The Emily Fables, Second Edition

THE EMILY FABLES surprised me and mesmerized me. Somehow I had anticipated a book about the poet Emily Dickinson. 'This Emily' also lives a cloistered life but in a very different place and manner. There is a lush stillness to each connected piece, even when the story is exploding on the page. I can't get out of my head the many characters Dickinson has created in such a small book, the unforgiving landscape, the husband, John, who is unknowingly savage at heart, the children. Stephanie Dickinson is a writer I've long admired for her deep sensibilities and risk taking work. Of all her books, THE EMILY FABLES is my favorite so far. Very highly recommended.--Susan Tepper

This book is exquisite. Every sentence is poetry. Every story leaves its mark upon you, an image, or vision, you will never forget. Emily and her brother facing a bobcat. 'Never were we deer mewling. Never prey melting away with their shy, mournful eyes.' Emily the bride forced to eat the snapping turtle soup her husband has fished for one day wed. 'I knew from my eight grades of education his kind had been on the earth since God created the dinosaurs, that they were almost immortal.' Emily and the Curse. 'Thirteen years old and a field hand for the harvest. It is my monthly time and Ma still has to show me how to place the rag and knot it from my waist.' Stephanie Emily Dickinson is the most compassionate, feeling, magical writer of our hard-bitten time as well as the time of the old ewes, whose 'wool was scented with bark, fierce wind, and damp earth soaked in the cider of a thousand apples dying.'--Jill Hoffman