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Philip K Dick Award Best Book (nominee)
Library Journal
Nebula Award winner and Hugo and World Fantasy Awards nominee Bishop offers his first full-length collection of stories in ten years. These 15 works previously appeared in Omni, Asimov's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies between 1981 and 1996.
Kirkus Reviews
Bishop's latest collection (One Winter in Eden, 1984, etc.) brings together 15 tales, 198696, drawn from a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies, many with a strong mainstream/experimental flavor. Best is the title piece, a splendid tongue-in-cheek fantasy about a Japanese-style ritual suicide in a Deep South town. "God's Hour" posits a weekly hour of TV direct from the deity-and if you don't watch, you go to hell. A dying St. Augustine is lectured on advanced Chinese cosmology by his long- lost son, and on evolution by an African tribesman, in "For This Do I Remember Carthage." And Judas gets a thoroughgoing workout in "I, Iscariot." Other ideas range from Crucifixion ironies, butterflies, snakehandling, jukeboxes, death, and cats to chaos theory, ghosts, and conversations with God.
Chilly, intellectual, extended metaphorical ruminations for the most part, with the emotions only rarely engaged: for minority tastes only.
Genre: Science Fiction
Nebula Award winner and Hugo and World Fantasy Awards nominee Bishop offers his first full-length collection of stories in ten years. These 15 works previously appeared in Omni, Asimov's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies between 1981 and 1996.
Kirkus Reviews
Bishop's latest collection (One Winter in Eden, 1984, etc.) brings together 15 tales, 198696, drawn from a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies, many with a strong mainstream/experimental flavor. Best is the title piece, a splendid tongue-in-cheek fantasy about a Japanese-style ritual suicide in a Deep South town. "God's Hour" posits a weekly hour of TV direct from the deity-and if you don't watch, you go to hell. A dying St. Augustine is lectured on advanced Chinese cosmology by his long- lost son, and on evolution by an African tribesman, in "For This Do I Remember Carthage." And Judas gets a thoroughgoing workout in "I, Iscariot." Other ideas range from Crucifixion ironies, butterflies, snakehandling, jukeboxes, death, and cats to chaos theory, ghosts, and conversations with God.
Chilly, intellectual, extended metaphorical ruminations for the most part, with the emotions only rarely engaged: for minority tastes only.
Genre: Science Fiction
Praise for this book
"All of Bishop's wonders and strengths! A rich and surprising collection." - Greg Bear
"A book of such astonishing accomplishment and variety, Michael Bishop appears to speak in tongues. No other writer can pull off the impossibly delicate balance of wit, charity, poetry and perception that Bishop does. He does it with mirrors and jewels, cats and snakes."" - Karen Joy Fowler
"Michael Bishop is a writer of intense humanity and grace and compassion. One enters these collected stories as into a roomful of friends, and leaves with great reluctance: a lovely book." - Elizabeth Hand
"Forrest Gump's mother, in her eternal insipidity, insisted that life is like a box of chocolates. It isn't. But Michael Bishop's new short-story collection, I discovered, does resemble a box of chocolates. Be warned, however: the confectioner is a bit of a madman and something of a sorcerer, and when you bite into one of these goodies, you never know what's going to fly out: a Japanese demon, a malevolent butterfly, a numinous cat, a blob of Savior's blood. At the City Limits of Fate is habit-forming and delicious. Eat up." - James Morrow
"A book of such astonishing accomplishment and variety, Michael Bishop appears to speak in tongues. No other writer can pull off the impossibly delicate balance of wit, charity, poetry and perception that Bishop does. He does it with mirrors and jewels, cats and snakes."" - Karen Joy Fowler
"Michael Bishop is a writer of intense humanity and grace and compassion. One enters these collected stories as into a roomful of friends, and leaves with great reluctance: a lovely book." - Elizabeth Hand
"Forrest Gump's mother, in her eternal insipidity, insisted that life is like a box of chocolates. It isn't. But Michael Bishop's new short-story collection, I discovered, does resemble a box of chocolates. Be warned, however: the confectioner is a bit of a madman and something of a sorcerer, and when you bite into one of these goodies, you never know what's going to fly out: a Japanese demon, a malevolent butterfly, a numinous cat, a blob of Savior's blood. At the City Limits of Fate is habit-forming and delicious. Eat up." - James Morrow
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