“Pride and Prometheus,” a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.
An astonishing, long-awaited collection of stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Includes John Kessel’s modern classic “Lunar Quartet” sequence about life on the moon.
“A sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel’s wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you’ll ever read (“The Red Phone”).”
—Entertainment Weekly A-
Table of Contents
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence [audio]
Every Angel is Terrifying [audio]
Downtown
The Last American
The Invisible Empire
A Lunar Quartet
– The Juniper Tree
– Stories for Men
– Under the Lunchbox Tree
– Sunlight or Rock
The Snake Girl
It’s All True
The Red Phone
Powerless
Pride and Prometheus [part 1 | part 2]
Hardcover dustjacket easter egg:
— SciFi.com
— Metro Arts
— Foreword
— Dependable Erection(!)
— Book Sense Pick
— Podcasts
“One of the best collections of the year.” — Locus
“These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch.”
— Publishers Weekly“Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless.”
— SciFi.com“John Kessel’s writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel’s wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn’s first light. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek.”
— Rich Rennicks, Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC“Critics were all excited to see another anthology from Kessel … not only did Kessel pull off these stories with gusto but he did so in such a way that readers can enjoy his tales even if they have not read the original authors.”
— Bookmarks Magazine
On the web:
- John Kessel’s home page
- A sneak peek at the collection in the Raleigh News & Observer.
- Scifi Weekly Interview with Kessel and James Patrick Kelly by John Joseph Adams (2006)
- Scifidimensions audio interview (2002)
- Strange Horizons interview (2001)
- Locus Interview, Hour of the Wolf (w/Jim Kelly) (1997)
- Interview (1993)
- IMDB | ISFDB | Wikipedia | Library Thing
- Find The Baum Plan in a library near you.
About the Author
John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Poll, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product.
His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1992. Writer Kim Stanley Robinson has called Corrupting Dr. Nice “the best time travel novel ever written.”
Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Credits
- Cover art © Nathan Huang.
Download cover for print.
