"Flawless. . . . Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become
the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house,
where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An
ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your
co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel
under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it
led.
Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes
into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half
hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them.
You might want to get out of the way.
Butner’s allusive and
elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life—where there are
no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a
tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be
ignored.
Genre: Science Fiction
Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become
the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house,
where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An
ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your
co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel
under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it
led.
Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes
into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half
hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them.
You might want to get out of the way.
Butner’s allusive and
elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life—where there are
no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a
tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be
ignored.
Genre: Science Fiction
Praise for this book
"At last, one of the contemporary masters of the uncanny and darkly humorous, Richard Butner, has his stories in one place where we can get at them. With a toe (just a toe) in the literary pool, and the rest of him splashing happily in the spec fic/sci-fi/surreal swimming hole, Butner's tales deal in the deadly habits of nostalgia, and the surprises waiting for the wistful and the obsessive whose march forward obliges a look backward. Linkean, Barthelmean, Saundersean . . . hm, okay, these guys do NOT lend themselves to sonorous adjectivization but, nonetheless, they'll have to welcome a new storyteller beside them on the shelf." - Wilton Barnhardt
"Richard Butner's stories are funny, scary, personal, dispassionate, satirical, and heartfelt, if those incompatible adjectives can be assembled to describe the same work. He writes about the subtle losses we suffer (often without noticing) as we get older, about love and loyalty, about how the past is never completely past and can come sweeping back over you at the slightest opportunity like a tidal wave, so you'd better be ready lest you drown." - John Kessel
"A Richard Butner story is an invitation to discovery alongside his characters. It's a left turn off of reality's highway and into its old business district: defiantly shabby, casually weird, and occasionally surreal, perfect in every grounding detail. Every story zigs when you expect it to zag. You only think you know where they are going, but it turns out you are on the same adventure as the protagonist, discovering as you go that the world is stranger than it was the minute before, and the minute before that. Well worth the journey." - Sarah Pinsker
"Richard Butner's stories are funny, scary, personal, dispassionate, satirical, and heartfelt, if those incompatible adjectives can be assembled to describe the same work. He writes about the subtle losses we suffer (often without noticing) as we get older, about love and loyalty, about how the past is never completely past and can come sweeping back over you at the slightest opportunity like a tidal wave, so you'd better be ready lest you drown." - John Kessel
"A Richard Butner story is an invitation to discovery alongside his characters. It's a left turn off of reality's highway and into its old business district: defiantly shabby, casually weird, and occasionally surreal, perfect in every grounding detail. Every story zigs when you expect it to zag. You only think you know where they are going, but it turns out you are on the same adventure as the protagonist, discovering as you go that the world is stranger than it was the minute before, and the minute before that. Well worth the journey." - Sarah Pinsker
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Richard Butner's The Adventurists: and Other Stories