Map of Dreams [Hardcover]

M. Rickert (Author), Gordon Van Gelder (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2006

Set in a reality where nightmares do not fade upon waking, this anthology skims along the surface of life and dips just beneath, revealing the hidden machinations that fuel dreams. These underlying myths and fantasies exist not as musty old stories but as ancient truths that have come to illuminate the modern human condition. The title story touches on themes of grief, redemption, and time travel; "Cold Fire" ventures into love and obsession; and "Peace on Suburbia" introduces readers to a Christmas with an entirely different kind of savior. These and 13 other tales are framed by four interludes—Dreams, Nightmares, Waking, and Rising—that guide readers through a world that is at once familiar and eerily off-kilter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sorrows, anguish and bitter might-have-beens dominate Rickert's fitfully brilliant collection of fantasy fiction, whose title novella, according to Gordon Van Gelder's afterword, reveals a love of the natural world that wonderfully imbues the author's often enigmatic fiction. Rickert's nature is less illumined by golden daffodils than "red in tooth and claw," rife with the fierce necessary complements of birth and death, reality and dream, sanity and madness. Rickert acknowledges her "magical realism" owes a literary debt to Gabriel García Marquez, but her most powerful passages, like "Moorina of the Seals," a startling ecological hymn, and "Many Voices," the horrific exposé of a women's prison, draw on woman's strengths and weaknesses as maiden, matron and crone. "Leda" and her other subtle retellings of myth, couched in the deceptively prosaic dialogue of America's underprivileged, achieve resonances that plumb the darkest depths of human love and loneliness, and occasionally rise to "the song that both connects, and disconnects us, shared, but never owned, life."
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Review

"The stories in this collection both sting and delight me."  —Charles Coleman Finlay, author, The Prodigal Troll

"One of my favorite short story writers."  —Jeffrey Ford, New York Times–notable author and winner of the World Fantasy Award

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 310 pages
• Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930846444
• ISBN-13: 978-1930846449
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #837,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing collection of stories, March 25, 2011

By 

Michelleoverhere - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Map of Dreams (Hardcover)

This is the first time I've reviewed something on Amazon, because usually everything I would write is already written in another review. This book is incredible! I came across M. Rickert's story Bread and Bombs in the anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse(by far my favorite story in that anthology, by the way). Her writing is so beautiful, and the stories are haunting. I love to read short stories, but usually I can only find one or two that I really love in a collection. In this book, though, I really love most of the stories! I finished the book last night, and I'm still thinking about the lovely yet very sad final story "The Chambered Fruit," in which a mother tries to contact her dead daughter. Actually, the death of a child is a theme that recurs at least a few times in the book, and M. Rickert's portrayal of such a tragedy is very convincing, beautiful, and of course depressing. There is a sense of the magical in these stories, often in a dark sort of way. I love this book and recommend it to everyone! Now I'm off to read her more recent book Holiday.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories you will not forget easily, July 11, 2008

By 

Christopher Barzak (Youngstown, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Map of Dreams (Hardcover)

M. Rickert's first collection, Map of Dreams, is beautiful, magical, real, incantatory, evocative, lush, poetic, full of narrative momentum and characters and situations that you will not easily forget. There is a generous amount of heart and sympathy in these stories, and a wealth of wisdom. Don't read this book at your own risk.