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“Combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical panache of Animal Farm.”—Entertainment Weekly

"Carol is the most unappreciated great writer we''ve got. Carmen Dog ought to be a classic in the colleges by now . . . It''s so funny, and it''s so keen."—Ursula K. Le Guin

“A rollicking outre satire.... full of comic leaps and absurdist genius.”—Bitch

“A wise and funny book.”—The New York Times

"This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinoceros and The Handmaid''s Tale.... Imagination and absurdist humor mark [Carmen Dog] throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about male-female relationships."—Booklist

"Her fantastic premise allows Emshwiller canny and frequently hilarious insights into the damaging sex-role stereotypes both men and women perpetuate."—Publishers Weekly

The debut title in our Peapod Classics line, Carol Emshwiller’s genre-jumping debut novel is a dangerous, sharp-eyed look at men, women, and the world we live in.

Everything is changing: women are turning into animals, and animals are turning into women. Pooch, a golden setter, is turning into a beautiful woman—although she still has some of her canine traits: she just can''t shuck that loyalty thing—and her former owner has turned into a snapping turtle. When the turtle tries to take a bite of her own baby, Pooch snatches the baby and runs. Meanwhile, there''s a dangerous wolverine on the loose, men are desperately trying to figure out what''s going on, and Pooch discovers what she really wants: to sing Carmen.

Carmen Dog is the funny feminist classic that inspired writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler to create the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award.

"My favorite thing about her is the wry, uncanny tenderness of her stories. She has the astonishing ability to put her finger on the sweet spot right between comedy and tragedy, that pinpoint that makes you catch your breath. You''re not sure whether to laugh out loud or cry, and you end up doing both at once."—Dan Chaon

"When I first read China Mountain Zhang many years ago, Maureen McHugh instantly became, as she has remained, one of my favorite writers. This collection is a welcome reminder of her power—they are resonant, wise, generous, sharp, transporting, and deeply, deeply moving. McHugh is enormously gifted; each of these stories is a gift."—Karen Joy Fowler

"Wonderfully unpredictable stories, from the very funny to the very grim, by one of our best and bravest imaginative writers."—Ursula K. Le Guin

"Enchanting, funny and fierce by turns —a wonderful collection!"—Mary Doria Russell

* Story Prize finalist.* A Book Sense Notable Book.

In her luminous, long-awaited debut collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.— A woman introduces her new lover to her late brother.— A teenager is interviewed about her peer group''s attitudes toward sex and baby boomers.— A missing stepson sets a marriage on edge.— Anthropologists visiting an isolated outpost mission are threatened by nomadic raiders.McHugh''s characters—her Alzheimers-afflicted parents or her smart and rebellious teenagers—are always recognizable: stubborn, human, and heartbreakingly real.This new trade paperback edition has added material for book clubs and reading groups, including an interview with the author, book club questions and suggestions, and a reprint of Maureen''s fabulous essay, "The Evil Stepmother."Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award, and Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and New York Times Editor''s Choice.

“Wilhelm really knows students and knows how to teach them to craft a professional story.”—The Oregonian

Part memoir, part writing manual, Storyteller is an affectionate account of how the Clarion Writers’ Workshop began, what Kate Wilhelm learned, and how she passed a love of the written word on to generations of writers. Includes writing exercises and advice. A Hugo and Locus award winner.

“If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you.”—From the Introduction by George R.R. Martin

Acclaimed cult author Waldrop''s stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo.

The first paperback (and twentieth anniversary) edition of a landmark debut collection.  Waldrop’s capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, world wars, long-dead film stars, Mexican wrestlers, pulp serials, and fairy tales is put to good use in these sophisticated re-combinations of oddball television shows, radio plays, scientific expeditions, extinct species, knock-knock jokes, and questions like these:

    * What if the dodo wasn''t extinct after all?    * What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind?    * What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond?

Never published in paperback, long out of print, and extremely collectible, Howard Who? was Waldrop''s seminal debut collection. If you haven''t read Waldrop before, you''re in for a treat.

"The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful.... Italo Calvino once said that he was "known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself." Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he''ll come up with next, but somehow it''s always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art -- and to fishing."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"A charming collection."—Los Angeles Times

"Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop." —Metrobeat

Table of Contents    Introduction by George R. R. Martin.    The Ugly Chickens    Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen    Ike at the Mike    Dr. Hudson''s Secret Gorilla    . . . the World, as we Know''t    Green Brother    Mary Margaret Road-Grader    "Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me    Horror, We Got    Man-Mountain Gentian    God''s Hooks    Heirs of the Perisphere

Praise for Howard Waldrop:

"Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy."—Library Journal

"Wise and funny."—Publishers Weekly

"An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy."—Booklist

"Erudite and gonzo."—Science Fiction Weekly

"Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre."—The Houston Post/Sun

"The man''s a national treasure!"—Locus

"The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honkytonk angel."—Washington Post Book WorldAbout the Author:

Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens."

"Startling, unclassifiable. . . Full of mysteries — all originating in its characters’ troubled psyches — and full of terrors that can’t be explained."—New York Times

Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s previous novels:

“Inhabits a world between reason and insanity—it’s a delightful waking dream.”—People

“One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time.”—Peter Straub

Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

Elizabeth Hand grew up in New York State. In 1975 she moved to Washington, DC, to study playwriting at Catholic University. After seeing Patti Smith perform, Hand flunked out and became involved in the DC and New York City nascent punk scenes. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; she returned to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her BA in 1985. The author of seven previous novels and the recipient of a Maine Arts Commission and an NEA Fellowship, she is a regular contributor to The Washington Post Book World. Hand lives with her family on the Maine coast.

Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres—realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political—and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction.

This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and challenging world that we live in. These nineteen stories, by some of the most interesting and innovative writers working today, will change your mind about what stories can and should do as they explore the imaginative space between conventional genres. The editors garnered stories from new and established authors in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and also fiction translated from Spanish, Hungarian, and French. The collection features stories from Christopher Barzak, Colin Greenland, Holly Phillips, Rachel Pollack, Vandana Singh, Anna Tambour, Catherynne Valente, Leslie What, and others.

"A wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring."—New Haven Review

"Odd, Deep, Delightful"—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"This idea of playing with genre conventions is interstitiality''s charm and what makes it a movement for the hypertext age. We want words to do more now and for our time not to have been spent with just one idea."—Adrienne Martini, Baltimore City Paper

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo and brought up in New York City. She earned a PhD in Renaissance studies at Brown University and taught at Boston and North-eastern universities. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Award winner), and Changeling. Sherman co-founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation, dedicated to promoting art that crosses genre borders.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent a peripatetic childhood in various European countries. She teaches at Boston University, is completing a PhD, and is introducing classes on the fantastic tradition in English literature. She is the author of a short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting.

By water logic, a cow doctor becomes a politician. A soldier becomes a flower farmer. A lost book contains a lost future. The patterns of history are made and unmade.

Amid assassinations, rebellions, and the pyres of too many dead, a new government forms in the land of Shaftal—a government of soldiers and farmers, scholars and elemental talents, all weary of war and longing for peace. But some cannot forget their losses, and some cannot imagine a place for themselves in an enemy land. Before memory, before recorded history, something happened that now must be remembered. Zanja na’Tarwein, the crosser of boundaries, born in fire and wedded to earth, has fallen under the ice. Now, by water logic, the logic of patterns repeated, of laughter and music, the lost must be found—or the found may forever be lost.

Laurie J. Marks teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of five previous novels, and her first two Elemental Logic novels (Fire Logic and Earth Logic) won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award and received multiple starred reviews. She is a recipient of the Fairy Godmother Award (James D. Tiptree, Jr. Award) and a founding member of Broad Universe.

"Rosenbaum''s The Ant King and Other Stories contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In "Biographical Notes to ''A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes,'' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"—yes, his name is part of the title—the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art."—Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008

* "Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, "best first collection" for this book."—Booklist (Starred review, Top 10 SF Books of the Year)

"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland."—Publishers Weekly

"Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with "Biographical Notes," a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and "A Siege of Cranes," a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents.... Perhaps none of the tales is odder than "Orphans," in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant."—Kirkus Reviews

"Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual."—Boston Phoenix

A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting.

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and McSweeney’s, been translated into fourteen languages, and listed in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Rosenbaum’s work has been reprinted in Harper’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He lives in Switzerland with his family.

"[Ryman] has not so much created as revealed a world in which the promise of redemption takes seed even in horror."—The Boston Globe

“Sweeping and beautiful. . . . The complex story tears the veil from a hidden world.”—The Sunday Times

“Inordinately readable . . . extraordinary in its detail, color and brutality.”—The Independent

"Ryman has crafted a solid historical novel with an authentic feel for both ancient and modern Cambodia."—Washington DC City Paper

“Another masterpiece by one of the greatest fiction writers of our time.”—Kim Stanley Robinson

"Ryman''s knack for depicting characters; his ability to tell multiple, interrelated stories; and his knowledge of Cambodian history create a rich narrative that looks at Cambodia''s "killing fields" both recent and ancient and Buddhist belief with its desire for transcendence. Recommended for all literary fiction collections."—Library Journal

Archeologist Luc Andrade discovers an ancient Cambodian manuscript inscribed on gold leaves but is kidnapped—and the manuscript stolen—by a faction still loyal to the ideals of the brutal Pol Pot regime. Andrade’s friends, an ex-Khmer Rouge agent and a young motoboy, embark on a trek across Cambodia to rescue him. Meanwhile, Andrade, bargaining for his life, translates the lost manuscript for his captors. The result is a glimpse into the tremendous and heart-wrenching story of King Jayavarman VII: his childhood, rise to power, marriage, interest in Buddhism, and the initiation of Cambodia’s golden age. As Andrade and Jayavarman’s stories interweave, the question becomes whether the tale of ancient wisdom can bring hope to a nation still suffering from the violent legacy of the last century.

Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels Air (winner of Arthur C Clarke and James Tiptree awards) and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner). Canadian by birth, he has lived in Cambodia and Brazil and now teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester in England.

hese two short novels bookend Poppy Z. Brite’s cheerfully chaotic series starring two chefs in New Orleans. The Value of X introduces G-man and Rickey, who grew up in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and who are slowly realizing there are only two important things in life: cooking and each other. Rickey’s parents aren’t quite so taken with the boy’s plans and get him an impossible-to-resist place at the Culinary Institute of America.

In D*U*C*K, Rickey and G-man’s restaurant, Liquor, is doing well but there are the usual complications of running a kitchen: egos get bruised, people get fired . . . and then Rickey is jumped in an alley by one of their ex-waiters.

On the mend, Rickey takes a side job to cater the annual Ducks Unlimited banquet, where every course must, of course, include the ducks the hunters have bagged. Rickey’s crew are ready to meet the challenge, but Rickey’s not sure he can do it all and deal with the guest of honor—his childhood hero, former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert.

"Fun foodie fiction, and readers will scarf it down as quickly as a plate of blackened crawfish."—Publishers Weekly

Originally published in limited hardcover editions, these two novels are full of the pure joy of love, hard work, and great food and are a tremendous extension (or introduction) to Brite’s series.

Praise fo the Rickey and G-man stories:

“A high-end restaurant is...a gift that keeps on giving. The heat, the bickerings and intrigue, the pursuit of perfection, the dodgy money keeping it all afloate: the setting spawns plots...Can the [Liquor] franchise sustain itself? The answer is yes.”—New York Times

“World-class satire and perfect New Orleans lit.”—Andrei Codrescu

“Steeped in spicy dialogue and [New Orleans] flavor...a behind-the-swinging-door peek into the world of chefs.”—Entertainment Weekly

Poppy Z. Brite’s fiction set in the New Orleans restaurant world includes Prime, Liquor, and Soul Kitchen. She has also published five other novels and three short story collections. She lives with her husband Chris, a chef, in New Orleans.

Selected as one of the Best Books of the Year in science fiction and fantasy by Amazon.com.

Delving deeper into the genre-spanning territory explored in Interfictions, the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s first groundbreaking anthology, Interfictions 2 showcases twenty-one original and innovative writers. It includes contributions from authors from six countries, including the United States, Poland, Norway, Australia, France, and Great Britain.

Newcomers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson, Theodora Goss, and Alan DeNiro rub shoulders with established visionaries such as Jeffrey Ford (The Drowned Life), Brian Francis Slattery (Liberation), Nin Andrews (The Book of Orgasms), and M. Rickert (Map of Dreams). Also featured are works by Will Ludwigsen, Cecil Castellucci, Ray Vukcevich, Carlos Hernandez, Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Ziemska, Peter M. Ball, Camilla Bruce, Amelia Beamer, William Alexander, Shira Lipkin, Lionel Davoust, Stephanie Shaw, and David J. Schwartz.

Colleen Mondor, of the well-known blog Chasing Ray, interviews the editors for the afterword.

Henry Jenkins, ex-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and now a member of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and School of Cinematic Arts, provides a fantastic introduction sure to set readers’ imaginations alight.

Interfictions 2 is here and ready to be read, discussed, taught, blogged, taken apart, and re-interpreted.

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. She earned a PhD in Renaissance Studies at Brown University and taught at Boston University and Northeastern University. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, Changeling, and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Christopher Barzak is the author of the novels One for Sorrow and The Love We Share Without Knowing. His stories have appeared in Nerve.com, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, Descant, and the first volume of Interfictions. He teaches writing at Youngstown State University.

This is the fourth novel—and much-anticipated conclusion—of John Crowley’s astonishing and lauded Ægypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Ægypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.

Praise for Elizabeth Hand:

"Fiercely frightening yet hauntingly beautiful."—Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl

"A sinful pleasure."—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in award-winner Elizabeth Hand''s new collection. From the summer isles to the mysterious people next door all the way to the odd guy one cubicle over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

Elizabeth Hand''s novels include Shirley Jackson Award–winner Generation Loss, Mortal Love, and Available Dark.

Don''t rush Trafalgar Medrano when he starts telling you about his latest intergalactic sales trip. He likes to stretch things out over precisely seven coffees. No one knows whether he actu-ally travels to the stars, but he tells the best tall tales in the city, so why doubt him? Trafalgar is Angélica Gorodischer''s second novel to be translated into English. Her first, Kalpa Imperial, was selected for the New York Times summer reading list.

Angélica Gorodischer lives in Rosario, Argentina. She has received many awards, most recently the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Praise for Peter Dickinson''s mysteries:

"A literary magician controlling an appar-ently inexhaustible supply of effects."—Penelope Lively

For best-selling author Lady Margaret, the past is no longer a pleasant memory. Her first lover''s mysterious death and the seeming inevitability of her inheriting the family''s stately home are cast in new light by secrets unwillingly revisited. The first in a series of reprints of Peter Dickinson''s mysteries, this classic British mystery will win fans currently engrossed in Downton Ab-bey.

Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers'' As-sociation''s Gold Dagger. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.