Publisher's Synopsis
Fiction. Set on the Iowa prairie, THE EMILY FABLES is Stephanie Emily Dickinson's homage to a lost world. Dickinson brings all of her powers of compassion, an eye to detail, and her ability to look unflinchingly at suffering and uses them to conjure scenes of incredible poignancy and power: the pre-antibiotic world that Emily lived much of her life in, where diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough could take the life of one's best friend in a day, or five of one's classmates in a night. Where death might also be found in a hermit and his woman, discovered frozen and kneeling, side by side in the woods. Where hunger could drive a bobcat to almost attack two children, or, decades later, send a grown woman with an ax out of her farmhouse to butcher the reindeer she may or may not be hallucinating. These beautiful, strange 'fables' can read at times almost like scenes from Grimms' fairy tales yet are very American and barely a century gone.--Catherine Sasanov
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
