Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

Filter House collects fourteen stories by Nisi Shawl, with an introduction by Eileen Gunn (author of Stable Strategies). The collection offers a haunting montage that works its magic subtly on the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933500190
• ISBN13: 9781933500195
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Aqueduct Press
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Animism Unbound

Call Nisi Shawl's stories curvy fiction, call them slipstream, call them speculative--they're all grounded in experience. In Shawl's stories, calling upon an African goddess is no more speculative than hailing a taxi. In Shawl's realities, imagination is a force to be reckoned with and the universe is teeming with life and spirit and desire. "Filter House" is aptly named for the structure a minuscule sea creature secretes around itself and that filters the sea for the creature's food. Food, dwelling, the implied hearth and heart that is fed--all these describe Shawl's stories. Her characters are closely observed, and gain quick traction in the friction of the real. The real, here, is animated, alive, and Shawl's sentences weave a rhythm that gives voice to (secret?) desires--for divine intervention, for allies and challengers in rocks and trees, for love and imagination to be made simple and practical. Her stories' trajectories are wonderfully entertaining but her sentences are magical. With dialog and observation, Shawl manages to frequently prick through the veil between reader and writer, bringing her characters alive in a delightfully synchronous world.