Fantastic Women

After several days of staying in with a miserable cold, I ventured out into the rain today to University Bookstore and came home with a copy of the "Fantastic Women" issue of Tin House (Vol. 9, Number 1). The cover displays a stunning painting by Julie Heffernan, and the ToC includes work by some of my favorite writers. You'll find stories by Judy Budnitz. Mary Caponegro, Rikki Ducornet, Shelley Jackson, Stacey Levine, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, and several others.

Editor Rob Spillman writes:

The daughters of Franz Kafka and Mary Shelley, the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter, these inventive, insightful writers steep their realistic narratives in a heady portion of surreal and macabre black comedy.

[...] Why women? Well, frankly, it seems more and more women writers are creating work that not only pushes the envelope, but fold realistic fiction into an origami dragon. They are transporting us into worlds we've never seen before and, forgive the generalization, digging deeper into the psychic bedrock than their male counterparts.

As Ursula K. Le Guin says, "We are volcaones. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."

That just what we wanted: new maps.

Yum yum.