THE COYOTE ROAD SHOW
Jun. 11th, 2007 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushnerWe had a good old time at both readings. Lots of nice folks came. The anthology has already gotten one lovely review in Strange Horizons that singles out Delia's story, and another one in Locus (June 2007, Nick Gevers), not available online, which reads in part:
Easily of major interest to adult readers, the stories presented here (all originals) explore every permutation of the Trickster archetype: Coyote, Hermes, Japanese fox women, and imaginary variations aplenty; tricksters tricking others, tricksters being tricked, tricksters tricking themselves, innocents being tricked into becoming tricksters. It’s a recipe for rich humor, but also an opportunity to investigate just how tricksters arise in the first place, and why, despite their destructive mischief, they are so essential to human nature and human narrative. [....]
Other pleasing, subversive tales abound. “Honored Guest” by Ellen Kushner, set in her Riverside milieu, concerns a confidence woman who visits a foreign household dominated by a clever, cynical, bullying matriarch; the intruder’s complex scheme of theft becomes entangled with the aspirations of the matriarch’s put-upon granddaughter, and the results are amusingly passionate. Delia Sherman’s “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” is pungently evocative of the Louisiana backwoods, as a girl living among the werewolves of the swamps encounters human cruelty and perversity in their full measure, a spur to clever sleights and competing deceptions.
And - oops! - I forget to mention this review at GreenMan.
Easily of major interest to adult readers, the stories presented here (all originals) explore every permutation of the Trickster archetype: Coyote, Hermes, Japanese fox women, and imaginary variations aplenty; tricksters tricking others, tricksters being tricked, tricksters tricking themselves, innocents being tricked into becoming tricksters. It’s a recipe for rich humor, but also an opportunity to investigate just how tricksters arise in the first place, and why, despite their destructive mischief, they are so essential to human nature and human narrative. [....]
Other pleasing, subversive tales abound. “Honored Guest” by Ellen Kushner, set in her Riverside milieu, concerns a confidence woman who visits a foreign household dominated by a clever, cynical, bullying matriarch; the intruder’s complex scheme of theft becomes entangled with the aspirations of the matriarch’s put-upon granddaughter, and the results are amusingly passionate. Delia Sherman’s “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” is pungently evocative of the Louisiana backwoods, as a girl living among the werewolves of the swamps encounters human cruelty and perversity in their full measure, a spur to clever sleights and competing deceptions.
And - oops! - I forget to mention this review at GreenMan.