"In her moving and elegant new collection, New York Times bestseller Karen Joy Fowler writes about John Wilkes Booth's younger brother, a one-winged man, a California cult, and a pair of twins, and she digs into our past, present, and future in the quiet, witty, and incisive way only she can.
The sinister and the magical are always lurking just below the surface: for a mother who invents a fairy-tale world for her son in 'Halfway People'; for Edwin Booth in 'Booth's Ghost,' haunted by his fame as 'America's Hamlet' and his brother's terrible actions; for Norah, a rebellious teenager facing torture in the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award winner 'The Pelican Bar' as she confronts Mama Strong, the sadistic boss of a rehabilitation facility; for the narrator recounting her descent in 'What I Didn’t See.'
With clear and insightful prose, Fowler's stories measure the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness. This collection, which includes two Nebula Award winners and stories which have been significantly rewritten since first publication, is sure to delight listeners, even as it pulls the rug out from underneath their feet."
"San Francisco in the 1890s is a town of contradictions. Lizzie Hayes, a docile, middle-aged spinster, is praised for her volunteer work with the Ladies' Relief and Protection Society Home. When the wealthy but ill-reputed Mary Ellen Pleasant shows up with an orphan in tow, Lizzie is drawn to them both. For it is the beautiful Mrs Pleasant, object of suspicion because of her rumoured voodoo practise, who holds the key to freeing Lizzie's rebellious nature."
"A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California.
Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing.
The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships. Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy."
