ISBN: 0-88739-266-0
160 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 7/2000
Paperback Original
Price: $13.95
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Home is the Sailor, Under the Sea
Mermaid Stories
Stephen Spotte
Put aside the alluring sirens of legend. The mermaids populating these stories include a lonely freak in a circus sideshow, a creature bioengineered by a love-sick scientist, an actress who studies her aquarium's inhabitants so intensely that she too becomes a fish, a watery angel seen in a vision by snake-handling Christian fundamentalists, and a sailor who washes ashore to tell a startled beachcomber that he might or might not have drowned.
In these and other tales-some funny, some sad, but all of them very, very weird-the author scrapes aside reality's thin patina and gives us a glimpse into the strange abyssal world of his imagination.
Review: "The assurance with which he handles the basic elements of his craft is unequivocal, and that confidence allows him to play delightfully with language free of the self-conscious strain seen in more deliberately experimental fiction."
-Hillary Johnson,Los Angeles Weekly
"A remarkable collection. These stunning stories, particularly those drawn from Spotte's coal country youth, are imaginative, moving, poignant, and thoughtful. Readers will want an encore."
-John Hanchette, Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent, Gannett News Service
"These stories are weird and wonderful, disturbing yet comic, combining present and future into startling visions."
-George B. Schaller, winner of the National Book Award, author, Stones of Silence and The Last Panda
Bio: STEPHEN SPOTTE, a marine scientist at the University of Connecticut, was born and raised in West Virginia. He holds a bachelor's degree from Marshall University and a doctorate from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of eighty scientific articles and eight nonfiction books. An earlier collection of his short fiction, An Optimist in Hell, is also available from Creative Arts Book Company.
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