Moon Songs
The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller
Introduction by Kelly Link
Fall 2025
“A greatest hits collection of unclassifiable speculative fiction. … This compellingly assembled retrospective gives longtime Emshwiller fans a chance to savor her unique sensibility again, while lucky newcomers enjoy the thrill of discovery.
“Wickedly astute and surreally funny.”
Moon Songs gathers some of the best short stories from the long career of a true literary original, Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019). Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and Pushcart Prize, Emshwiller has been described as a writer of science fiction, literary fiction, magic realism, postmodernism, fabulist fiction, and everything in between.
These are tales of love and war, of aliens and animals, of science, magic, wonder — and each infused with Emshwiller’s uniquely off-kilter sensibility, uniting humor and horror through unpredictable sentences that render the domestic epic, the mundane apocalyptic (and vice versa). Her stories are psychologically penetrating but also fleet as fables; they roam across species and galaxies, giving us superhero grandmothers, melancholy bird people, befuddled robots, men trapped by poisoned gender, and cats that save the world.
This selection presents 19 stories that show Carol Emshwiller’s full range: the quirky science fiction stories that first made readers notice her name, experimental literary fiction from the 1960s and ’70s, and award-winning stories from a late-life burst of creativity that confirmed her mastery and made her an inspiration for younger generations of writers.
Moon Songs revels in mysteries of language, humanity, and everyday life … while also singing music into our dreams.
Reviews
“When you … want something that is playing its own game, something difficult and slippery yet playful and fun, what a joy it is to have her work at hand.”
—B.D. McClay,
The Washington Post
❍
“Moon Songs is representative of both the breadth of Emshwiller’s career and its peaks, and the selections have been sequenced into a book that works, with illuminating juxtapositions of stories written decades apart. It also becomes the best easily available text for these stories…. It is a scrupulous book, and it is recommended.”
—Niall Harrison,
Locus
❍
“Moon Songs is a beautiful book, and important.”
—Ursula Pflug,
Ancillary Review of Books
“Emshwiller’s readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019) published her first short story in 1955, and became a regular contributor to science fiction and fantasy magazines as well as literary journals. Her books include the World Fantasy Award-winning collection The Start of the End of It All, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Mount, and two volumes of Collected Stories. Her short stories won a Pushcart Prize and two Nebula Awards, and in 2005 she received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
“Carol Emshwiller’s imagination is fierce and funny, never mean. She creates people, situations, and combinations of words that make me read her sentences and paragraphs again and again for the sheer pleasure of reading.”
—Grace Paley
“Carol Emshwiller’s stories are wonder-filled, necessary, and beautifully crafted.”
—Samuel R. Delany