Weird Women, Wired Women » (New Edition)

KIT REED is an Adjunct Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Her twelve novels include Captain Grownup, Catholic Girls, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, and her newest J.Eden. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. In SF, she has published three short story collections and the novels Armed Camps, Magic Time, Fort Privilege, and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, a finalist for the Tiptree Prize. "Whoever," the next -to-last short story she read in the New York Review of Science Fiction's series at Dixon Place this year, is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "The Singing Marine" was a short story nominee at the 1996 World Fantasy Convention.

Visionary stories expose the humor and horror of contemporary women's lives.

Publishers Weekly

Reed has been writing what she calls "speculative" stories for 40 years, and this is a collection of 19 short narratives that specifically focus on the problems of women during those four decades particularly on the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. These range from the early "The Wait" (1958), in which a mother who has always been protective but conventional yields to a horrifying new convention that will sacrifice her daughter, to last year's "Whoever," in which a terminally trendy teenager tries to choose between the parent who adopted her (as a sperm-bank baby) and two other women who may be the "real" mother she craves. These stories hover on the brink of science fiction and have a strong element of fantasy. They embrace, with fearful lucidity, contemporary trends like the passion for the perfect house ("Cynosure," 1964); the all-enveloping beauty contest ("In Behalf of the Product," 1973); the fiercer side of feminist combativeness ("Songs of War," 1974); and the obsession with fashion ("Like My Dress," 1993). There is no doubt about the prescience of Reed's earlier stories, or about the despairing sense of the consumerist media culture that infuses the later ones. Her writing is always crisp and to the point. There is, however, a kind of unrelenting obsessiveness not unlike that of Reed's characters. The lack of contrast to offset the prevailing darkness becomes unnerving, and the total effect, while impressive, is somewhat cold.