Saffron and Brimstone : Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories Strange Stories - Elizabeth Hand

Saffron and Brimstone

Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories Strange Stories

By: Elizabeth Hand

Paperback | 13 December 2006

Sorry, we are not able to source the book you are looking for right now.

We did a search for other books with a similar title, however there were no matches. You can try selecting from a similar category, click on the author's name, or use the search box above to find your book.

Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, "Saffron and Brimstone" is a worthy addition to an outstanding career.
Industry Reviews
Myth and magic are the ingredients assembled to sometimes stunning effect in this vivid gathering of previously collected and recently published stories from the award-winning fantasy author.Brandishing the lush descriptive prose that energized such critically acclaimed novels as Waking the Moon (1995) and Mortal Love (2004), Hand conflates reality with dream and disorientation, the physical world with realms visited in memory and imagination. In "Wonderwall," a former substance-abusing college dropout and wannabe writer reflects on her defiantly wasted youth; the doomed figure of a fellow drama-student soulmate "who was waiting to be discovered" and instead discovered his own frail mortality; and a nightmarish envisioning of a catastrophic near-future defined by environmental disaster and the AIDS pandemic. Two brief stories grounded in Greek mythology articulate the rueful observation that "Always, somewhere a woman waits alone for news." That archetypal sorrowing figure assumes the forms of the eponymous nymph "Echo," pining for Narkissos while subsisting on a remote Maine island, and the title temptress of "Calypso in Berlin," who has learned from her betrayal by Odysseus how to manage her restless lovers. More precisely contemporary themes are addressed in the vacillating post-9/11 love story ("Kronia") and the eerie tale ("The Saffron Gatherers") of a woman writer and all-purpose intellectual whose longtime bicoastal romance falls victim to the future shock she had feared, and perhaps imagined into being. The volume also includes three novellas from Hand's 2003 limited-edition collection Bibliomancy: a plaintive account of preparations for the pagan burial ceremony for its narrator's lifelong friend ("Pavane for a Prince of the Air"); the story of a rejected daughter's self-healing through the art of tattooing and the energy of Tarot cards ("The Least Trumps"); and a kick-ass horror story about a lonely lepidopterist's absorption into the only world that appears to want her ("Cleopatra Brimstone").Some redundancy and sketchiness are only slight blemishes in another rich display of this gifted visionary's enticing wares. (Kirkus Reviews)

More in Fantasy Fiction

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil - V. E. Schwab

RRP $34.99

$18.95

46%
OFF
Song of Chaos - C.C. Davie

Paperback

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Shadow of Wings - C.C. Davie

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Heliacle Rising - C.C. Davie

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
A Forgery of Fate - Elizabeth Lim

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
When the Moon Hatched : Moonfall - Sarah A. Parker

RRP $24.99

$16.95

32%
OFF
Shield of Sparrows - Devney Perry

RRP $34.99

$18.00

49%
OFF
Monk and Robot - Becky Chambers

RRP $34.99

$28.35

19%
OFF
Trinity Seven Revision, Vol. 2 : Trinity Seven Revision - Youichi Nishio
Never Flinch : From the No. 1 Bestselling author of HOLLY - Stephen King
Of Monsters and Mainframes - Barbara Truelove

RRP $34.99

$29.80

15%
OFF
DCC RPG : Dungeon Denizens - Chris Doyle

RRP $125.99

$113.50

10%
OFF
Face Meat - Bonten Taro

Paperback

RRP $35.99

$32.50

10%
OFF
Thunder Game : Ghostwalker, Book 20 : Ghostwalker Novel - Christine Feehan
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris - Evie Woods

RRP $22.99

$18.40

20%
OFF
Lore Olympus : Volume Eight - Rachel Smythe

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%
OFF