synopsis
In 1972, Jack Dann was a law school student and aspiring writer who had published stories in Worlds of If and Fantastic when a story he had sent to Damon Knight for his famed Orbit anthology series was published. These early stories eventually led to a Nebula Award for his novella “Da Vinci Rising” in 1997 and to increasing acclaim as one of science fiction and fantasy’s most original writers.
Jack Dann’s imagined worlds are so rich in detail as to become hallucinatory; a reader doesn’t so much peruse a Dann story as experience it. In “The Dybbuk Dolls,” the owner of a sex shop in a future ghetto finds himself involved with weird customers, a political feud, alien dolls, and a number of complicated and often hilarious events. “Jumping the Road” and “Timetipping” also draw on Dann’s Jewish heritage and his gift for humor, while “Amnesia,” a darker tale in which a man searching for his dead wife plugs into a dying man’s mind, demonstrates Dann’s range, as does “Blind Shemmy,” a story of gamblers playing for the highest of stakes.
In “Bad Medicine,” a man searching for meaning in his life embarks on a spiritual quest with a Native American shaman, while the Ditmar Award-winning “The Diamond Pit,” an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald set in the 1920s, is an adventure story of an aviator shot down and confined by an eccentric millionaire in a luxurious prison from which he and other confined flyers must escape.
All of the stories in this volume reveal Dann’s ability to draw the reader completely into his settings and the minds of his characters; even when we’re not quite sure of where we are going, we are compelled to go along for the ride. John Kessel calls Dann’s fiction “stories of transcendence, spiritual exploration, harrowing psychological transformations. Rebirth and conceptual breakthrough. And yet they are grounded in a developed sense of personal relationships, the rag and bone shop of the human heart.” Set in places as diverse as Renaissance Italy, upstate New York, near-future Paris, Nazi Germany, modern-day Athens, and Hollywood in the 1950s, here are compulsively involving stories by a master storyteller.
Jack Dann’s highly praised novels include Junction, The Man Who Melted, The Silent, Counting Coup, Shadows in the Stone, and the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral.
He has also been honored with the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Chronos Award, the Darrell Award for Best Mid-South Novel, the Ditmar Award (five times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. Having grown up in the United States, he now lives in Australia with his partner, author and anthologist Janeen Webb. The complete contents appear below. Note: Jack Dann wrote two strories called “Visitors.” They are completely different stories. That is why you see the title listed twice in the table of contents below.
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