Showing posts with label Short Story Wednesday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Short Story Wednesday. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Short Story Wednesday: Carolyn See on William Kotzwinkle's JEWEL OF THE MOON



Book Review: Mixed Bag of Stories From Kotzwinkle
By CAROLYN SEE
FEB. 13, 1986 12 AM PT

Suppose you’re a 19-year-old girl, and smart as well as beautiful. You can have any basketball player you want, but a sky-high intellectual with John Lennon glasses gives you a book for Christmas--”Le Desire Attrappe par le Coeur,” Pablo Picasso’s only play--and now smartypants (your classmate) has a birthday coming up. What do you do about it, since you know he’s already read everything, in that insistent undergraduate way of his? Scoot on out to your nearest independent bookstore and buy him a copy of William Kotzwinkle’s Jewel of the Moon.

No one’s read it yet, it looks spooky and delicious and the author’s picture on the back looks like a combination of Merlin and Lennon himself. Direct the intellectual’s attention particularly to “Sun, Moon and Storm,” which chronicles the life of the artist Antonio Correggio as he painted his masterwork on a cathedral dome for venal theologians who care nothing for genius. . . .

Or, suppose you’re 19 and beautiful as well as smart. The basketball center on the college team has been hanging around, giving you woof-eyes and you think he’s pretty cute, so--in Math, probably--you hand him “Jewel of the Moon,” wrapped carelessly in newspaper. “No big deal,” you tell him. “No biggee. Just read ‘Victory at North Antor.’ When I read it, I don’t know why, I thought of you.”

Jumble of Stories

What we are addressing here, then, is a book of short stories, wildly different, thematically chaotic, attractively written. The stories are a jumble. No one (outside of the author) seems to have given them much thought or attention: A lax publicity release announces that only two of these stories have been published before: “All the others are being published for the first time,” but the author’s agent has countered that nine of these have already seen print.

And no one seems to know what to make of them. Again, the publicity release quotes Kurt Vonnegut: “William Kotzwinkle’s materials seem to come from way down deep.” Well, OK, but don’t most writers of fiction scramble around, dredging up their materials from “way down deep”?

The truth may be that these stories are so varied in tone that if you like some, you probably won’t be able to stomach the others: the volume is a mixed review. For instance, the title story is an erotic myth of creation, a god and goddess on a steamy honeymoon of sorts, creating the universe.

Again, in “Fana,” a tale of a Middle-Eastern dancing girl who is the very embodiment of the winking universe, the same themes are suggested: “There waited a white camel bearing a noble sheik. In the hoof-beats of the camel Al-nujum heard the drumming of time, and in the eyes of the sheik he saw the race of man. The sheik’s own heart was a flame which no man could extinguish, and here Al-nujum was inclined to rest--but Fana undulated once more.”

Clearly, here is a man who holds the sexual act in high regard, and who could argue against that? But readers who dote on this silken-pillow literature can’t be expected to like “Victory at North Antor,” which depicts life in a working-class high school, in a fiendish small town, in the middle of Northeast nowhere--a town where the adults live in mill shacks and have, as vocational opportunities, “the button mill, the pillow factory, or the sewer works.” Is it possible for there to be heroism in such grim and forgotten worlds? Certainly, for some--and that heroism heartens even the inarticulate gnomes still locked inside these hells of the imagination.

Great Fun to Read

“Victory at North Antor,” with its rich cast of characters--Shrimp Sondoni, Tootzi Zonka, Tony One-Punch and Franky Plunger--is great fun to read, as is “Star Cruisers, Welcome,” in which an invincible space ship full of invincible aliens (who literally eat Earth for lunch) makes the mistake of landing in the South Bronx, where the ship is taken apart, with terrific casualness, by a gang called the Walton Avenue Baldies, who sell their space parts to the local fence and break out the space booze.

A wonderful story, but where does that leave the lavender intricacies of Fana and Zahir and Al-nujum? It seems that this slim volume literally isn’t big enough for Fana and Tootsie Zonka.

More than 100 years ago, as they never tire of telling us in literature classes, Wordsworth and Coleridge got together and decided that for a project they’d work--separately--on making “strange things familiar and familiar things strange.” Thus, that host of golden daffodils from Wordsworth, and that Ancient Mariner from Coleridge. But, for the sake of their own fevered minds, they didn’t try doing both at once, as does Kotzwinkle. Never mind. Give this book to nice male undergraduates of every stripe. They’ll appreciate the culture and like the sex; they may grow their hair long, and buy a monocle like that pixie author on the back.





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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

SSW: June 1943: UNKNOWN WORLDS;; July 1943: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, SCIENCE FICTION (previously FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION); September 1943: FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES--stories from 1943 US fantasy fiction magazines:

A snapshot/slice of a time long past...notable that the most famous story in this issue of Weird Tales would be the most famous and among the most influential stories to be published in any of the issues cited here, one which posits that "Jack the Ripper" has found a means of achieving literal immortality through his crimes. Got a top-line banner, though not the cover illustration (albeit, to be fair, the story is not so very much Newsstand Illustration-friendly for the times). 





The most famous story here, I'd say, is the Wellman. I've certainly seen it collected and anthologized the most. Though the Sturgeon is probably a not too distant second...

This issue can be read here.  ISFDB index here. (Bloch's light-hearted, pun-laden "Lefty Feep"-series story might well be the best-remembered story in this issue.)


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Catherine L. Moore story would be the best remembered of the new fiction in this issue...even if by default. Chambers has had a spike in interest in part from television taking elements from his fiction and/or name-checking it in such series as True Detective, From, and Good Omens, the last in its turn based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore which also pays homage to Chambers, and apparently also Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which I have yet to see.


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Bloch story is (just barely) the most widely-reprinted here.

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Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES: SERIES VII (1979), edited by Gerald W. Page


I was moving around stacks of books in one of the various rooms of the house festooned with such stacks, and that's how I turned up my copy of The Eyes Still Have It the other week (see George Kelley's late review of the book, in today's list of Short Story reviews...I read it when it was newish, damned near 30 years ago, and the next book in that pile was today's subject, my copy, from 1979, of Gerald W. Page's fourth volume in The Year's Best Horror Stories, and the seventh to be published (the first three were reprints of a British annual, and Karl Edward Wagner would edit the annual for the next two decades). My first volume of the annual had been the fifth, which I discovered as a reasonably new book in '77, and it was one of the spurs that pointed me toward picking up new issues of the fiction magazines I could find on the newsstands, or even via mail order....

This was the first volume to gather fiction first published in 1978, though the only story included I had read previous to picking up this volume was the Charles Grant story, as many of his series of stories set in Oxrun Station, his haunted New England town creation, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in the first new issue I'd bought and read, March 1978. Page, unlike Wagner, would also sprinkle a few first-publication stories into his volumes, such as the Wellman and Schweitzer stories as the only examples here...but I had been reading Wellman in anthologies since I was eight years old, and was always ready for more.

I could recommend all the volumes in this DAW Books annual series, which ended, sadly, with the even sadder death of Wagner, but this one is among my very favorites. 

Among the most powerful stories, for me, was the lead-off story by Dennis Etchison, "The Pitch", which ISFDB somewhat clumsily tags as "non-genre", by which they mean it's not actually fantasy, sf, nor horror...which it isn't, but it is the kind of suspense fiction which deals with psychopathic behavior, of a sort Etchison seemed to be able to publish in the horror press more readily than in crime-fiction magazines or anthologies, perhaps because of its intensity. I think such fiction might not have as much trouble finding a cf market today. Likewise, Michael Bishop's closing story, involving a two-headed (but one body) sort of conjoined twins, runs all along the edge of the fantastic without planting a flag firmly on either side...a rather unsettling and brilliant story, particularly upon first reading.

Likewise among the better works in an impressive set, the Janet Fox story, "Intimately, with Rain"; first published in the now-obscure Collage, a West Coast university little magazine for November 1978; this below might be an earlier issue:


The weakest story in the volume was (for me, unsurprisingly) Stephen King's "The Night of the Tiger", from the F&SF issue before the first new one I bought. But even that one is better than such contemporary items as his "The Cat from Hell", which I read in Terry Carr's first volume of Year's Finest Fantasy the year before, or the Gunslinger stories, which first saw publication in F&SF beginning with the October 1978 "All-Star" anniversary issue.

Page was also not unwilling to include no little sword and sorcery/horror crossover fiction in his volumes, something that (perhaps surprisingly) Wagner was less wont to do (though horror published as horror was finding ever more markets in the decades Wagner was editing the series.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's Short Story reviews entries, and, I am somewhat disappointed this long-out-of-print volume is available in the Archive.org facsimile text at the link above if one has difficulties with standard print. I shall post links to other online texts, if time permits.

An index to the entire run of The Years's Best Horror Stories, volumes from all three editors the series had.
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Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: "Best of the Year" stories, mostly from 1964: John D. MacDonald, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, Frank Roberts; Peter Beagle

A return to the anthologies detailed in this post: 

FFB: THE 1965 ANNUALS of fiction and drama, further augmented...some more...


In which I begin with some of my favorites, taken from the fiction volumes (I may drop in some discussion of some of the plays eventually, or in another post).

"Blurred View" by John D. MacDonald, first published in the newspaper Sunday supplement magazine This Week (a bit like a more wide-ranging version of Parade), the 23 February 1964 fiction special, and can be read as collected and headnoted here by Peter Haining in his 1996 anthology The Orion Book of Murder; first read by me in "Anthony Boucher" (William White)'s Best Detective Stories of the Year: 20th Annual Collection

"Blurred View" is a relatively brief and brisk take on how a cad finds himself blackmailed after a murder he was quite sure was well-staged as accidental death; it's deftly written and very neatly thought out, if still a bit slight. I suspect annual editor Boucher was drawn to the neatness, as well as happy to have a reason to include a MacDonald story. (Not All That) Oddly enough, Judith Merril's sf and fantasy annual for '65 has a better, supernatural story by JDM, "The Legend of Joe Lee".

Further looking into the Merril annual, the first of these volumes I was to find and read (in 1978, at the Nashua, NH library, where I would also first find several of the others indexed in the earlier post), brings to mind some stories that made a stronger impact than either of these particular two MacDonald items, such as the lead-off story, "Automatic Tiger" by Kit Reed...a fantasy that was one of her earlier contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), and perhaps the first story of hers to gain her widespread attention, as she built her career with fairly equal emphasis on crime fiction, fantasy and some sf, and contemporary/mimetic fiction over the next several decades (having been a professional newspaper reporter before beginning to publish fiction, with a good story in F&SF a few years earlier); "Automatic Tiger" the story is mostly about keeping what's most important in one's life front and center, as well as taking some nicely-aimed chill-shots at what we too often mistake for what's important. Among those also to make a strong impression on me was Mack Reynolds's canny political sf story "Pacifist", about whether sustained peace can ever be achieved through violence, no matter how "surgical" (Reynolds was particularly fascinated by this kind of question, as once a Socialist Labor Party member who had served as speech-writer and general assistant for his father Verne's presidential run as the candidate of this extremely doctrinaire Marxist party, whose founder Daniel De Leon had criticized Marx for the latter's own "deviations" in his later political writing).






























Another yet was the Australian writer Frank Roberts, with the grim "It Could Be You", a dystopian slight exacerbation of how life was barely lived/survived (and sometimes not for long) in a very near-future Australia (or elsewhere in the "First World")--a more sophisticated early precursor to Mad Max, reprinted from the Oz news/analysis/arts/some fiction magazine The Bulletin, in the 3 March 1962 issue; Merril first read it in a 1964 issue of the then-new Short Story International magazine, which she loved...which folded after a couple of years, but was revived in time for me to find 1978 issues on newsstands and enjoy it for a number of years, not realizing that it hadn't been continually published when picking up my first issue. (I have belatedly realized I gave this story, and its complicated publishing history, its own SSW entry here).








































As I look at the two most venerable eclectic (if mostly contemporary-mimetic fiction) US/North American Anglophone anthologies for '65, the O. Henry and the Best American Short Stories, probably the most widely-read of the stories collected in both in recent years is the fantasy short story, one of only a relative few at shorter than novel-length (and many of those gathered in the volume The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances) by Peter Beagle, "Come Lady Death"...albeit this was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, opening some doors in '64 that would be closed to fiction from more fantasy-heavy magazines. A few of the other stories might come closer some of their cohabitants to sustained audiences/readership nearly as widespread, but I doubt that any are read nearly as often over the decades as the Beagle is...even when the other contributors (many more prolific than Beagle) have among their catalogs at least a few stories at least within shouting/staged reading distance, such as Joyce Carol (or, as she signs herself in the '65 annual, J. C.) Oates and her earlier "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"...with a mythic quality, though not fantasy per se, of its own.

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Australia's second-oldest literary magazine, Meanjin Quarterly, folds, as does the annual volume Best American Poetry:  Lit Mag News 

Adam Pearson: "The People Imagine a Vain Thing", Metropolitan Review, 9 August 2025



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Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: John D. MacDonald, Robert Arthur, Anne Gibbons, Val Duncan, Margaret Atwood: more from early 1950s US magazines: REDBOOK, June 1951; BLUEBOOK, July 1953; ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, June 1953, and a new vignette by Margaret Atwood (Twitter, 2025)

John D. MacDonald:  "Nothing Must Change" (Redbook 1951); "Manhattan Horse Opera" (Black Mask 1947, as reprinted in EQMM, 1953, as "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose")

MacDonald demonstrates his mastery of various modes of short fiction between these two stories, originally published four years apart, one in Redbook, which at this point was aiming itself at younger married couples, while still broadly fitting into the dynamics of a slick magazine with a largely female readership, the other in Black Mask, not quite the birthplace of noirish crime fiction writing, but as close as any single publication came to being so. (Spell- checkers on blogging software hate the the word "noirish".) "Nothing" involves the reunion of two women friends, one now one of the key visual arts critics of the time, the other having settled in as the wife of a bohemian younger painter, a bit of a smart-ass but very devoted to his work. His wife isn't so very sure of the quality of his work. Things go better than she fears, though the degree to which she has subsumed herself into his somewhat iffy career, and unsettled by that predicament, while feeling herself, to say the least, underaccomplished in the face of both these people important to her, and afraid her old friend will and that she won't tell him he has no shot, is well drawn.

The Black Mask story  is a good, late example of what the writers for that magazine could do, and JDM was not one of the less talented ones, for all that he came in in its very last years; a relatively minor but reasonably canny functionary in the underground sports betting world of Brooklyn gets caught in the switches when smoother operators set him up for a very hard fall at the hands of much uglier thugs; things aren't going his way at all. The ending is not necessarily one you'd guess was coming, but it works. Even relatively young JDM knew how to bring a verisimilitude to his work that even some of the greater pros who were his peers could envy. 

Robert Arthur: "The Man with the Golden Hand", Bluebook 1953, was a gifted editor and a good writer, but as with this example of his Murchison Morks loose series of fantasies, could lay the shtick on a bit heavily at times. It remains an amusing story, while pushing its comic aspects a bit hard, and there are better examples among the Morks tall-tale narratives (Morks isn't so much a recurring character as a narrator to others), but one could see why this story nonetheless led off the fiction contents of this issue. Redbook and Bluebook, as the titles might suggest, had begun their long runs as stablemates, but McCall by 1956 would sell Bluebook, which  was still definitely and squarely aimed at male readers, hence the fanboy article on Hemingway's machismo in this issue, as well. But they still weren't afraid of women writers contributing by 1953, and the near-vignette "Relic" by Anne Gibbons does a relatively good job of setting up a rather grim discovery in the life of its boy protagonist, in the midst of his not terribly nurturing life. 

Likewise, what little I've turned up about Val Duncan, whose EQMM reprint story "Emerald Bait" was originally in Esquire, and its slick origins and relatively clever resolution don't give us any more clues than I've been able to turn up otherwise whether Duncan was a male or female writer, with its biter-bit plot and reasonably deft battle of the sexes execution. It, too, won't rock anyone's world, but you might get a chuckle out of the last little twist. One could see why editor Frederic Dannay, half of "Ellery Queen"'s two-cousins team on the writing side, dug it.


















Bluebook [Vol. 97 No. 3, July 1953] ed. Maxwell Hamilton (McCall Corporation, 25¢, 128pp, quarto, cover by Robert Doares) [] Can be read here.

This issue can be read here.



This issue can be read here.


Margaret E Atwood
@MargaretAtwood
Here's a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike -- we are told -- The Handmaid's Tale. (Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.): John and Mary were both very, very good children. They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits. They grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex. Although they claimed to be Christian, they paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor and the Good Samaritan and forgiving your enemies and such; instead, they practised selfish rapacious capitalism, because they worshiped Ayn Rand. (Though they ignored the scene in The Fountainhead where “welcomed rape” is advocated, because who wants to dwell, and also that would have involved sex and would de facto be pornographic. Well, it kind of is, eh?) Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk? So they lived happily ever after. But while they were doing that The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job. The end.
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Margaret Atwood: 'Handmaid's Tale Banned in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Schools...And everyone and their pet canary wants me to "comment."' (In The Writing Burrow, Atwood's blog, 2 September)

For more of today's stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Piet Nel's reviews of stories from a number of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction dear to my heart and often key early reading experiences...
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