Fantasy/Mainstream. 170626 words long. First published in 2009. Tiptree Award Winner. World Fantasy Award Winner, Nebula Award(R) Finalist

lgrsfic/R:/!fiction/0day/SFFebooks/Greer Gilman - Cloud and Ashes Three Winter's Tales # (v5.0).epub

lgli/Greer Gilman\Greer Gilman - Cloud and Ashes Three Winter's Tales # (v5.0).epub

zlib/Science Fiction/Fantasy Fiction/Gilman Greer/Cloud and Ashes Three Winter's Tales_4371126.epub

by Greer Gilman

Peapod Press

Jelly Ink

Lightning Source (Tier 4), Easthampton, Mass, 2009

1st ed., Easthampton, MA, Massachusetts, 2009

United States, United States of America

First edition, Easthampton, MA, 2009

1st, First Edition, PS, 2009

version: 5.0

lg_fict_id_846384

<p>"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."<br>
—Paul Kincaid, <i>SF Site</i></p>
<p>"A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origin."<br>
—<i>Locus</i></p>
<p>"Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman’s use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology."—<i>Publishers Weekly</i></p>
<p>"'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."<br>
—Margo Lanagan, author of <i>Tender Morsels</i></p>
<p>"Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. <i>Cloud and Ashes</i> 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 <i>In the Night Garden</i></p>
<p>"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 <i>Cloud &amp; Ashes</i>."<br>
—Theodora Goss, author of <i>In the Forest of Forgetting</i></p>
<p>"<i>Cloud and Ashes</i> 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 Gilman's own personal cosmology.... Gilman's prose reminds us that most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of language itself. <i>Cloud and Ashes</i> is particularly recommended to those readers who enjoy myth and folklore, especially the myths of Ariadne and Persephone. <i>Cloud and Ashes</i> is also highly recommended to those readers who enjoy fantasy which explores language and folklore."<br>
—<i>Green Man Review</i></p>
<p>“Gilman's ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings."<br>
—<i>The Washington Post Book World</i></p>
<p>“I am wind and memory who spells this . . .”</p>
<p>In the eighteen years since her Crawford Award–winning debut novel <i>Moonwise</i>, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing, more beguiling and inventive.</p>
<p>Gilman’s second novel, <i>Cloud &amp; Ashes</i>, 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 Gilman’s intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else.</p>
<p><i>Cloud &amp; Ashes</i> collects three Winter’s Tales (“Jack Daw’s Pack,” “A Crowd of Bone,” and the longest, “Unleaving”) centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>Cloud &amp; Ashes</i> is a work that reaches back to the richness of Shakespeare—Gilman understands that the depth of Shakespeare’s work lies in his range—and the reader will rejoice in her counterplay of high myth and bawdry even while being drawn into the world of Cloud.&nbsp; Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.</p>
<p><b>Greer Gilman</b> is the author of the novel <i>Moonwise</i>, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. and Mythopoeic awards, as well as of the World Fantasy Award–winning “A Crowd of Bone.” She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>

Winner of the Tiptree Award and a Mythopoeic Award finalist, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic fable that invites revisitation.Praise for Cloud & Ashes:'A rich poetic prose laden with fetching archaisms that's unlike anything else being written today. Brilliant and truly innovative fiction, not to be missed.'—The Washington TimesGreer Gilman is the author of Moonwise. A graduate of Wellesley and the University of Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.

Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: Jack Daw's Pack (Nebula finalist, 2001), A Crowd of Bone (World Fantasy Award winner, 2004) and the third part, a whole novel, Unleaving, centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures

2013-02-26