If you attended the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading back in November with John Langan and yours truly, you might remember the story I read called “In Memory of a Summer’s Day.” That story will appear in an Alice in Wonderland-themed anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. The anthology includes stories by Seanan McGuire, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine, Kaaron Warren, Jeffrey Ford, Richard Bowes, Jane Yolan, Andy Duncan, and lots more. The full table of contents is below, but first I wanted to talk a little bit about the origin of my story.
When Ellen asked me to send her an Alice-themed story, I first had to go back and reread the books to re-familiarize myself with the material. But I kind of already knew what I had in mind. I envisioned a kind of haggard, jaded tour-guide who leads a group of clueless tourists, Disney-style, through Wonderland’s oddities. But unbeknownst to the tourists, Wonderland is crumbling. And it’s not the whimsical, fantastical realm everyone’s been led to believe, but something far more sinister. I got my idea from an exhibit I visited with some friends in Manhattan at the Morgan Library & Museum called “Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland.” What struck me was, well, how pervy Lewis Caroll was. His obsession with the real Alice (Ms. Alice Pleasance Liddell), penning love letters to her, taking photographs of her in her underwear, when she was many years his junior and not even close to consensual age, just came off as vile. And here were were, a century and a half later, so enamored with the tale and all its variants, ignoring its uncomfortable source. It seemed to me that its very seed was corrupt. This idea led me to my story, “In Memory of a Summer’s Day.”
Mad Hatters and March Hares, edited by Ellen Datlow, comes out December 5, 2017. Details follow:
Here is what you can expect from Mad Hatters and March Hares: “An all original anthology of stories inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. ‘Alice’ has been read, enjoyed, and savored by generations of children and adults since its publication. It’s hallucinogenic, weird, imaginative and full of wordplay, mathematical puzzles, and political and social satire.”
Mad Hatters and March Hares will features stories that are inspired by the strange events and characters that appear in Wonderland.
Table of Contents
- “A Comfort, One Way” by Genevieve Valentine
- “Alis” by Stephen Graham Jones
- “All the King’s Men” by Jeffrey Ford
- “Conjoined” by Jane Yolen
- “Eating the Alice Cake” by Kaaron Warren
- “Gentle Alice” by Kris Dikeman
- “In Memory of a Summer’s Day” by Matthew Kressel
- “Lily-White & The Thief of Lesser Night” by C.S.E. Cooney
- “Mercury” by Priya Sharma
- “Moon, Memory, Muchness” by Katherine Vaz
- “My Own Invention” by Delia Sherman
- “Run, Rabbit” by Angela Slatter
- “Run, Rabbit, Run” by Jane Yolen
- “Sentence Like a Saturday” by Seanan McGuire
- “Some Kind of Wonderland” by Richard Bowes
- “The Flame After the Candle” by Catherynne M. Valente
- “The Queen of Hats” by Ysabeau Wilce
- “Worrity, Worrity” by Andy Duncan
The anthology features a cover by the legendary Dave McKean, whose Folio Society edition of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods recently went on sale.
Mad Hatters and March Hares will be released on December 5, 2017.
| Read the first novel of the Worldmender trilogy King of Shards free now when you subscribe to my newsletter. | Read Queen of Static now, the follow-up to the groundbreaking novel King of Shards. |
 |
 |
