather than endearing.

“If you do not tell me,” Ylsa intoned in a velvet voice, “I shall eat these delicate morsels, one at a time, until you do.” With that pronouncement, she reached into the jar and withdrew a handful of the packets, pressing one to her lips.

“No!” Marisel screamed, and Ylsa shrank back for a moment at the sheer volume of the cry.

Mmm… yeah. It’s a shame because the premise has great potential, and some of the details are fun – I like that the main character is a shady apothecary, for example.

Go to:
Kelly Barnhill
Michael S. Dodd

Wonder, bleakness, and beyond

PSA – just in case it wasn’t already sort of obvious, Bad Book Cover Fridays are on hiatus while I plumb new depths of procrastination finish my theses (holycrap).

In the meantime, please enjoy the ever-encyclopedic David Forbes’ mind-blowing essay,  “Sovereign Bleak” (via Coilhouse) on sci-fi landmarks and the philosophical trends that shaped them.

– E

Guess that children’s book!

One of my roommates and I work part-time for a children’s library, and one of the activities this past fall was teaching kids how to interpret stained-glass windows – so in between midterm cramming, we ended up painting eight huge faux-stained-glass windows of popular children’s (and a couple YA) books for the kids to guess. Anyone else like to have a go?

1.

cotsenstainedglass-006

2.

cotsenstainedglass-009

Continue reading Guess that children’s book!

“The Story of the Hinge”

A snippet of a larger (but still very short) prose piece, “Nothing Began as It Is,” from Merwin’s The Book of Fables:

The story of the hinge is that it is learning to fly. “No hinge has ever flown,” the locks tell it again and again. “That is why were are learning,” it answers, “and then we will teach the doors.”

– E

Go to:
“Where Laughter Came From”