Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller

Today, my latest book is released: Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, with a foreword by Kelly Link.

The book collects 19 of Carol Emshwiller’s 150 stories, strange tales of aliens, animals, and humans, stories of war and apocalypse, of ordinary life made extraordinary, of beauty and ugliness interwoven through prose that is quirky and idiosyncratic in all the best ways. The stories are poetry, jewels, visions. Her work was beloved by writers as different as Ursula Le Guin and Grace Paley, and she influenced multiple generations of writers who sought to demilitarize the borders of science fiction and literary fiction.

In Locus, Niall Harrison says the book “is, as it sets out to be, an exemplary primer on the work of an extraordinary writer.”

Though I have been enchanted by Emshwiller for most of my life, I never thought I would work on a book like this. But nobody else was doing it, and it was a book I thought needed to be in the world. Younger writers I talked to did not know Carol Emshwiller’s work, and I wanted to do something about that. I wanted a book I could hand to people and say, “Read anything in this. Then you’ll understand.”

I’m grateful to all the folks at Third Man Books, especially designer Amin Qutteineh and editor-in-chief Chet Weise, for their immediate enthusiasm for this project and their devotion to getting it as right as we possibly could. In his review, Niall Harrison declares it “is a scrupulous book”, and that is thanks to the team at Third Man.

I will be forever grateful to Carol Emshwiller’s family (in particular literary executor Susan Emshwiller) for trusting me to do this. I am also grateful to the many friends and acquaintances with whom I have shared an enthusiasm over the years for Carol’s writing. When Emshwillerians get together, we trade enthusiasms: “Oh, and what about this story?” “Yes! Amazing! And this one, too!” “Yes — amazing, I laugh and cry every time I read it!”

Finally, I owe special thanks to Kelly Link. First, of course, for bringing us so many of Carol’s writings via her and her husband Gavin Grant’s Small Beer Press. Part of the reason my generation of weirdo writers was so influenced by Carol’s work is because Kelly and Gavin made it easily available 20+ years ago. Kelly’s foreword is a moving memoir of working with Carol, and it brought her alive for me again. I have no higher praise.

Here’s a tale I’ve told before, but which bears repeating here: In the mid-to-late-’90s, I was home for the summer from college in New York, and I went down to Boston and stopped in at my favorite bookstore, Avenue Victor Hugo. I picked up a copy of Century magazine, with a story by Carol in it, and her novel Leaping Man Hill. The clerk was a tall guy with a Scottish accent. “If you like Century and Carol Emshwiller,” he said, “you might like a little zine I’ve started publishing.” Reader, I scoffed. This person thought he was publishing something in the same league as Carol Emshwiller?! I was polite but abruptly left without taking a copy of the zine. Of course, that was Gavin and the zine was Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which would publish some of Carol’s stories, and would even publish one of my own (“The Lake”) quite a few years later. Few publishers and publications have been as important to my life, and Gavin and Kelly have for decades been some of my favorite people on this, or any other, planet.

Enough of me. Go read some Carol Emshwiller!

Here’s the table of contents, for anyone curious:

Moon Songs
Day At The Beach
The Start of the End of It All
Yukon
Mrs. Jones
Grandma
Boys
Al
The Bird Painter in Time of War
All of Us Can Almost
Pelt
Creature
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison
I Live with You and You Don’t Know It
The Lovely Ugly
If Not Forever, When?
Baby
Desert Child
All I Know of Freedom