We continue our series of blogs presenting the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominations with the award for best Single-Author Collection.
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is the author of one of the most revered horror novels: The Haunting of Hill House
She has also written The Sundial
Best Single-Author Collection
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Everland and Other StoriesAuthor: Witcover, Paul |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection In the quarter century since the publication of his first short story, “Red Shift,” Paul Witcover has slowly but steadily produced an impressive body of short fiction alongside his critically acclaimed novels, Waking Beauty, Tumbling After, and Dracula: Asylum. Fusing elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and fairy tales, Witcover’s work inhabits the borderlands of genre. Everland collects twelve of his best stories, seven previously published, including the Nebula Award finalist “Left of the Dial,” and five appearing here for the first time, including the title story, which does not so much reimagine as reinvent J. M. Barrie’s classic tale of a boy who never grew up. In “Mayaland,” a callow young man with a romantic attachment to a bloody past learns that there is a price to pay for ignorance . . . and for understanding. Fundamentalism meets fascism in “Twilight of the Dogs,” a horror story that is also a ghost story that morphs into a science fiction story and then . . . In “Lighthouse Summer,” a young boy has the adventure of several lifetimes when a summer storm washes an eccentric traveler ashore . . . A lost marble that is more than it seems catapults a timid legal proofreader into a war between gods and demons in “Where Balloons Go.” Ranging from present day New York to Central America, from Revolutionary France to a near-future United States convulsed by civil war, the twelve stories in Everland are both topical and timeless, showcasing Witcover’s affinity for the strange that lurks within — or alongside — the familiar. Featuring an introduction by award-winning author Elizabeth Hand. Table of Contents:
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Fugue StateAuthor: Evenson, Brian |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives. Table of Contents:
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Love Songs for the Shy and CynicalAuthor: Shearman, Robert |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection The first love song in the world, as composed by a pig in the Garden of Eden . . . The Devil, alarmed when his hobby of writing romantic fiction begins to upstage his day job . . . A man finding love with someone who has an allergy to his happiness, another losing love altogether when his wife gives him back his heart in a Tupperware box . . . By turns macabre and moving, horrific and laugh-out-loud funny, Robert Shearman’s short stories come from a place just to the left of the corner of your eye. Following his World Fantasy Award-winning Tiny Deaths, this new collection puts a bizarre twist on the love story. What is love, why does it hurt so much, and how is it we keep coming back for more? Sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel — but always as startling and fresh as Shearman’s fans have come to expect. Table of Contents:
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There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy TalesAuthor: Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer. Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia — or anywhere else in the world — today. Table of Contents:
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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: StoriesAuthor: Wilson, Kevin |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider — a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. Table of Contents:
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ZOOAuthor: Otsuichi |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection Ten stories of horror and science fiction from Japan’s hottest young author. In one story, the last man on Earth turns out to be a robot. In another story, a man builds a house from the bodies of his murder victims. And in the book’s eponymous story, a man sees his girlfriend’s corpse decompose . . . one Polaroid snapshot at a time! Table of Contents:
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- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novel
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novella
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novelette
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Short Story
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Edited Anthology
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Single-Author Collection
- Presenting the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners
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