Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales

About this book

"A book whose hold on your mind on your memory is assured. It is a story about story and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Paul Kincaid SF Site "A work that reads like language stripped bare myth tracked to its origin." Locus "Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilmans use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology."Publishers Weekly "Green quince and bletted medlar quiddany and musk: Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes your ears with crowcalls knockings and old old rhythms your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures sly-eyed luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back well back in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language riddled with bones and iron sodden with witches blood." Margo Lanagan author of Tender Morsels "Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant heart-rending triptych a mosaic of folklore intellectual pyrotechnics and marvelous motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster."Catherynne M. Valente author of In the Night Garden "No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve read Cloud & Ashes." Theodora Goss author of In the Forest of Forgetting "Cloud and Ashes is a dark pastoral shaped from bits of ballads scraps of nursery rhymes fragments of Tarot tatters of ancient myth and shreds of archaic language all shot through with luminous ribbons of Gilmans own personal cosmology.... Gilmans prose reminds us that most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of language itself. Cloud and Ashes is particularly recommended to those readers who enjoy myth and folklore especially the myths of Ariadne and Persephone. Cloud and Ashes is also highly recommended to those readers who enjoy fantasy which explores language and folklore." Green Man Review Gilmans A Crowd of Bone . . . is dense jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the storycomplex tangled in narrative as well as syntax and very darkrewards the most careful of readings." The Washington Post Book World I am wind and memory who spells this . . . In the eighteen years since her Crawford Awardwinning debut novel Moonwise Greer Gilmans writing has only grown more complex and entrancing more beguiling and inventive. Gilmans second novel Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language a button box of words a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion study revisitation and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes witty turns and shadowy corners of the human imagination limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilmans intricate prose myth and fable live breathe and dance as they do nowhere else. Cloud & Ashes collects three Winters Tales (Jack Daws Pack A Crowd of Bone and the longest Unleaving) centering on folk traditions harvest rites the seasons gods and trickster figures. In Unleaving Margaret granddaughter of a goddess escapes from the underworld into the human realm Cloud. She is pursued and in escaping brings about an epochal change separating the kingdom of myth from the human world. Cloud & Ashes is a work that reaches back to the richness of ShakespeareGilman understands that the depth of Shakespeares work lies in his rangeand the reader will rejoice in her counterplay of high myth and bawdry even while being drawn into the world of Cloud. Inventive playful and erudite Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales. Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic awards as well as of the World Fantasy Awardwinning A Crowd of Bone. She lives in Cambridge Massachusetts.