Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller

Over the more than five decades spanned by this lovingly curated collection, Carol Emshwiller held to something distinctly Emshwillerian in the stories she invented: out of the most straightforward language and a deceptively calm sensibility grew the strangest of tales. Though they were all published in science fiction magazines, there's hardly a spaceship to be found; instead there are animals, some familiar, some not (like the green, scaly, house-filling thing in "Creature"), and humans, who, even when their cruelest impulses are being suggested, still have something gentle, and gently funny, about them. A friend and peer of Le Guin and Grace Paley, Emshwiller's warm but unsettling fables have spawned a whole generation of followers from Kelly Link to Carmen Maria Machado.