The Ogre's Wife
Sep. 30th, 2002 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tmcgI seem to have written myself dry today in catching up with email and message boards after the convention, and can't summon up an essay or even a one-liner wasp. But instead of defaulting to a metapost or a quiz (there's still one in the wings) I want to plug a wonderful story collection that just came out.
It's by Richard Parks, who has published extensively in an enviable assortment of the highest-quality magazines, and it's called The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups. There's a wide range of work in it, so there ought to be something to the taste of anyone who likes fantasy or science fiction, but my personal favorites are the ghost stories. I love ghost stories, and there aren't many people writing good ones anymore--not in the short form, anyway. Parks gives excellent ghost. That in itself would be enough for me to recommend the book. But more appealing even than the stories' subjects is the author's sensibility. Discovering Parks is like discovering an ancient, wise Zen master gassing up at a service station, or sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square, or slinging burgers at your favorite corner diner: transcendence in the midst of the ordinary and down-to-earth, profound truths folded into the interstices of the quirky and quotidian.
For balance (for what that's worth, when everyone loves the book), here's a link to Charles de Lint's review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And Parke Godwin, in his introduction, describes the author twenty years ago as a "taciturn kid from Mississippi who mumbled diffidently over the phone, looked like a good ol' boy fullback from Dogpatch, and wrote like a prophet," and says of his current work, "He uses fantasy to underscore reality: the nature of our humanity and the inescapability of what we are, the choices we make and the price we pay for each, right or wrong."
The book's available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and direct from Obscura Press.
[Later update: The author has got an LJ now, username![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ogre_san.]
It's by Richard Parks, who has published extensively in an enviable assortment of the highest-quality magazines, and it's called The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups. There's a wide range of work in it, so there ought to be something to the taste of anyone who likes fantasy or science fiction, but my personal favorites are the ghost stories. I love ghost stories, and there aren't many people writing good ones anymore--not in the short form, anyway. Parks gives excellent ghost. That in itself would be enough for me to recommend the book. But more appealing even than the stories' subjects is the author's sensibility. Discovering Parks is like discovering an ancient, wise Zen master gassing up at a service station, or sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square, or slinging burgers at your favorite corner diner: transcendence in the midst of the ordinary and down-to-earth, profound truths folded into the interstices of the quirky and quotidian.
For balance (for what that's worth, when everyone loves the book), here's a link to Charles de Lint's review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And Parke Godwin, in his introduction, describes the author twenty years ago as a "taciturn kid from Mississippi who mumbled diffidently over the phone, looked like a good ol' boy fullback from Dogpatch, and wrote like a prophet," and says of his current work, "He uses fantasy to underscore reality: the nature of our humanity and the inescapability of what we are, the choices we make and the price we pay for each, right or wrong."
The book's available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and direct from Obscura Press.
[Later update: The author has got an LJ now, username
ogre_san.]
