<div>Russell Banks, Temple Grandin, and other renowned writers contemplate animals&mdash;and the way our own species interacts with them. Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie gathers essays, fiction, and poetry that imagine the world of our fellow beings, animals. Cultural mythologies and pantheons are populated with snakes, monkeys, cats, jackals, whales: a cast of characters whose stories reveal how complex and wildly contradictory our species&rsquo; relationship with other animals is. They&rsquo;re friends, enemies, tools, food. Descartes deliberated about whether animals have souls, deciding they didn&rsquo;t. Linnaeus cataloged them. Darwin connected us to them. Wild or tame, sinless or soulless, the animal is a chimera of shifting identities, both mundane and mysterious. Featuring interviews with William S. Burroughs and Temple Grandin, essays by animal experimenters Vint Virga and Dale Peterson, fiction by Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates, and work by many others, this collection of imaginative new writing offers uncaged access to the lives of the nonhuman creatures that surround us.</div>

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A Menagerie

<div>Essays, fiction, and poetry reflecting on truth and illusion in a world filled with deceptions both treacherous and benign. Children deceive, as do grownups, and many are the moments when all of us even deceive ourselves. People of every age and stripe, whether rarely or often, dissimulate, bluff, and beguile. The writer who fabricates and populates worlds is a deceiver, as is the artist whose triumph is to trick the eye, to alter perception. The honest magician&#39;s livelihood is based on deception; so is the dishonest thief&#39;s. And consider the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote, &quot;A deception that elevates us is dearer than a legion of low truths,&quot; thus complicating the subject entirely. This special issue of Conjunctions gathers a wide spectrum of essays, fiction, and poetry on the classic subject of deception, exploring in original and thought-provoking ways a world in which truth is a most fragile, elaborate, and mercurial thing. Contributors include Edie Meidav, Terese Svoboda, Yannick Murphy, Paul Hoover, Bim Ramke, Eleni Sikelianos, Magdalena Zyzak, and many others.</div>

Sleights of Hand

<div>Jennet Stearne's father hangs witches for a living in Restoration England. But when she witnesses the unjust and horrifying execution of her beloved aunt Isobel, the precocious child decides to make it her life's mission to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Armed with little save the power of reason, and determined to see justice prevail, Jennet hurls herself into a series of picaresque adventures&#8212;traveling from King William's Britain to the fledgling American Colonies to an uncharted island in the Caribbean, braving West Indies pirates, Algonquin Indian captors, the machinations of the Salem Witch Court, and the sensuous love of a young Ben Franklin. For Jennet cannot and must not rest until she has put the last witchfinder out of business. </div>

The Last Witchfinder

<div>A brilliant philosopher with a talent for self-destruction, Mason Ambrose has torpedoed a promising academic career and now faces a dead-end future. Before joining the ranks of the unemployed, however, he's approached by a representative of billionaire geneticist Dr. Edwina Sabacthani, who makes him an offer no starving ethicist could refuse. Born and bred on Isla de Sangre, a private island off the Florida coast, Edwina's beautiful and intelligent adolescent daughter, Londa, has recently survived a freak accident that destroyed both her memory and her sense of right and wrong. Londa's soul, in short, is an empty vessel&#8212;and it will be Mason's job to fill it.Exploring his new surroundings, our hero encounters a lush Eden abounding in bizarre animals and strange vegetation engineered by Edwina and her misanthropic collaborator, Dr. Vincent Charnock. And Londa, though totally lacking a conscience, proves a vivacious young woman who quickly captivates her new teacher as he attempts to recalibrate her moral compass with the help of Western civilization's greatest ethical thinkers, living and dead.But there's trouble in this tropical paradise. Mason soon learns that he isn't the only private tutor on Isla de Sangre, nor is Londa the only child in residence whose conscience is a blank slate. How many daughters does Edwina Sabacthani really have, and how did she bring them into being?Undaunted by these mysteries, Mason continues to instruct Londa, hoping that she can lead a normal life when she eventually ventures forth into human society. His apprentice, however, has a different agenda. Her head crammed with lofty ideals, her heart brimming with fearsome benevolence, and her bank account filled to bursting, Londa undertakes to remake our fallen world in her own image&#8212;by any and all means necessary.</div>

The Philosopher's Apprentice

<div>God is dead, and Anthony Van Horne must tow the corpse to the Arctic (to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition). En route Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, sabotage both natural and spiritual, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas. Winner of a 1995 World Fantasy Award. </div>

Towing Jehovah

<div>A New York Times Notable Book: The People vs. God in &ldquo;a funny, ferocious fantasy&rdquo; from the two-time Nebula Award&ndash;winning author (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Hallelujah! God is not dead. He&rsquo;s just been a deep-freeze coma in the Arctic. Strapped for cash, the Vatican has sold the body (a bargain at $1.3 billion!) to Baptists in Florida. Enterprising souls that they are, they&rsquo;ve turned the Corpus Dei into a popular, two-mile long theme-park attraction at Orlando&rsquo;s Celestial City USA&mdash;hooked up to the largest life-support system on earth. Then things get weird. Martin Candle, a justice of the peace who&rsquo;s suffered a series of devastating setbacks, decides to put Him on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Now, to accumulate evidence for the prosecution, Candle enters God&rsquo;s brain on a steamer to find out what in the world the Almighty could possibly have been thinking all these years. What ensues in this sequel to James Morrow&rsquo;s World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning Towing Jehovah is a &ldquo;square off for the greatest moral debate of all time . . . [and it&rsquo;s] not to be missed&rdquo; (Booklist). &ldquo;Surreal . . . dark and powerful.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly &ldquo;A wildly imaginative novel . . . as barbed with high and low comedy as an Aristophanes play&mdash;and just as fundamentally serious.&rdquo; &mdash;The Bloomsbury Review &ldquo;Hilarious . . . [Morrow] demonstrates a sharp mind, [and] a sharper tongue . . . Salman Rushdie, eat your heart out.&rdquo; &mdash;The San Diego Union-Tribune</div>

Blameless in Abaddon

<div>Can civilization survive the untimely demise of God? &ldquo;A buoyant romp . . . superlatively intelligent and entertaining&rdquo; (The Baltimore Sun). Completing the World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning author&rsquo;s darkly comic trilogy, The Eternal Footman brings us into a future world in which God&rsquo;s skull is in orbit, competing with the moon, and a plague of &ldquo;death awareness&rdquo; spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe&rsquo;s stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. And a chilling villain in the person of Dr. Adrian Lucido&mdash;founder of a new pagan church in Mexico, and inventor of a cure worse than any disease . . . &ldquo;Morrow hilariously joins the ranks of the great satirists.&rdquo; &mdash;The Denver Post &ldquo;[An] insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent, variously, of B-science-fiction movies in the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh&rsquo;s The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most charmingly deranged.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews &ldquo;Any novel that springs from a sparkling intellect rather than a dreary neurosis is cause for celebration, and The Eternal Footman, with its load of truth and laughter, justifies a considerable quantity of champagne.&rdquo; &mdash;Tom Robbins, New York Times&ndash;bestselling author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues</div>

The Eternal Footman

<div>The award-winning, irreverent, and darkly funny trilogy from &ldquo;the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction&rdquo; (The Washington Post). The complete Godhead Trilogy from James Morrow, including Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman. In the World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning Towing Jehovah, God has died, and Anthony Van Horne must tow the corpse to the Arctic (to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition). En route Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, sabotage both natural and spiritual, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas. Blameless in Abaddon, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is a &ldquo;funny, ferocious fantasy&rdquo; (Philadelphia Inquirer). God is a comatose, two-mile-long tourist attraction at a Florida theme park&mdash;until a conniving judge decides to put Him on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. The Eternal Footman completes Morrow&rsquo;s darkly comic trilogy about God&rsquo;s untimely demise. With God&rsquo;s skull in orbit, competing with the moon, a plague of &ldquo;death awareness&rdquo; spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe&rsquo;s stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. Morrow also gives us his most chilling villain ever: Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new pagan church in Mexico and inventor of a cure worse than any disease. </div>

The Godhead Trilogy

<div>Short fiction of biblical proportions&mdash;and bent&mdash;from the science fiction satirist and author of The Godhead Trilogy. James Morrow, &ldquo;the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction,&rdquo; unabashedly delves into matters both sacred and secular in this collection of short stories buoyed by his deliciously irreverent wit (The Washington Post). Among the dozen selections is the Nebula Award&ndash;winning story, &ldquo;The Deluge,&rdquo; in which a woman of ill repute is rescued by the crew of the ark, who must deal with the consequences of their misguided act of mercy. Also included is a follow-up to the Tower of Babel fable, an unprecedented nativity, and an attempt to stand so-called creation science on its head. Nothing is spared in a collection that &ldquo;deliciously skewer[s] not only Judeo-Christian mythology but other sacred cows of modern society, from capitalism to New Age spiritualism&rdquo; (Booklist). &ldquo;Morrow&rsquo;s is a blend of parody and commentary which challenges readers to reflect upon the human spiritual condition.&rdquo; &mdash;Midwest Book Review </div>

Bible Stories for Adults

<div>A dystopian tale about mass-entertainment-turned-toxic from the award-winning author of Towing Jehovah&mdash;perfect for Philip K. Dick fans. Cutting-edge virtual reality has emerged as a popular, albeit controversial, source of amusement. Devouring a cephapple or &ldquo;dreambean&rdquo; allows the eater to become the primary player in a preprogrammed narrative: love story, historical spectacle, horror thriller&mdash;this medium encompasses all genres. Our protagonist, Quinjin, is a professional dreambean critic, rating the hallucinogenic adventures hidden within these remarkable fruits. But something has gone terribly wrong. An anonymous &ldquo;dreamweaver&rdquo; has created a cephapple that, by transporting its users to the core of an inescapable nightmare, drives them stark raving mad&mdash;just the sort of ammunition the anti-dreambean movement needs to get the technology banned. Quinjin is hired to find the source of the poison and eradicate it. But the reviewer&rsquo;s heroic quest becomes highly personal when the person he most cares about&mdash;his teenage daughter&mdash;eats the forbidden fruit and lapses into a coma. Dark and satiric, The Continent of Lies is a bravura demonstration of the bold originality that has won James Morrow two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, and the Prix Utopia. </div>

Overdrive

The Continent of Lies

<div>This &ldquo;delightful&rdquo; Nebula Award&ndash;winning novella about a world without lies has &ldquo;a sharp, unmerciful edge that would have pleased old Jonathan Swift&rdquo; (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Truth reigns supreme in the city-state of Veritas. Not even politicians lie, and weirdly frank notices abound&mdash;such as warning: this elevator maintained by people who hate their jobs: ride at your own risk. In this dystopia of mandatory candor, every preadolescent citizen is ruthlessly conditioned, through a Skinnerian ordeal called a &ldquo;brainburn,&rdquo; to speak truthfully under all circumstances. Jack Sperry wouldn&rsquo;t dream of questioning the norms of Veritas; he&rsquo;s happy with his life and his respectable job as a &ldquo;deconstructionist,&rdquo; destroying &ldquo;mendacious&rdquo; works of art&mdash;relics from a less honest era. But when his adored son, Toby, falls gravely ill, the truth becomes Jack&rsquo;s greatest enemy. Somehow our hero must overcome his brainburn and attempt to heal his child with beautiful lies. Alternately hilarious and moving, City of Truth thoughtfully explores the pitfalls inherent in any attempt to engineer a perfect society.</div>

City of Truth

<div>A rollicking and audacious collection of stories featuring Martian invaders, time travel, voodoo queens, giant Hollywood monsters, Dr. Moreau&ndash;like mad scientists, and more In The Cat&rsquo;s Pajamas, James Morrow&mdash;called &ldquo;the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction&rdquo; by the Washington Post&mdash;takes the reader on thirteen wild and gleeful rides, each exploring a demented, dystopian, or provisionally desirable world. A tyrannical church wields terrifying power over people&rsquo;s sex lives in the name of protecting &ldquo;the rights of the unconceived.&rdquo; The dead, raised by Caribbean magic, are put to benevolent use in a New Jersey suburb. A racist Supreme Court justice gets his karmic comeuppance. Columbus &ldquo;discovers&rdquo; a contemporary New York City. The island of Manhattan becomes a battlefield on which two alien races thrash out their philosophical disagreements. And in the remarkable title offering, a deranged doctor blesses his mutant creatures with ethical superiority, a simple matter of injecting them with a serum derived from the disembodied brain of the story&rsquo;s living&mdash;and understandably bewildered&mdash;protagonist.</div>

The Cat's Pajamas

<div>The World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning novel of a female deity trying to save a modern world gone mad&mdash;&ldquo;Invites comparisons with Vonnegut and even Rushdie&rdquo; (The Washington Post). Rejoice! A new messiah has come, and her name is Julie. Born to Murray Katz, the solitary (and celibate) keeper of an abandoned lighthouse on the Jersey shore, our protagonist arrives on Earth boasting supernatural abilities evocative of her divine half brother, Jesus. As a child, she revels in her talent for walking on water, resurrecting dead crabs, and treating fireflies as luminous alphabet blocks. But after she reaches adolescence, her life becomes as challenging and ambiguous as any mortal&rsquo;s. Not only is Julie Katz obliged to deal with a silver-tongued devil and self-righteous neo-Christian zealots, she must also figure out what sort of mission her mother&mdash;the female Supreme Being&mdash;has in mind for her. At once outrageous and affirming, this Nebula Award finalist is a magnificent work of contemporary satire that holds a mirror up to human nature, astutely reflecting our species&rsquo; failings, foibles, and often misguided affections. </div>

Only Begotten Daughter

<div>Nebula Award Finalist: A fantastical and darkly comic tale of nuclear apocalypse that &ldquo;begins where Dr. Strangelove ends&rdquo; (The Philadelphia Inquirer). George Paxton is a simple man, happy enough with his job carving inscriptions on gravestones. All he needs is a high-tech survival garment&mdash;a scopas suit&mdash;to protect his beloved daughter in the event of nuclear Armageddon. But when George finally acquires the coveted suit, the deal comes with a catch: He must sign a sales contract admitting to his complicity in the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviets. Inevitably, the bombs fall, and our hero finds himself imprisoned on a submarine headed for Antarctica, where he and five other survivors will stand trial for &ldquo;crimes against humanity.&rdquo; George Paxton&rsquo;s accusers are no ordinary plaintiffs: They are &ldquo;the unadmitted,&rdquo; potential people whose hypothetical lives were canceled in consequence of humankind&rsquo;s self-extinction. In the months that follow, George&rsquo;s dark journey will take him through the hellscape that was once the Earth, through a human past that has become as unthinkable as the human future, to his day in court before the South Pole tribunal, and finally into the intolerable heart of loss. From the World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning author of Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah, this is an &ldquo;astute, highly engaging, and . . . moving&rdquo; journey into a bizarre postapocalyptic world (Los Angeles Times). </div>

This Is the Way the World Ends

<div>On a distant planet, two human societies keep an uneasy equilibrium&mdash;one nonviolent, the other ferocious&mdash;in this &ldquo;triumphant writing performance&rdquo; (Atlantic City Press). A fact-finding mission has crash-landed on a harsh world, leaving entomologist Francis Lostwax and physicist Burne Newman marooned. The scientists are rescued by a mysterious society whose inhabitants are wholly incapable of murder, assault, rape, or any other form of aggression. Protected by a river made of liquid hate, the descendants of Quetzalia&rsquo;s original human colonists have devised a strange techno-religion that has in turn engendered a culture of total pacifism. While Burne undertakes to rid the planet of the savage and menacing brain-eaters that flourish beyond the utopia&rsquo;s walls, Francis cultivates his romantic feelings for Tez Yon, the Quetzalian surgeon who saved his life. But the entomologist&rsquo;s obsession with Tez&rsquo;s soul leads him down a dark and twisted path, in time confronting him with a terrible dilemma. Should he murder the woman he loves to save a society he abhors? </div>

The Wine of Violence

<div>This short story anthology by the author of The Godhead Trilogy “reveals him to be one of the wittiest writers of contemporary speculative fiction” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple who accept her for the uncanny little biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking Titanic—and don’t be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams. Reality by Other Means offers readers the most celebrated results from James Morrow’s decades-long career designing fictive thought experiments. Anchored by seven previously uncollected stories, this omnibus ranges from social satire to theological hijinks, steampunk escapades to philosophical antics.</div>

Reality by Other Means

<div>A satirical SF caper of evolution, gangsters, Darwin&rsquo;s brain, and the Golden Age of Hollywood from the Nebula and World Fantasy Award&ndash;winning author. When Sonya Orlova, a successful 1930s horror-film actress, crosses paths with a gorilla whose brain has been swapped for the frozen cerebrum of the late Charles Darwin, the two are inspired to write and produce evolution-themed monster movies&mdash;with Sonya in her greatest role, Korgora the Ape Woman! As this offbeat and controversial Hollywood series finds a devoted cult audience, Sonia&rsquo;s relationship with her strange simian collaborator acquires an intensity neither could have imagined. Then disaster strikes, as zealous opponents to Darwin&rsquo;s ideas contrive to put the Ape Woman out of business. By turns satiric and romantic, madcap, and thoughtful, Behold the Ape is at once an outr&eacute; love story, a tribute to classic monster movies, and a science-fictional celebration of that beleaguered institution we call public education. </div>

James Morrow
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Books By James Morrow (15 Books)