{"product_id":"9781931520027","title":"Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat if the world ended on your birthday—and no one came? What if your grandmother was a superhero? Recommended to readers of Judy Budnitz, Geoff Ryman, Aimee Bender, and Grace Paley this fourth collection by the wonderful Carol Emshwiller includes the Nebula winning story \"Creature.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"These short stories have a mysterious glow.\"— \u003ci\u003eJANE\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Carol Emshwiller’s stories are wonder-filled, necessary, and beautifully crafted.”\u003cbr\u003e—Samuel R. Delany\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I read one of the stories in Carol Emshwiller's new collection, \u003ci\u003eReport to the Men's Club,\u003c\/i\u003e in progress several years ago and have thought about it ever since. I could even quote you lines! And now, having read the rest of the elegant, complex, insightful stories, I know she's done the same thing to me again eighteen times over! Emshwiller knows more about men and mortality and love and loss and writing and life than anybody on the planet! Dazzling, dangerous, devastating writer! Unforgettable (and I mean that literally!) collection! Wow! Wow! Wow!\"\u003cbr\u003e—Connie Willis\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Carol Emshwiller ( \u003ci\u003eCarmen Dog,\u003c\/i\u003e etc.) lends her elegant wit to \u003ci\u003e Report to the Men's Club,\u003c\/i\u003e a collection of 19 fantastic short fictions treating the war between the sexes. Such tales as \"Grandma,\" \"Foster Mother\" and \"Prejudice and Pride\" are brim-full of wry insights into male-female relationships. Testimonials from Samuel R. Delaney, Maureen McHugh, Terry Bisson and Connie Willis, among other big names, should send this one into extra printings.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A daring, eccentric, and welcome observer of darkly human ways emerges from these 19 motley tales. Often writing in an ironical first-person voice, storywriter and novelist Emshwiller ( \u003ci\u003eLeaping Man Hill\u003c\/i\u003e , 1999, etc.) assumes the persona of the outsider or renegade who flees the community as if to test boundaries and possibilities. In \"After All,\" the narrator is a grandmother who decides to set out on a \"makeshift journey\" in her bathrobe and slippers simply because it is time. The setting is vague: she flaps through the town and then into the hills, pursued, she is sure, by her children, and, in the end, she is merely happy not \"to miss all the funny things that might have happened later had the world lasted beyond me.\" Both in \"Foster Mother\" and \"Creature,\" the mature, quirky narrators take on the care of an abandoned, otherworldly foundling and attempt to test their survival together in the wilds. In other stories, a character's affection for a scarred pariah forces her out of her home and through a stormy transformation-as in the sensationally creepy \"Mrs. Jones.\" Of the two middle-aged spinster sisters, Cora and Janice, Janice is the fattish conspicuous one who decides to tame and civilize at her own peril the large batlike creature she finds wounded in the sisters' apple orchard. Janice does get her husband, and through skillful details and use of irony, the story becomes a chilling, tender portrait of the sisters' dependence and fragility. At her best, Emshwiller writes with a kind of sneaky precision by drawing in the reader with her sympathetic first person, then pulling out all recognizable indicators; elsewhere, as the long-winded \"Venus Rising\" (based on work by Elaine Morgan),the pieces read like way-far-out allegories. A startling, strong fourth collection by this author—look for her upcoming \u003ci\u003eThe Mount\u003c\/i\u003e .\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This strange collection of stories is populated by creatures of all sorts, human and alien. The collection-closing title piece takes the form of a speech given to a men's club by someone who has just been initiated into membership, despite the accident of birth that made her biologically female. The other stories range topically from the faith of a scribe in \"Modillion\" to love at first sight in \"Nose.\" What makes them satisfying is the personalities of their characters. Even the shortest pieces present characters who possess all the force of real persons who might be standing beside us. For the most part, Emshwiller keeps the stories simple, engaging us with their characterization rather than fast, copious action. We stay engaged because they render enough emotion to sustain our creaturely interest.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A real joy to read. This is a collection to delight and intrigue readers and writers of all persuasions. Go out and buy it now.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Science Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Elliptical, funny and stylish, they are for the most part profoundly unsettling. In \"Mrs. Jones,\" a spinster tries to one-up her sister in an ongoing codependent battle by trapping and seducing the angel (demon? alien?) that is living in their orchard. In \"Creature,\" a man cohabitates with a massive female monster—one of a race that has been engineered to kill him. In \"One Part of the Self Is Always Tall and Dark,\" a woman, happily convinced that she is going crazy, dreams of long sentences composed of nothing but three-letter words: \"She was far out and tip top too.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This is a wonderful collection of short fiction, marked by tremendous variety, a wonderful, funny, knowing, and sympathetic voice, and a truly off-center imagination.... Carol Emshwiller is a real treasure. She seems underappreciated to me, but this late burst of productivity may help remedy that situation. Both \u003ci\u003eThe Mount\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eReport to the Men's Club\u003c\/i\u003e are first rate books.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eSF Site\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Emshwiller sentences are are transparent and elegant at the same time. Her vocabulary, though rich and flexible, is never arcane.\"\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eThe Women's Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarol Emshwiller's stories have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Magazine of Fantasy \u0026amp; Science Fiction, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, Crank!, Confrontation, Trampoline, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales,\u003c\/i\u003e and many other anthologies and magazines.\u003cbr\u003e    Carol is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has been awarded an NEA grant, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant, the ACCENT\/ASCENT fiction prize, and the World Fantasy, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Gallun, and Icon awards.\u003cbr\u003e    Carol Emshwiller is the author of many collections of short fiction including \u003ci\u003eReport to the Men's Club, I Live with You,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Start of the End of it All\u003c\/i\u003e (World Fantasy Award winner), \u003ci\u003eVerging on the Pertinent,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eJoy in Our Cause,\u003c\/i\u003e and the novels \u003ci\u003eCarmen Dog, Ledoyt, Mister Boots, The Secret City, \u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLeaping Man Hill. \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e    She lives in New York City in winter and spends the summers in a shack in the Sierras in California.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Small Beer Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47060643741936,"sku":"9781931520027","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781931520027_p0.jpg?v=1763640373","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781931520027","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}