"Pride and Prometheus," a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.

A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice , Frankenstein , The Wizard of Oz , and Flannery O’Connor. Kessel, whose story "A Clean Escape" was filmed as part of ABC's Masters of Science Fiction , ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon.

"In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In "Pride and Prometheus," Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while "A Lunar Quartet" introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel's wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you'll ever read ("The Red Phone")." A-
— Entertainment Weekly

"Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head."
— Time Out Chicago

"Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories."
— Charlotte Observer

"A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction."
— The Seattle Stranger

"Kessel's blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing."
— Booklist

"These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch."
— Publishers Weekly

"Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please—or to defy prediction."
— Metro Magazine

"One of the best collections of the year."
— Locus

"Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless."
— SciFi.com

"John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel's wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn's first light. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek."
—Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, NC

"Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous."
— The Fix

John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree awards, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product, and story collection, Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book).
Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics were all excited to see another anthology from Kessler, even if most of the stories here have already appeared in top science fiction magazines. While some admitted they were at first skeptical of the motif of entering other authors’ worlds, most felt that not only did Kessler pull off these stories with gusto but he did so in such a way that readers can enjoy his tales even if they have not read the original authors. While the Strange Horizons reviewer was not quite as impressed by the work as a whole and cited it as an uneven collection, he also found much to praise, especially in the lunar stories.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist

Woven into the narrative of every Kessel story is a little bombshell of startling ideas. Kessel never fails to provide some odd, often surreal angle on a familiar sf theme that few other genre specialists could have imagined. In the title story of this collection, L. Frank Baum’s famous Oz-bound heroine becomes a ruby-sneakered vixen who lures her unwitting boyfriend into an Emerald City bank to pull off a swindle. In “It’s All True,” a film studio agent from the future travels back in time to offer Orson Welles an irresistible movie contract. “The Last American” presents a mini biography of the last wartime president to occupy the White House before mankind makes the leap into a peaceful, posthuman society. The volume also showcases Kessel’s remarkable stylistic versatility in a sequel to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that recounts the further adventures of the killer who appeared at the original story’s end. Kessel’s blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing. --Carl Hays

Review

"Witty, daring and intelligent, Kessel produces some of the best science fiction in the genre." --Publishers Weekly "Kessel's darkly comic vision is wackily funny, brilliantly cruel, and joltingly powerful--like Silly Putty cut with high tech plastic explosives." --Bruce Sterling "Kessel is a superb satirist with a keen eye for detailing the human spirit." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Kessel treats his characters with warmth and compassion--even while he's putting them through the wringer!" --The San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

John Kessel's stories have won the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree Awards. His books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and collections The Pure Product and Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book). Kessel and his family live in Raleigh, NC, where he co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University.