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- Weird Women, Wired Women
Visionary stories expose the humor and horror of contemporary women's lives.
Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.
KIT REED is an Adjunct Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Her twelve novels include Captain Grownup, Catholic Girls, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, and her newest J.Eden. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. In SF, she has published three short story collections and the novels Armed Camps, Magic Time, Fort Privilege, and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, a finalist for the Tiptree Prize. "Whoever," the next –to-last short story she read in the New York Review of Science Fiction's series at Dixon Place this year, is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "The Singing Marine" was a short story nominee at the 1996 World Fantasy Convention.
"Her humorous, ironic prose could best be described as The Feminine Mystique meets The Twilight Zone. Her surreal short stories provide a unique commentary on the role of women in America from the 1950s to the present."
~Booklist
"Reed is an expert at using science fiction to cast a subversive eye on women's roles. This fine showcase of some of her best stories is a significant contribution.""
~Pamela Sargent
"Her flights of fancy are tipped with curare."
~Brian W. Aldiss
"A significant and needed contribution by an important feminist fiction writer who has the guts and wit of Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr.""
~Marleen Barr
"Illustrating the powers of fantastic literature to illuminate real sociological dilemmas and personal psychological states, Reed's collection is both a popular book for general readers and a useful primary text for studying 20th-century writing by women.""
~Paul Di Filippo
""Full of humor, pathos, understanding, and an insidious horror which makes laughter as wild as a scream, and makes terror an hilarious release.""
~Worlds Ahead
""She is the SF writer par excellence of the war between the generations . . . Kit Reed frees us as we read her.""
~John Clute, Science Fiction Weekly
""Her humorous, ironic prose could best be described as The Feminine Mystique meets The Twilight Zone. Her surreal short stories provide a unique commentary on the role of women in America from the 1950s to the present.""
~Booklist
""Reed is that good, her writing is a treasure house of gems.""
~Washington Post Book World