{"product_id":"if-lions-could-speak-and-other-stories-by-paul-park-paperback","title":"If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories, by Paul Park (Paperback)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIf Lions Could Speak\u003c\/em\u003e is the first collection from Paul Park, acclaimed author of \u003cem\u003eThe Starbridge Chronicles\u003c\/em\u003e \u003cem\u003eCoelestis\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eThe Gospel of Corax\u003c\/em\u003e. Subtle, stylish, at once forthrightly simple and ingeniously complex, the pieces gathered here are compelling and penetrating explorations of cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and reconciliation. It is a marvelous literary labyrinth, a realm of memory palaces, eerie doppelgangers, terrifying theocracies, implosive revelations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere time travel, sordid and ludicrous, becomes emblematic of how all lives are led; here, disease is an index to how the past is rewritten; here, the Other, extravagantly alien or simply alienated, can collapse into the Self with the suddenness of a lethal gunshot. Sometimes sardonically hilarious, sometimes gravely humane, always fiercely shocking, these stories constitute one of the finest bodies of short fiction by any contemporary SF writer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Paul Park's short stories are subtle, blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true--all these qualities, often all at once--they are like those dreams or nightmares that seem to plumb right to the meaning of things. In other words, beautiful fiction.\" --Kim Stanley Robinson. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If those who don't read science fiction could discover Paul Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as ambitious and as many-faceted as any they will find under any rubric. I hope this collection will help them discover him. The rest of us can simply open and enjoy.\" --John Crowley.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Paul Park does not remind us of James Sallis or Marcel Proust; the mark of genius is that it never makes us recall anyone else, not even earlier selves.\" --Gene Wolfe.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wildside Press LLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43184449454289,"sku":"9781587155086","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/5981\/5377\/files\/9781587155086_FC.jpg?v=1784068997","url":"https:\/\/startlingstories.us\/products\/if-lions-could-speak-and-other-stories-by-paul-park-paperback","provider":"Startling Stories","version":"1.0","type":"link"}