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Falling in Love with Hominids Kindle Edition
An alluring new collection from the author of the New York Times Notable Book, Midnight Robber
Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Sister Mine) is an internationally-beloved storyteller. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having "an imagination that most of us would kill for," her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are filled with striking imagery, unlikely beauty, and delightful strangeness.
In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retelling The Tempest as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTachyon Publications
- Publication dateJuly 20, 2015
- File size534 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Los Angeles Public Library: Best of 2015 Fiction
Conversationalist: Best Books of 2015
Open Letters Monthly Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
Locus 2015 Recommended Reading List: Best Collection
Rock Your Reality Dope Female Authors to Get Into This Women’s History Month
BookRiot Most Influential Sci-Fi Books of the Past 10 Years
“Hopkinson's stories dazzle.”
―NPR
“The stories all share a common thread of magic, which is often woven, whether subtly or blatantly, into the fabric of everyday reality, allowing characters to react to the strange or the impossible as it crosses into their world. Hopkinson also draws frequently on her Caribbean upbringing and heritage, and her characters’ voices are distinct and authentic, both in their speech patterns and in their ways of looking at their surroundings. Hopkinson’s fans will be delighted by these examples of her wide-ranging imagination.”
―Publishers Weekly
“The power of Hopkinson’s stories lies in their capacity to help us reimagine our own movement through the world and to wonderfully innovate new trajectories for speculative fiction as a whole.”
―Los Angeles Review of Books
“The award-winning author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring returns with a collection of fantastical short fiction, assembling a decade’s worth of stories of magic and the supernatural intersecting with everyday life.”
―Barnes and Noble, Bookseller’s Pick
“There is something for everyone in this collection. Hopkinson manages to make a reader’s skin crawl in one story and smile in the next. It’s a mixture that keeps you reading just to see what she will come up with next. A great collection from a highly imaginative and insightful mind, Falling in Love with Hominids is a must read for fantasy and short story fans”
―Portland Book Review
“Hopkinson’s stories stack up well against their source of inspiration, but her voice is clearly her own, charged with deep feeling and vast imagination.”
―San Francisco Chronicle
“The short fiction collection Falling In Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson introduced me to speculative fiction with Black queer characters.”
―Wear Your Voice
“Daring, creative, and fantastically unique.”
―Read Diverse Books
“Every reader will surely find something to love, as this collection is often hilariously funny, deeply tragic, intensely engaging, and strongly steeped with fantastic elements.”
―Civilian Reader
“In this collection of luminous stories, Nalo Hopkinson writes with an observant intensity. . . .”
―World Literature Today
“Falling in Love with Hominids overflows with originality, beauty, and Hopkinson’s trademark depiction of human decency. . . .”
―Women's Review of Books
“Hopkinson does some beautiful things with the art of writing, her imagination is without bounds, and she challenges both readers and writers to go beyond what we see as the status quo. The book is filled with characters of colour, with LGBT characters, with characters who, one way or the other, are memorable and real and get to take part in some amazing stories.”
―Bibliotropic
“Every story feels like a perfectly formed separate entity, but pulling them together is the effortless blending of the fantastic and the mundane.”
―Book Riot, Best Books We Read in July
“A wonderful treat for Nalo Hopkinson fans and a fantastic introduction for new readers.”
―New York Journal of Books
“Yet another extraordinary collection of short stories that is well worth your time and rapt attention. The writing is beautiful, the message important, and its delivery is page-turning.”
―The Warbler
“A magical collection of short stories which brings the reader completely different and new worlds to explore.”
―A Universe in Words
“An entertaining and humane book that affirms why Junot Díaz refers to Hopkinson as “one of our most important writers.”
―Room Magazine
“I can’t wait to read more of [Hopkinson’s] work in the future because I loved the speculative worlds in this short story collection.”
―Paper Wanderer
“Nalo Hopkinson paints the places she knows in the way that Márquez embodies the soul of Central America, or the way Bradbury captures Illinois summers.”
―Fiction Foresight
“[U]nique and wonderful and disturbing. . . . Falling in Love with Hominids is at its heart a story of hope.”
―Books Without Any Pictures
“A pleasure from beginning to end.”
―Worlds Without End
“This is an outstanding collection that really gives insight into [Hopkinson’s] storytelling, the breadth and insight with which she writes.”
―The Conversationalist
“This is a fantastic collection that I encourage lovers of fantasy and science fiction to pick up.”
―The Illustrated Page
“After I finished this book, I just wanted to hug it to my chest and sigh contentedly.... If you have any interest at all in fantastical or magical realist short stories, if you like sharp humor or flawed and compelling characters, definitely pick this one up. It's one of my favourite reads this year.”
―Paper Blog
“Falling in Love with Hominids reveals a writer at the height of her powers.”
―The Canadian Science Fiction Review
“A re-invigoration at the sense of wonder about human experience.”
―Speculating Canada
“The variety and depth is amazing. Horror, fantasy, magic realism, and science fiction. A story or two that I’m sure mainstream editors might buy without noticing it’s not mainstream, the touch of the fantastic is so light and gentle, and yet absolutely there. In that way, and in no other way than being an excellent writer, Hopkinson resembles Le Guin. Go find this book and read it.”
―File 770
“All the stories display the various and eclectic writing skill Hopkinson contains in such ample amounts. The writing, too, is terrific.”
―Paper Wars
“[T]he entire book is wonderful. Definitely give it a shot. A+”
―Book Blather
“I think that many readers have been waiting for affirmative perspectives like these, perspectives that show, over and over again, that diversity is beautiful.”
―Strange Horizons
“There are such an excellent variety of stories . . . If you’re a sci-fi/fantasy fan there will almost definitely be something in this collection that catches your fancy.”
―Snap
“This brilliant short story collection has several stories with black women and girls as leads. These girls and women defend their village from invading European conquerors, have divine powers of creation, and overall epitomize Black Girl Magic, sometimes literally!”
―Read Diverse Books
“Not only a collection of beautifully written speculative prose, it takes the what-if-ness of the genre and expands it.”
―The Norwich Radical
About the Author
Nalo Hopkinson is the author of The New Moon's Arms, The Salt Roads, Midnight Robber, and Brown Girl in the Ring, among many others. She has won numerous awards, including the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, and Canada's Sunburst Award for fantasy literature. Her award-winning short fiction collection Skin Folk was selected for the 2002 New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. Currently, she is a professor of creative writing at the University of California-Riverside.
Product details
- ASIN : B083G6W17G
- Publisher : Tachyon Publications (July 20, 2015)
- Publication date : July 20, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 534 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Print length : 240 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,196,705 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,537 in Fantasy Anthologies & Short Stories (Kindle Store)
- #4,061 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
- #4,974 in Contemporary Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books. If you like knowing about awards and such, my work has received the Warner Aspect First Novel award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian literature of the fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Honourable Mention in Cuba's Casa de las Americas Prize for literature.
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Some of these stories are *tiny*, some can barely count themselves science fiction, some have horriy ambiguous endings (and that's a lovely thing indeed) but all of them pack a punch. These are stories even an old jaded reader will remember.
Well worth a read.
But really, I didn’t even need to read that far to know that I was going to enjoy this collection of short stories. The first story in there, The Easthound, was an interesting take on werewolf lore, combined with a hint of zombie apocalypse. The quality continued two stories later with Message in a Bottle, which was an odd look at time travel and the future of humanity, combined with the trials of mundane adulthood and child-rearing. The Smile on the Face was a really great look at empowerment and overcoming teen social pressure, especially when it comes to appearance and unwanted advances. Emily Breakfast was, well, hard to describe, because it seemed so mundane at first, with a guy losing one of his chickens, only when you get a little further you see lines about chickens being descended from dragons and you realize that this isn’t taking place in the familiar reality we’re all used to. Blushing was just chilling, a very disturbing piece of prose.
A Young Candy Daughter was a good take on the idea that God might be one of us (just a stranger on the bus), only most of the time in such explorations, God is still a white guy in his prime. Or a white woman. But here, you’ve got a little brown girl who has these divine powers and is still in the process of growing up and learning that there’s more to saving people than what a child’s mind can comprehend. It’s not written from her perspective, or even the perspective of her mother, but from a stranger, a Salvation Army Santa Claus who sees the girl fill his coin bucket with food that the hungry can take to feed themselves. It was surprisingly powerful, and while it seems to be one of the stories that didn’t resonate well with other reviewers I’ve seen, I really enjoyed it.
Interestingly, there are many stories in Falling in Love With Hominids that don’t seem to have much point. They’re snippets, scenes rather than stories in the way I’m used to thinking of them, but although they were a few that didn’t really appeal to me, I liked to see that done. Whose Upward Flight I Love features workers trying to restrict trees from flying away. Soul Case involves a woman giving up her life to defeat invaders. Small things, with no real point, per se, but sometimes stories don’t have points. They really are just scenes, ideas, and once you get that down that’s all that needs to happen. It doesn’t need to go anywhere else. From a writing standpoint, I thought this was wonderful, because it shows the value in those little ideas that come to our minds but only stay for a moment and never get elaborated on. From a reading standpoint, though, they do come across as fairly random, without purpose, and often without much story.
Still, I enjoyed some of them.
As a counter to that, though, there are some stories here that I would love to see expanded as novellas or full-out novels, because there’s so much potential to the short story. Message in a Bottle and Delicious Monster are the two that come to mind instantly for this, because there’s so much to them that goes unsaid, so many questions and what-ifs about them that I want to see more. The Easthound, too, to a degree, though that one still works so perfectly a short story that expansion could possibly ruin it.
Hopkinson does some beautiful things with the art of writing, her imagination is without bounds, and she challenges both readers and writers to go beyond what we see as the status quo. The book is filled with characters of colour, with LGBT characters, with characters who, one way or the other, are memorable and real and get to take part in some amazing stories. From this collection, I definitely want to see more of her work; she is without a doubt an author to keep an eye on!
"I loved his imagination, style, the poetry of his writing, his compassion. Loved his sensibility in writing about a racialized, manufactured underclass and telling some of the stories from their context.”
The stories within this collection originate from across roughly a decade span of Hopkinson's writing career; with varied styles and themes they are absolutely unified only in their author. So then who is Hopkinson?
Born in Jamaica and raised in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada, Hopkinson writes speculative fiction and fantasy that typically includes elements of Caribbean culture and tradition. Many readers appreciate this perspective that her heritage provides the field, and she is equally valued for sincere inclusion of characters who may be any combination of people-of-colo(u)r, female, or queer. Such unique perspective alone shouldn't define her work though. Above all Hopkinson is talented, attracting the respect of writers such as Junot Díaz and earning accolades such as the 1999 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
The uniqueness of her perspective also doesn't mean that her writing is just for people like her. It's really important to have books by all kinds of people, not just straight, white men. But that doesn't mean that a book by a straight, white man can't speak to a queer, black woman. Or in this case, the reverse. Hopkinson's writing touches all those qualities that her quote on Cordwainer Smith mentions. She writes universal, core themes of what it is to be human, to deal with despair and to fight it. As her forward to the collection relates, this comes from her own evolution as an individual in society.
“One of the progressions I’ve made is from being a depressed teenager who saw how powerless she was to change all the ills around her to being a mostly cheerful fifty-something who realizes there are all kinds of ways of working together towards positive change... So part of the work of these past few decades of my life has been the process of falling love with hominids."
The opening story of this collection, "The Easthound", is an exquisite introduction to the range of Hopkinson's writing. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where adults become 'sprouted' into creatures that kill and feed upon the living, the story uses setting and a minimized plot as backdrop to focus on characters and emotion. This balance - tending towards what typically gets called literary - is typical of Hopkinson's stories. Also common for her work, here she takes a general premise that should be familiar to science fiction fans and puts on her unique twist. Her writing is not usually 'light' reading and some of her stories benefit from multiple reads because nuanced characteristics aren't at first registered. Yet, "The Easthound" demonstrates that Hopkinson can write taut action sequences amid more quiet moments of deep character introspection. The language can vary from the straight-forward to a more artistic poetry, such as lines in this story that form part of a 'Loup-de-lou' game that children play.
Because of her range as a writer, readers may not enjoy or appreciate all the stories in the collection. Some, like "Flying Lessons" or "Blushing" seem designed to challenge the author and reader alike. "Soul Case" puts a lot of complexity into a relatively small bit of space. (Not unlike, perhaps, fitting a soul and intelligence into the limitations of a human body, the 'soul case' of the title). For some its explorations of politics, history, race, and humanity will work brilliantly. Others may wish its soul had more room to breathe, to develop within the novella length. "Shift" adds a Caribbean twist to The Tempest, another example of a story grounded in something familiar to contrast with stories that have elements more unconventional - and verging on bizarro, like in "Emily Breakfast" or "Snow Day".
Overall this collection conveys a feeling of reading folklore. Readers particularly drawn to that style of fantasy will probably easily enjoy Falling in Love with Hominids, as Hopkinson uses the style effectively even in the context of a science fiction tale. Some of the stories here have been included elsewhere, including "Best of..." anthologies, pointing to Hopkinson's success and recognition. If you haven't yet experienced her writing, there is no better place to get a representative view of it as this.
Disclaimer: I received a free advanced electronic reading copy of this from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review that originally appeared on Reading1000Lives.com
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