Last Summer at Mars Hill [Mass Market Paperback]

Elizabeth Hand (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061057312
• ISBN-13: 978-0061057311
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

More About the Author

A couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform, Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum; she was eventually readmitted to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her B.A. She is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-Winner), Glimmering, and Mortal Love, and three collections of stories, including the recent Saffron and Brimstone. Her fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards, and her novels have been chose as New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. She has also been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. A regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hand lives with her family on the Maine Coast.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Writing, February 2, 2001

By 

Justin Vaughan (northern IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Summer at Mars Hill (Paperback)

I discovered this collection of stories after first reading Waking the Moon (also amazing). Elizabeth Hand uses words like an artist uses paints; they evoke textures and colors and feelings when you read them. Her descriptions are like none that I've ever read before - as well as her storylines. One or two of the stories presented didn't do much for me, but the rest more than made up for them. The title story and Snow on Sugar Mountain were favorites, the latter being particularly interesting (about the strange connection between a shapechanging boy and an ailing former astronaut). I also highly recommend her novels Waking the Moon and Black Light (read them in that order).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A collection of excellent stories, November 16, 1998

By 

Peter F. Delaney - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Summer at Mars Hill (Paperback)

I've always liked Elizabeth Hand's work. Her writing is the jazz of the science fiction world: intelligent, sophisticated, complex and stylistically thrilling, but at the same time requiring a lot of effort on the part of the reader. Don't bother trying to read these right before you go to sleep at night after a hard day. You will have to think and have some patience to make it through these stories, but they are well worth it. Her characters are usually well-sketched and interesting, and the stories, if occasionally falling prey to the postmodern habit of having little in the way of plot and leaving dangling strings, are unique and exciting. Much better than The Glimmering.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (Short) Strange Trip, January 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Summer at Mars Hill (Paperback)

I wish these stories were longer. In "Last Summer at Mars Hill", Hand continues her journey through Magic, twilight, and Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary. She speaks from different points of view in each story, exploring dark purposes and good, varied enough that the collection could have been written by four or five different writers. Her stories are palpable and audible, and quite frequently, as in the case of "Prince of Flowers", you can smell them too.