Praise for Carol Emshwiller's previous
books:
Carol Emshwiller's stories have
appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Century,
Scifiction,
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet,
The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, Crank!,
Confrontation, and many other anthologies and magazines.
Ledoyt
Mercury House, 1995
Ms. Emshwiller is so gifted. .
. . She describes the ragged, sunswept Western countryside with a
vividness and clarity that let us see it as her characters do -- and
understand why they love it as they do. There are moments of [Ledoyt]
that are remarkably moving; there are scenes of great power.
--The New York Times Book Review
[Ledoyt is] as haunting
as the song of a canyon wren at twilight.
--Atlanta Journal
It's always cheering when an unclassifiable
writer suddenly grows a little more unclassifiable. That's the case
with Carol Emshwiller, the feminist-fantasist author of three short-story
collections and one earlier novel.... With Ledoyt, Emshwiller
offers a historical novel of sometimes gothic intensity, but one remaining
well within the realm of physical possibility...of all things -- a
Western...a story of unlikely love and destructive jealousy.
--San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
A fierce and tender portrait of
a girl growing up fierce and tender; a sorrowful, loving portrait
of a man whose talent is for love and sorrow; a western, an unsentimental
love story, an unidealized picture of the American past, a tough,
sweet, painful, truthful novel.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Tales of Earthsea
-- read the full
review
Ledoyt is sweet and true
and heartbreaking, echoing with the actualities of our old horseback
life in the American West. Carol Emshwiller has got it dead right.
--William Kittredge, editor of The Portable Western Reader
Leaping
Man Hill
Mercury House, 1999
Leaping Man Hill is
a satisfying novel, with complexities not susceptible to easy summary,
as well as those quirky characters and some playful language. Finally,
though, it is dominated by Emshwiller's sure development of Mary Catherine.
Readers who grow with that young woman may remember this book a long
time.
--San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
[Leaping Man Hill is] another
strong, satisfying western . . . a headstrong young heroine succeeds
in finding her niche in the ranch country of post-WWI California.
. . . An exuberant yet exquisite portrait of a woman coming into her
own.
--Kirkus Reviews
Emshwiller is particularly good
at showing the ways we aspire to self-sufficiency to insulate ourselves
from a world beyond our control.... Leaping Man Hill is, if
anything, a love story.... Love, strange and complicated, has been
a theme of Emshwiller's from her earliest, fantasy-tinged short stories,
in which characters float, shrink, grow wings, and cohabitate with
aliens under its influence. As Emshwiller knows, implausibility and
affection seldom rule each other out, and in some cases the combination
effects amazing transformations. In Emshwiller's carefully drawn,
realistic western context these changes are less pronounced, but no
less revealing or remarkable.
-- San Francisco Bay Guardian
-- read the full
review
Carmen
Dog
Mercury House, 1990
** Small Beer Press will reprint
Carmen Dog in June 2004 through their new Peapod Press imprint.
More.
Emshwiller has produced a first
novel that combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical
panache of Animal Farm. In the hyper-Kafkaesque world of Carmen
Dog, women have begun devolving into animals and animals ascending
the evolutionary ladder to become women. . . . there has not been
such a singy combination of imaginative energy, feminist outrage,
and sheer literary muscle since Joanna Russ' classic The Female
Man.
--Entertainment Weekly
This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire
mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinoceros and The Handmaid's
Tale.... Imagination and absurdist humor mark [Carmen Dog]
throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about
male-female relationships.
--Booklist
An inspired feminist fable....
A wise and funny book.
--The New York Times
-- review from Vector:
The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association
-- review from Strange
Horizons
The
Start of the End of It All
Mercury House, 1990
-- Winner of the 1991 World Fantasy
Award
Eighteen short fantastic fictions
comprise Emshwiller's third superb collection. . . . again, her improvisations
include inventive fabulisms and feminist satires, many with a science-fictional
spin to them.... Emshwiller's fabulisms court a sense of the sacred
but cleverly undercut that sense with tongue-in-cheek playfulness.
The ensuing deft balance between mystery and skepticism is touching
-- and often aesthetically triumphant.
--Kirkus Reviews
Emshwiller's characters embrace
the unexpected and extraordinary; their lives leap from the mundane
to the wondrous in a surreal instant, and the reader feels transported
too.
--Publisher's Weekly
-- review
by Gwyneth Jones on the Broad
Universe site
-- L.
Timmel Duchamp on "Peninsula," a story from Carol Emshwiller's
first collection, Joy in Our Cause
-- review from Strange
Horizons
Verging
on the Pertinent
Coffee
House, 1989
"I have loved her work for
years. Her imagination is fierce and funny, never mean."
--Grace Paley
"[She] must be read, watched for,
nurtured as an original and exciting new talent."
-- Doris Grumbach
Venus Rising, a
chapbook
Edgewood
Press, 1992
A stunning story of an alien
exiled to an exotic world, the peaceful inhabitants he finds there
and his attempts to "civilize" them.
"I have always thought that
Carol had the most inventive mind in science fiction. It is not possible
to summarize her work as a whole nor describe it satisfactorily piece
by piece, but it does all have a particularly tough kind of feminity
that appeals to me very much. Her heroines generally rise to the occasion
and they do this with only their courage and their imagination and
they do this in ways no one else would. And yet, as a reader, you
always liked her heroines just fine before they were heroic, so there
is a bit of sadness there, that the world is the sort of world that
forces nice, ordinary people into heroism. Other writers can be funny
one moment and heart-breaking the next, but Carol is routinely both
at once and she makes it look effortless or accidental."
--
Karen Joy Fowler
"Here is a female living
out among the breakers. Here is a man from the land-dwelling culture.
When they meet, the encounter touches on culture-clash, gender politics,
evolution in its manifold forms, relative civilization, even murder
and kidnapping. No one else has a voice like Carol Emshwiller's. She
should be heard."
--
Locus
"Venus Rising
is wonderfully Emshwillerian: lyrical in its language, delightfully
idiosyncratic in its thinking, filled with laughter and strange pain."
-- Pat Murphy