Tails of Wonder and Imagination - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597801704 ISBN 13: 9781597801706

Publisher: Night Shade, 2010

Synopsis

What is it about the cat that captivates the creative imagination? No other creature has inspired so many authors to take pen to page. Mystery, horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories have all been written about cats.

From legendary editor Ellen Datlow comes Tails of Wonder and Imagination, which collects the best of the last thirty years of science fiction and fantasy stories about cats by some of today’s most popular authors. With uncollected stories by Stephen King, Carol Emshwiller, Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Elizabeth Hand, Dennis Danvers, and Theodora Goss and a previously unpublished story by Susanna Clarke, plus feline-centric fiction by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, George R. R. Martin, Lucius Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, Graham Joyce, Catherynne M. Valente, Michael Marshall Smith, and many others.

Tails of Wonder and Imagination features more than 200,000 words of stories in which cats are heroes and stories in which they’re villains; tales of domestic cats, tigers, lions, mythical part-cat beings, people transformed into cats, cats transformed into people. And yes, even a few cute cats.

Edited by Ellen Datlow
Cat stories by:
Lawrence Block
Susanna Clarke
Charles de Lint
Carole Nels on Douglas
Neil Gaiman
Stephen King
Joyce Carol Oates
Kelly Link
George R. R. Martin
Sharyn McCrumb
and many others

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty years. She was the fiction editor of Omni magazine and Sci Fiction and has edited more than fifty anthologies. Datlow has also won lifetime achievement awards from three prominent genre organizations, and currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com.

Reviews

Few things alarm the experienced reader more than the prospect of a science fiction, fantasy, or mystery book that involves—or worse, fetishizes—cats. This reprint anthology is the exception, an assortment of 40 stories by authors who are for the most part willing to take cats on their own ground. Datlow avoids the trap of a too-narrow premise: though there appears to be a slight bias toward horror, the stories are various within that field, from Jack Ketchum's ghost story Returns to Michaela Roessner's highly scientific Mieze Corrects an Incomplete Representation of Reality and Edward Bryant's brilliantly repellent Bean Bag Cat. Other tales are amusing, like Lawrence Block's The Burglar Takes a Cat, or gently sentimental, like Dennis Danvers's Healing Benjamin. This is that rarity of rarities: an anthology of cat stories worth reading. (Feb.)
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Datlow’s anthology intentionally (i.e., thematically) full of cats manages to showcase quite a variety of stories by a very impressive list of authors—Stephen King, John Crowley, John Kessel, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharyn McCrumb, to name just a few. Ordinary housecats are on view, of course, and so are lions and tigers and manticores and one thought experiment. Mary A. Turzillo’s “Pride” is the bittersweet story of a boy and his saber-toothed cat; Jeffrey Ford and Catherynne M. Valente both offer tales of manticores, though their respective examples of the species are very different creatures; and Michaela Roessner gives voice to a famous physics thought experiment in “Mieze Corrects an Incomplete Representation of Reality.” Datlow brings horror, sf, and fantasy all into the volume on equal footing, making it likely that even genre readers who aren’t cat people will find something very much worth their while in it. --Regina Schroeder

Edition details

• Publisher: Night Shade
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597801704
• ISBN 13: 9781597801706
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Ellen Datlow