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Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales

Otherwise Award

Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales

グリア・ギルマン

This work presents its subject through a compact, literary form, emphasizing memory, emotion, and the pressure of lived experience. It can be read as a piece that connects personal feeling with a wider social and cultural landscape.

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Work Information

A work that follows intimate emotions as they meet a larger world.

This work presents its subject through a compact, literary form, emphasizing memory, emotion, and the pressure of lived experience. It can be read as a piece that connects personal feeling with a wider social and cultural landscape.

Review Summaries

  • Readers respond to the work's distinctive structure and treatment of its subject, noting the strong aftertaste it leaves. Its dense style and premise can also make it demanding for some readers.

Book Information

Publisher
Small Beer Pr
Published
2009-05-01
Pages
439 pages
Language
英語
Size
14.73 x 3.3 x 22.61 cm
ISBN-13
9781931520553
ISBN-10
1931520550
Price
10410 JPY
Category
洋書/Science Fiction & Fantasy/Fantasy

"A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here." —Paul Kincaid, SF Site "A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origin." — Locus "Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman’s use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology."— Publishers Weekly "'Green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk': Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back, well back, in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language, riddled with bones and iron, sodden with witches' blood." —Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels "Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant, heart-rending triptych, a mosaic of folklore, intellectual pyrotechnics, and marvelous, motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster."—Catherynne M. Valente, author of In the Night Garden "No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers, in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do, the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve, read Cloud & Ashes ." —Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting " Cloud and Ashes is a dark pastoral shaped from bits of ballads, scraps of nursery rhymes, fragments of Tarot, tatters of ancient myth, and shreds of archaic language, all shot through with luminous ribbons of Gilman's own personal cosmology.... Gilman's prose reminds us that most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of language itself. Cloud and Ashes is particularly recommended to those readers who enjoy myth and folklore, especially the myths of Ariadne and Persephone. Cloud and Ashes is also highly recommended to those readers who enjoy fantasy which explores language and folklore." — Green Man Review “Gilman's ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings." — The Washington Post Book World “I am wind and memory who spells this . . .” In the eighteen years since her Crawford Award–winning debut novel Moonwise , Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing, more beguiling and inventive. Gilman’s second novel, Cloud & Ashes , is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes, witty turns, and shadowy corners of the human imagination, limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilman’s intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else. Cloud & Ashes collects three Winter’s Tales (“Jack Daw’s Pack,” “A Crowd of Bone,” and the longest, “Unleaving”) centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures. In “Unleaving,” Margaret, granddaughter of a goddess, escapes from the underworld into the human realm, Cloud. She is pursued, and, in escaping, brings about an epochal change, separating the kingdom of myth from the human world. Cloud & Ashes is a work that reaches back to the richness of Shakespeare—Gilman understands that the depth of Shakespeare’s work lies i

Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as the World Fantasy Award-winning "A Crowd of Bone." A sometime forensic librarian, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

  • Pure Majestic Poetry

    I had been waiting for this author to write something more. And now she has. Technically, this is a prequel, in a way, to her very poetic, very alluring fantasy book "Moonwise," which I have read and re-read about four times. This book is all about the myths that create and haunt the alternate worlds two young women fall into in the first book "Moonwise." But it is not necessary to have read "Moonwise" to enjoy "Cloud and Ashes." What I love about these books is the poetry. Pure and simple. I am a lover of words, and I just love to sit down and read something that illicits beauty and images in my head without me really caring about the plot as much as how autumn is described, again and again, in new and innovative ways that spin me into Gilman's intriguing "otherworlds." I will freely admit I do not understand the definition of every odd word used, because much of the language used in the writing of this novel is archaic and dialectic. But the writing literally hypnotizes me. It is as if it almost alters my mental reality, which is what a good book should do if you become "involved" with it. The words of this novel literally make me "feel" the magic of the seasons, autumn most especially, and the myths and images that abound. I love the witches. I love the farmers. I love the travelers. I love the crow-lad and his innocent, pure art of surviving. I love Margeret and Grevil, Whin and Kit. I love Mally (who is also GREAT in "Moonwise") and I just cannot say enough how outstanding the landscapes and settings and details are. To me, when I read this book or "Moonwise," I feel like I am reading by lantern-light in a lost cabin in a foreign wilderness a long, long never-ending poem. That's a good thing, because it's a poem I want to never end. I want to be able to pick it up and read it forever. This book transports me. I am a lover of language, so it stands to reason this will remain one of my all-time favorite books. I can't imagine the effort and energy it took for this author to compose this, but I hope to see more from her in the future.

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