We are continuing our series of blog posts presenting the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominations.
Today we’ll look at the two more award categories: Collections and Anthologies.
Remember, if you are interested in any of these books, click the mouse on the book cover or the store name to order them from an online bookseller.
Best Collection
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A Better AngelAuthor: Adrian, Chris |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering — illness, regret, mourning, sympathy — in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In “Why Antichrist?” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice — of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales. |
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Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen StoriesAuthor: Millhauser, Steven |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author hailed by The New Yorker as “a virtuoso of waking dreams” comes a dazzling new collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession. In Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser transports us to unknown universes that uncannily resemble our own. The collection is divided into three parts that fit seamlessly together as a whole. It opens with a bang, as “Cat ‘n’ Mouse” reimagines the deadly ritual between cartoon rivals in a comedy of dynamite and anvils — a masterly prologue that sets the stage for the alluring, very grown-up twists that follow. Part one, “Vanishing Acts,” features stories of risk and escape: a lonely woman disappears without a trace; a high school boy becomes entangled with his best friend’s troubled sister; and a group of teenagers play a treacherous game that pushes them deep into “the kingdom of forbidden things.” Excess reigns in the vivid, haunting places of Part two’s “Impossible Architectures,” where domes enclose whole cities, and a king’s master miniaturist creates objects so tiny that soon his entire world is invisible. Finally, “Heretical Histories” presents startling alternatives to the remembered past. “A Precursor of the Cinema” proposes a new, enigmatic form of illusion. And in the astonishing “The Wizard of West Orange” a famous inventor sets out to simulate the sense of touch — but success brings disturbing consequences. Sensual, mysterious, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journeythrough brilliantly realized labyrinths of mortal pleasures that stretch the boundaries of the ordinary world to their limits — and occasionally beyond. |
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The Diving Pool: Three NovellasAuthor: Ogawa, Yoko |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan’s bestselling and most celebrated authors From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. “The Diving Pool” — A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool–a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. “Pregnancy Diary” — A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination — but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister’s? “Dormitory” — A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg. Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities. Table of Contents:
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The Girl on the FridgeAuthor: Keret, Etgar |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad — such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade. |
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Just After SunsetAuthor: King, Stephen |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection Stephen King — who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies — delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything’s Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications. Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating — and then terrifying — journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl” is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable — and resourceful — as Audrey Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark. In “Ayana,” a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, “N.,” which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient’s irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside . . . or keep the world from falling victim to it. Just After Sunset — call it dusk, call it twilight, it’s a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It’s the perfect time for Stephen King. |
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Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and HemingwayAuthor: Oates, Joyce Carol |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway — Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius” — for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life-forms utterly alien to the poet’s exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a “distilled” state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet’s verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of “the little girl who loves you”; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master’s fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the “profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him.” Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates’s most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer’s memoirist work in the form of fiction. |
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Best Anthology
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Bound For Evil: Curious Tales of Books Gone BadEditor: English, Tom |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology Bound for Evil: Curious Tales of Books Gone Bad is a mammoth volume gathering together for the first time ever the very best stories of diabolical books. Illustrated throughout with over two dozen black and white pieces by World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator Allen Koszowski. Bound for Evil collects 66 tales of lost knowledge and restless ghosts, secret libraries and forbidden texts, alternate worlds and ancient gods; written by 61 acclaimed writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Rhys Hughes, Gary McMahon, H. P. Lovecraft, Jeffrey Thomas, Simon Strantzas, M. R. James, Mark McLaughlin, Robert W. Chambers, Christopher Fulbright, Gary Fry, and dozens more. Also included within the pages of Bound for Evil is a hidden (67th) tale. Limited to 500 copies. Deluxe smythe sewn, 800-page hardcover, bound in black imitation leather, and stamped in gold leaf with an original cover design by Allen Koszowski. |
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Exotic Gothic 2: New Tales of TabooEditor: Danel Olson, Danel Olson |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology Be drawn into Gothic enigmas from seven continents, and struggle to find your own explanation for the inexplicable in these twenty-four original stories. Identify with bewildered, ghost-ridden characters facing (or becoming) monstrosity. Let the darkness — from a dress dummy to a rogue nuclear state — creep closer to your living experience . . . and discern the Gothic secret: the revelation of the monster’s purpose. Almost viral in its adaptability, the nouveau Gothique transforms itself in these pages, feeding off broader cultural anxieties. Skilfully violating conventions of horror and suspense — and opening the door to other genres including fantasy, historical account, and travel narrative — the freshness of its stories infects us with something unknown. Our old expectations offer no antibodies to this latest mutation. |
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Fast Ships, Black SailsEditor: VanderMeer, Ann |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger — and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate — and so do readers everywhere! Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate. Limited to 500 copies. Deluxe smythe sewn, 800-page hardcover, bound in black imitation leather, and stamped in gold leaf with an original cover design by Allen Koszowski. |
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The New Uncanny: Tales of UneaseEditor: Eyre, Sarah and Ra Page |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology Performing a deft metaphorical evisceration of Sigmund Freud’s classic 1919 essay that delved deeply into the tradition of horror writing, this freshly contemporary collection of literary interpretations reintroduces to the world Freud’s compelling theory of das unheimliche — or, the uncanny. Specifically designed to challenge the creative boundaries of some of the most famed and respected horror writers working today — such as A. S. Byatt, Christopher Priest, Hanif Kureishi, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Matthew Holness, and the indomitable Ramsey Campbell — this anatomically precise experiment encapsulates what the uncanny represents in the 21st century. Masterfully narrated with the benefit of unique perspectives on what exactly it is that goes bump in the night, this chilling modern collective is not only an essential read for fans of horror but also an insightful and intriguing introduction to the greats of the genre at their gruesome best. |
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Shades of DarknessEditor: Roden, Barbara and Christopher Roden |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology Shades of Darkness is the fifth anthology of original supernatural fiction to be published by Ash-Tree Press and edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden. This latest volume presents the chilling work of twenty-six modern practitioners of the supernatural genre. |
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