For the Washington Post I wrote a little about Carol Emshwiller, a true and brilliant weirdo, and a new collection of her stories, Moon Songs:1
In his anthology “Dangerous Visions,” Harlan Ellison wrote that the award-winning Emshwiller (1921-2019) was “the first writer I ever encountered who said she wrote to please herself whom I believed.” In the same piece, he quotes her as saying, “I like interesting failures better than works where the artist always knows exactly what he’s doing.” As Ellison is quick to say, the story in question (“Sex and/or Mr. Morrison”) is not a failure, but part of what makes Emshwiller’s work both compelling and frustrating is the way that it seems to operate by a hidden, different set of rules about what it means to succeed or fail. You can respond to Emshwiller’s work by throwing it across the room, but you can’t suggest it might have benefited from being written in another way. These stories must be accepted or rejected in some total sense.
Read it here.
On…