This volume was a finalist for the 2004 Lambda award. Individual stories were finalists for the Tiptree, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.  With Her Body presents three pieces of short fiction by the Nebula-, Lambda-, and Tiptree-award winning novelist Nicola Griffith. Intense stories about hope, joy, the body, mainly joy and the body--feeling the world on our skin, the place where Us and Not-Us meet. Nicola Griffith writes about being as well as doing--about life and love and the fears that keep us from having what we want.  The women in these stories live in a world not quite like ours, where the jungle is alive with more than animals, music can be made with the body, and civilization can only end if we all give up...

With Her Body (Conversation Pieces)

Literature & Fiction

GRIFFITH, NICOLA

Contemporary

Aqueduct Press

Seattle, February 2076. The Marq ssan bring business as usual to a screeching halt all over the world, and Professor Kay Zeldin joins Robert Sedgewick, US Chief of Security Services, in his war against the invaders. Soon Kay is making rather than writing history. But as she goes head-to-head against the Marq ssan, the long-buried secrets of her past resurface, and her conflicts with Sedgewick and Security Services multiply. She faces terrifying choices. Her worldview, her very grip on reality, is turned inside out. Whose side is she really on? And how far will she go in serving that side? 
 Samuel R. Delany writes: "The coupling of real thoughtfulness and rip-roaring excitement is as rare in science fiction as in any other genre. But here, in Alanya to Alanya, they're locked together in the most exciting-and certainly the most intelligent!-tale of alien invasion I've read in decades. Because it is believable, it's fascinating. And, in the years that have seen Margaret Thatcher go and Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice arrive, Kay Zeldin is an extraordinarily effective portrait of a political hero." Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren 
 Politically savvy and philosophically relevant, this title puts a human face on today's problems. --Library Journal

Alanya to Alanya (Marq'ssan Cycle, Book One)

Duchamp, L. Timmel

Literary

The Queen of Heaven and Earth had no easy job, not even in 3000 BCE, when both heaven and earth were smaller. Even within the gates of her own city Uruk, the far-sighted and beautiful goddess Inanna requires the assistance of her lovers Gilgamesh and Ninshubur. With their help, she establishes her throne, defeats the guardian monsters of Grandfather Wisdom to bring civilization to Uruk, and returns alive from an ill-fated family reunion in Hell.  Ninshubur, Inanna's faithful counselor, is a woman of power and courage in her own right, but she lacks Inanna's ambition and usually find herself on the fringe of an adventure. But the fringe is often the best vantage point for the storyteller, and, after all, this is the dreamtime of myth, when even the fringe of an adventure can feature pterodactyls, sports cars, and terrific sex.

The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor (Conversation Pieces)

Sheldon, Anne

Poetry

The Traveling Tide (Conversation Pieces, Vol.5)

Love, Rosaleen

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Moment of Change is an anthology of feminist speculative poetry. The contributors include many fine poets, among them Ursula K. Le Guin, Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Amal El-Mohtar, Vandana Singh, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Athena Andreadis, Jo Walton, and Catherynne M. Valente. Editor Rose Lemberg writes in her introduction that ''Literature of the fantastic allows us to create worlds and visions of society, origins, social justice and identity, but notes that even though we are in the world, our voices are folded into the creases. We speak from memory of stories told sidewise. We speak from pain; is that serious enough? The world has not been welcoming, but what other world is there?'' ''In these pages,'' Lemberg summarizes, ''you will find works in a variety of genres--works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.''

The Moment of change

Lemberg, R. B.

Honor List for 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Edna, the heroine of The Receptionist, is a mother and the receptionist for an academic department. The morning after hearing a Voice telling her, "The first revolution: simply to refuse, " going through her email inbox, "Edna thought to check her spam." The message she found there from "nomic Utterance" changed everything. Gwyneth Jones, author of Spirit and The Universe of Things writes: "Lesley Wheeler's The Receptionist is a delight: a stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, 'Zombie Thanksgiving' (T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force." Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia and Cheek by Jowl, writes: "How much Modernism deprives us of when it declared both the fantastic in fiction and the narrative in poetry unrespectable, and what a pleasure it is now to see the exiled witches and the forbidden rhymes return. Where can an evil Dean meet his doom more fitly than in terza rima? Lesley Wheeler’s brief novel of misbehavior in academia, subtle and funny, rashly inventive and perfectly realistic, uses all the forgotten powers of metaphor and poetry to make the mundane luminous." Review For the lover of poetry and fantasy, for the survivor of academic politics or anyone interested in feminist speculative work, this book is a new and valuable Voice. 
Sally Rosen Kindred, Strange Horizons

The Receptionist and Other Tales (Conversation Pieces)

Wheeler, Lesley

Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated Surrealism. This is Christopher Barzak’s tribute to them, three stories and an essay that enter into a humane surrealism which turns away from the unconscious and toward magic. Sometimes the stories themselves seem to be paintings. Sometimes painter and writer may be characters, regarding each other through a painful otherness, talking in shared secrets. Barzak’s stories are huge with the spacious strangeness of worlds where there is always more room for a woman to escape her tormentors, or outgrow an older self. Here we find a bird-maker and a star-catcher whose shared history spills over into the birds and the stars themselves; a girl who outgrows her clothes, her house, and finally her town—and leaves to find her body a new home; a landlord, whose marriage, motherhood, separation, sexual exploration, and excursions into self-portraiture all take place within a single apartment building. In “Remembering the body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism,” Barzak comments on the images that inspired these stories and discusses his own position as a writer among painters.
Reviews
”These two refracted views of the paintings—through fiction, through scholarship—infuse the audience's own readings of the works in question, providing a delightful triple translation of art (painting) to art (fiction) to art (painting) to interpretation (scholarship/fiction). This is what makes the book so definitively interstitial, to my eye: It is many things, in many shades and forms, all looping back together infinitely.”
”The end result is a joyful tribute to these three women painters in the form of handsome, lyrical fiction and precisely considered scholarship. Barzak's awareness and sensitivity bring the project full-circle, as he considers the project/process/praxis of translating these women’s subjectivities to the page from his own personally-inflected position in cultural production.”
 Brit Mandelo, TOR.COM

Birds and Birthdays (Conversation Pieces)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Barzak, Christopher

Fantasy

Sometimes the cure is the disease...Jin is a designer and spreader of plagues intended to keep the human population in balance with the dwindling resources at hand. Jin is also a neuter, one of a clandestine group of naturally genderless humans whose lack of gender-specific hormones and needs results in an advanced capacity to grasp science and mathematics-but in Jin's case, not human nature and emotion. When a young woman named Sandy is thrust violently into the world of the neuters, the worlds of genders and neuters begin to clash, and only Jin can set things right...if it can connect with others enough to understand how. From the limestone caverns deep beneath the New Mexico desert to the streets of Albuquerque, Amarillo, and St. Louis, Jin straddles the line between creation and destruction. With the help of Sandy, an enclave of underground artists, and an unwitting ally bent on taking the neuters down, Jin struggles to create the disease that will save humanity from itself...even if no one wants to be saved.

Necessary Ill

Taber, Deb

Genre Fiction

Squaring the Circle presents 24 fantastic tales by Gheorghe Sasarman, originally published in Romanian, to readers in English, thanks to the efforts of Ursula K. Le Guin, a great admirer of Sasarman's tales. Each tale marvelously depicts the world of a city through the eloquence of its architecture. Eleanor Arnason writes of these tales: ''Squaring the Circle reminds me of some of my favorite books: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Angelica Gordodischer's Kalpa Imperial, and Ursula K LeGuin's Changing Planes. I don't know if there's a name for this kind of fiction Faux history? Fantastic geography? Imaginary anthropology? Whatever it is, I love it. Humans have always liked to hear about fabulous journeys and strange distant places. Othello told Desdemona, ''of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline.'' Maybe books like this meet our need for amazing stories, now that the world is mostly mapped. 
 ''Squaring the Circle is highly readable. (I got it through in one sitting.) And it's fun. There is a playfulness in this kind of fiction, a subversive undercutting of the 19th-century idea of the novel. It gives us all the pleasure of a travel guide, and the additional pleasure of being-- in spite of the meticulous description -- unreal. As it turns out, a cityscape can be as interesting as a bildungsroman and as meaningful. The first section of Squaring the Circle, ''Vavylon,'' is a fine description of a class society that claims to be egalitarian. Anyone can climb to the top of ziggurat, except the ramps are greased. I thought of Stalinist Romania when I read it, but it could also apply to the US.''

Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony Fantastic Tales

Sasarman, Gheorghe

The Stone Boatmen evolved from Sarah Tolmie's fascination with the fourteenth-century visionary poem, Piers Plowman, which she has also explored in the media of virtual reality and dance. The novel weaves a tale of three cities, separated by oceans, lost to one another long ago: the first, the city of rituals, of ceremonies; the second, the city of words, of poetry; and the third, the city of the golden birds, of dreams. In their harbors stand the stone boatmen, pointing outward toward the unknown. Now the birds are fostering a new-found relationship of the three cities of the ancestors, and the voyages of the ship Aphelion and its crew are beginning to rebuild the links. Ursula Le Guin declares of The Stone Boatmen: ''Certain imaginative novels never best-sell, yet remain alive, a singular treasure to each new generation that finds them -- books such as Islandia, The Worm Ouroboros, Gormenghast. The Stone Boatmen has the makings of one of these quiet classics. It is lucid yet complex. Its strangeness fascinates, captivates. To read it is to find yourself in a country a long, long way from home, taken on a unforeseeable journey -- and when it's over, you wish you were still there.''

The Stone Boatmen

Tolmie, Sarah

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