The Fate of Mice
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Gathering together the most outstanding short stories of Susan Palwick's twenty-year literary career, The Fate of Mice is a powerful collection from an extraordinary fantasist. These unflinching tales, including three original pieces, consider a woman born with her heart exposed and the heartless killer who protects her, a wolf who is willingly ensnared by a devious academic, a businessman resurrected to play at politics, and an ingenious mouse dreaming beyond the laboratory.
With the perceptiveness of Joyce Carol Oates, the inventiveness of Ray Bradbury, and the emotional resonance of Alice Sebold, The Fate of Mice is a meditation on the very art of storytelling: mythic, beautiful, and often brutal, filled with authentic compassion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning the past 20 years of Palwick's career, the eight previously published and three new stories in this outstanding collection (after her 2005 novel The Necessary Beggar) display the author's versatility. The fine title story about an IQ-enhanced mouse named Rodney recalls "Flowers for Algernon." "Gestella" centers on a woman werewolf whose accelerated aging complicates her doomed marriage to a self-obsessed professor. In "Jo's Hair," Palwick imagines remarkable alternate fates for Louisa May Alcott's little woman, Jo March, and her chopped and sold chestnut braid. The quintessential fairy tale "Stormdusk" depicts a child worried about her mother, a trapped snow maiden; the wise, whimsical concluding gem, "GI Jesus," addresses friendship and sacred smalltown "miracles." Palwick's genre-bending short fiction defies categorization and blends humor with pathos.
