Articles liés à The Receptionist and Other Tales

The Receptionist and Other Tales - Couverture souple

Livre 31 sur 99: Conversation Pieces

Wheeler, Lesley

 
9781619760127: The Receptionist and Other Tales

Synopsis

Honor List for 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award

Edna, the heroine of The Receptionist, is a mother and the receptionist for an academic department. The morning after hearing a Voice telling her, "The first revolution: simply to refuse, " going through her email inbox, "Edna thought to check her spam." The message she found there from "nomic Utterance" changed everything.

Gwyneth Jones, author of Spirit and The Universe of Things writes: "Lesley Wheeler's The Receptionist is a delight: a stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, 'Zombie Thanksgiving' (T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force."

Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia and Cheek by Jowl, writes: "How much Modernism deprives us of when it declared both the fantastic in fiction and the narrative in poetry unrespectable, and what a pleasure it is now to see the exiled witches and the forbidden rhymes return. Where can an evil Dean meet his doom more fitly than in terza rima? Lesley Wheeler’s brief novel of misbehavior in academia, subtle and funny, rashly inventive and perfectly realistic, uses all the forgotten powers of metaphor and poetry to make the mundane luminous."

Review

For the lover of poetry and fantasy, for the survivor of academic politics or anyone interested in feminist speculative work, this book is a new and valuable Voice.

Sally Rosen Kindred, Strange Horizons

Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

À propos de l'auteur

Lesley Wheeler is a Virginia author whose recent books include the poetry collections Radioland and The Receptionist and Other Tales. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, and many other journals. Heterotopia, her second poetry collection, won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a Library of Virginia Award; The Receptionist and Other Tales was a James Tiptree Jr. Award Honor Book. In 2011, she received an Outstanding Teacher Award from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, and she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. The Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, she lives in Lexington, Virginia with her spouse, writer Chris Gavaler, and their two children. She blogs on poetry's possible worlds at The Cave, The Hive (http://lesleywheeler.org/).

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.