| Carol Emshwiller |
LEDOYT LEAPING MAN HILL CARMEN DOG THE START OF THE END OF IT ALL |
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Ledoyt
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LEDOYT
“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.”
“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. I enjoyed and admired her story enormously!”
“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 this book that are remarkably moving; there are scenes of great power.” “As haunting as the song of a canyon wren at twilight.” |
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LEAPING
MAN HILL
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LEAPING MAN HILL
A sequel to the novel Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill tells the story of Abel, an impish, mute child; of Mary Catherine, whose eccentricities trigger new spirit in him; and of Henny, a World War I veteran. These and other characters come to life amid Emshwiller's rich country landscape. With Leaping Man Hill Carol Emshwiller continues to breathe life into the American Western, turning the genre on its head, filling it with surprises, and giving it unparalled authenticity, power, and poignancy.
“I was going to read Leaping Man Hill very very slowly to
enjoy it and the first day I did, but the second day to hell with it,
I read the whole thing SNAP GULP nothing could stop me. I mean I HAD to
find out, didden I?” This publication was made possible thanks to a generous grant by the Lannan Foundation. |
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CARMEN
DOG
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CARMEN DOG
FINALIST, 1990 JAMES TIPTREE, JR., RETROSPECTIVE AWARD
In this feminist Animal Farm, the reasonable, scientific world of men turns chaotic when women start metamorphosing into animals (birds, wolverines, smakes, polar bears, you name it), and animals metamorphose into women.
Pooch is a loyal golden setter who is turning into a beautiful young woman, but her erstwhile mistress is devolving into a vicious snapping turtle. When the mistress bites her own baby, Pooch takes the baby and runs. Lonely and lost, she falls into one misadventure after another but discovers her own desire: to be an opera star!
The use of outrageous fantasy enables Emshwiller to make powerful statements about what men really think about women and what women allow men to do to them. Disturbing and hilarious, Emshwiller's keenly honed sword cuts both ways in the war between the sexes.
“This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinocerus and The Handmaid’s Tale. ... Imagination and absurdist humor mark this book throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about male-female relationships.”
“An inspired feminist tale ... warm, compassionate and refreshingly jargon-free ... a gentle exposition of human folly that nevertheless makes some tough points about the inequalities between the sexes.... A wise and funny book.”
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THE START
OF THE END OF IT ALL
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THE START OF THE END OF IT ALL
WINNER, 1991 WORLD FANTASY AWARD
“It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things,” aliens advise the middle-aged divorcée in “The Start of the End of It All.” So begins a master plan to change the world, eliminating cats and establishing a “vast kitchen network.”
Replete with fierce humor and insight, Carol Emshwiller's stories turn reality upside down. Humans are seen by soaring bird-men as those creatures “with heavy thighs, flat faces, funny little teeth all in a row.” And everyday life is seldom predictable: One morning a man awakens in his small, neat apartment to find a winged, naked woman with wild eyes.
Emshwiller's tales are full of ordinary people discovering extraordinary lives. In “The Circular Library of Stones,” a woman finds a buried library in which she daily makes startling archaeological finds. In another story, a woman suddenly decides to move in with the man across the street whom she has watched for months but never talked to. As she moves her plants and throw-rug into his apartment while he is asleep, she asks herself, “Why hadn't she ever taken action before, even there, in that old drab world next door?”
Through Emshwiller's high-powered lens we see not only human cruelty and loneliness but also the search for love and fantasy fulfilled. In her inimitable style, Emshwiller offers new myths for a mixed-up age.
“[Her] 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.”
“I've loved Carol Emshwiller's work for years. Her imagination is fierce and funny, never mean.”
“Carol Emshwiller must be read, watched for, nurtured as an original and exciting new talent.”
CAROL EMSHWILLER on The Start of the End It All:
“I wrote these stories because I'm a writer, and I like to write,
and I'm always sitting down at the typewriter. I hardly ever start out
with a preconceived idea of what I'm going to write about. I write to
find out what I want to write. I like to surprise myself. I'd never write
if I knew too much about what I was going to do. These stories (mostly)
turned up as I was improvising. They grew out of first sentences and first
paragraphs that looked promising. They seemed to come out of my fingers,
not my mind. My mind, it has always seemed to me, isn't very clever—is
too pedestrian. My fingers and my typewriter seem much smarter.”
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CAROL EMSHWILLER has been widely published in literary, feminist, and science
FIction magazines. In addition to these Mercury House books, she is the
author of Joy in Our Cause and Verging on the Pertinent. Her
work has been anthologized in Intersections, Roger Caras’s New Treasury
of Cat Stories, Insights: Creating & Performing, The Penguin Book of Erotic
Stories by Women, and Dangerous Visions, among other publications.
She lives in New York City, where she teaches fiction writing at New York
University. She spends her summers in Bishop, California, near the settings
for Ledoyt andLeaping Man Hill.
“First and foremost, Emshwiller is a poet—with a poet’s sensibility, precision, and magic. She revels in the sheer taste of words, she infuses them with an extraordinary vitality and sense of life.”
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