Conversation Pieces

Vol. 7 — Ordinary People

by Eleanor Arnason

$12 $10.00 (paperback)
$5.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI

Read a sample from the book.

Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic "Warlords of Saturn's Moons," first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; "The Grammarian's Five Daughters" offers a playful explication of the uses of the parts of speech; "A Ceremony of Discontent" takes a humorous approach to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People offers a small, potent taste of the oeuvre of an important feminist sf author.

Reviews

"When I read Arnason, I am charmed, not only by the tales-as-tales but by a voice as unmistakable as that of Heinlein or Vance or Farmer: measured and precise and stealthily funny and full of homely wisdom."
    — Russell Letson, Locus, November 2005

"An Eleanor Arnason story collection is way overdue, and this is a very welcome book. I recommend it highly."
    — Rich Horton, Locus, August 2005

"This collection from Eleanor Arnason gives us eight pieces—six stories, a poem, and the text of a speech—in which the author seems to be engaged in conversation with her own past career in the genre. It is quite a retrospective collection, with stories going back to as early as 1974...[and provides] a new look at the range of her fiction, and more good reason than ever to wish for more new stories from Eleanor Arnason." (read the whole review)
    — Tangent Online, June 26, 2005

ISBN: 978-0-9746559-0-1 (13 digit)
Publication Date: May 2005
paperback 124 pages