Mythic Delirium Books Products

All products from this brand (2 total)

<p><strong>Winner of the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection</strong><br /> <br /> <strong>Contains &quot;The Bone Swans of Amandale,&quot; 2015 Nebula Award finalist for Best Novella</strong><br /> <br /> <strong>2015 <em>Locus</em> Recommended Reading List, Best Collection and Best Novella</strong><br /> <br /> &quot;C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.&quot;<br /> --Catherynne M. Valente, <em>New York Times</em>-bestselling author of the <em>Fairyland</em> novels<br /> <br /> &quot;These stories are a pure joy. C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language--O! her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable.&quot;<br /> --Delia Sherman, author of <em>Young Woman in a Garden: Stories</em><br /> <br /> &quot;<em>Bone Swans</em> is a joy of feathery bones &amp; ghoulish clowns. I adored every word. Like an eyas cries for meat, I cry for more. C.S.E. Cooney's a major talent and these are major talent stories. Who can resist hero rats, pouting swans, feral children, flying carpets and the Flabberghast? So tongue-tied am I with delight I fall back on the usual cliches: gripping, delightful, insightful, rollicking &amp; lyrical--and yet not one cliche is to be found in <em>Bone Swans</em>, only stories of surpassing delicacy and wit, told by a lady of rare talent. Please, ma'am, might I have some more?&quot;<br /> --Ysabeau S. Wilce, Andre Norton Award wining author of <em>Flora's Dare</em><br /> <br /> A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.<br /> <br /> World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney's writing &quot;stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible.&quot; <em>Bone Swans</em>, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are &quot;bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time.&quot; Cooney's mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as &quot;pure Cooney,&quot; and he offers readers a challenge: &quot;Try to define that when you've finished the stories in this book.&quot;</p>
Mike Allen's newest collection, THE JOURNEY TO KAILASH, gathers 57 poems that explore regions sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, always off the beaten trail. From the title poem, in which the down-to-earth teenage narrator discovers his mother's new husband is Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god of luck; to &quot;Manifest Density,&quot; a tongue-in-cheek celebration of materialism that dares Mankind to &quot;play a game of chicken with the Universe&quot;; to &quot;The Strip Search,&quot; in which the gate of Hell functions like an airport metal detector, sounding off when a damned soul hasn't yet abandoned all Hope; to an entire cycle of surreal poems in which the paintings of such artists as Chagall and O'Keeffe become reality; Allen uses a wide range of strange subjects and skewed perspectives to examine the hopes and fears that shape our times. <p> Sometimes drawing from mythology, sometimes extrapolating bizarre futures, and not at all afraid to blend the two, Allen's poetry still addresses universal themes of love, loss and longing with candor and even humor. </p> <p> &quot;Mike Allen pours everything he's got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.&quot; <br />-- Fred Chappell </p> <p> &quot;Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.&quot; <br />-- Catherynne M. Valente</p>