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320 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2006
There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.Bender's is the first story that really kindled that feeling of strangeness in me—the first sentence makes it clear this tale does not plan to stay within genre lines. One of the hallmarks of slipstream, I think, is that it does play fair with the reader; its logic may be dream logic, but slipstream never abandons sense altogether. Bender's story does deliver on that promise.
—p.27
At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx."Sea Oak" is predictably unpredictable, brilliantly crafted and compulsively readable—in other words, typical Saunders.
—p.88
{...}each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.
—p.226
"On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know."