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Novelties & Shorts

Fancies and Goodnights is what the great short story writer John Collier called his collection of fantastic tales, one or two  of which you likely know even if you haven’t read them.  These are my fancies and goodnights – short things I’ve written or things that have been collected.  In no particular order:

Totalitopia (PM Press, 2017):  A collection of essays and stories, one original, and a lengthy chat with the editor, Terry Bisson.

The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosenkreutz (Small Beer Press, 2016): My version – not a translation, but a modern-reader-friendly update – of a famously strange little German book of 1616, a journey to a magic castle, beheadings and resurrections, alchemical wonders, puzzles and stories.

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (Subterranean Press, 2005): Novella; two theater-obsessed teenagers get a chance to spend a 1950s summer working at the (fictitious) Indiana Shakespeare Festival in the period of the last major outbreak of polio.

Novelties & Souvenirs (2004) Contains all my short fiction up to the time of publication in 2004. This volume seems surprisingly hefty to me, as I don’t write very much short fiction. I wanted it to have an epigraph from Lolita: “The words novelties and souvenirs simply entanced her by their trochaic lilt.” Permission was not forthcoming. The cover is one of the least attractive I’ve been assigned.