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This Is My Letter to the World
Valente, Catherynne M. This Is My Letter to the World: The Omikuji Project, Cycle One. Kinsenka Press, 2010.
This anthology collects the first two years of Valente's self-produced Omikuji Project, in which she sends subscribers, by email or by post, a short story written just for them every month. I was a member of the Project for a year that overlapped with the stories collected here, and as such I contributed a sentence to the member-written introduction, but I can't remember which one it was at this point, which seems fitting. The stories are opened by art by project members, and closed by an excerpt from the personal note Valente sends with each story.
It should be obvious by now that I'm a fan of Valente's writing--her prose is like a glass of good wine, and I think her short stories tend to show off her talents to good effect in a way that is slightly different from her novels. Nine of the stories in here were already familiar to me, but rereading them brings the same sheer enjoyment in the words that I felt the first time I opened each wax-sealed letter (yes, I went for the paper version; I like letters).
The stories display the usual range of themes and methods familiar from Valente's other writings, deconstructions and retellings of familiar tales and tropes with a strong edge of irony and an admixture of wrath. I still love "Oh, the Snow-Bound Earth, the Golden Moon" for being a brilliant post-apocalyptic lunar story that's also a deft take on Snow White, and I particularly enjoyed the two-part "A Hole to China," which has some interesting similarities to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and which features (be still, my heart!) a cross-dressing peacock historian--that's a historian who is a peacock, not a historian of peacocks. "The Consultant" marries noir and fairy-tales brilliantly; "The Kunstkammer of Dr. Ampersand" had me feeling for the doomed members of its OT3 even though the story is told in the form of a tour guide's narrative; "A Postcard from the End of the World" is, in a familiar Valente maneuver, an accordion-fold back in on itself that is awesome and creepy. "Reading Borges in Buenos Aires" is the story that made me join the Project, and it's still awesome and metafictional. In other words, I have a hard time picking a favorite out of these.
I think, having read a fair amount of Valente's conventionally published stories, that these hold their own against the more readily available ones, and that this collection is as good a place as any to start, whether on Valente or on her short fiction. It's available in paperback and as an e-book, and you can still join the Project at any time.
This anthology collects the first two years of Valente's self-produced Omikuji Project, in which she sends subscribers, by email or by post, a short story written just for them every month. I was a member of the Project for a year that overlapped with the stories collected here, and as such I contributed a sentence to the member-written introduction, but I can't remember which one it was at this point, which seems fitting. The stories are opened by art by project members, and closed by an excerpt from the personal note Valente sends with each story.
It should be obvious by now that I'm a fan of Valente's writing--her prose is like a glass of good wine, and I think her short stories tend to show off her talents to good effect in a way that is slightly different from her novels. Nine of the stories in here were already familiar to me, but rereading them brings the same sheer enjoyment in the words that I felt the first time I opened each wax-sealed letter (yes, I went for the paper version; I like letters).
The stories display the usual range of themes and methods familiar from Valente's other writings, deconstructions and retellings of familiar tales and tropes with a strong edge of irony and an admixture of wrath. I still love "Oh, the Snow-Bound Earth, the Golden Moon" for being a brilliant post-apocalyptic lunar story that's also a deft take on Snow White, and I particularly enjoyed the two-part "A Hole to China," which has some interesting similarities to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and which features (be still, my heart!) a cross-dressing peacock historian--that's a historian who is a peacock, not a historian of peacocks. "The Consultant" marries noir and fairy-tales brilliantly; "The Kunstkammer of Dr. Ampersand" had me feeling for the doomed members of its OT3 even though the story is told in the form of a tour guide's narrative; "A Postcard from the End of the World" is, in a familiar Valente maneuver, an accordion-fold back in on itself that is awesome and creepy. "Reading Borges in Buenos Aires" is the story that made me join the Project, and it's still awesome and metafictional. In other words, I have a hard time picking a favorite out of these.
I think, having read a fair amount of Valente's conventionally published stories, that these hold their own against the more readily available ones, and that this collection is as good a place as any to start, whether on Valente or on her short fiction. It's available in paperback and as an e-book, and you can still join the Project at any time.