Tiny Tango

Holy Ground

by Judith Moffett, Dominique BELLEC (Translator)

When an ambitious young botanist named Nancy Sandford discovers that she is positive for HIV, she scraps plans for a world-class research career and reinvents herself as a mediocre professor in an academic backwater. By doing so she hopes to keep her secret concealed, and to survive until a cure for HIV is found. In her struggle to endure the loneliness and terror of such a life, Sandy involves herself in activities ranging from the botanical to the bizarre; and both sorts come into play when an accident occurs at a power plant near her home, shortly before an alien ship lands on the moon.

The nuclear meltdown shatters Sandy’s carefully restricted personal world. Yet its consequences—combined with alien intervention—bring about a startling conclusion to her situation and to the story.

“Tiny Tango,” written in 1987, was an early attempt to grapple with the AIDS epidemic in fiction. It appears (as Chapter 3) in The Ragged World, Volume I of the author’s Holy Ground Trilogy, and was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards. “Tiny Tango” is also included in Ian Sales’s list: “100 Great Science Fiction Stories by Women.”

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 5, 2014

About the author

Judith Moffett was born in Louisville in 1942 and grew up in Cincinnati. She is an English professor, a poet, a Swedish translator, and the author of twelve books in six genres. These include two volumes of poetry, two of Swedish poetry in formal translation, four science-fiction novels plus a collection of stories, a volume of creative nonfiction, and a critical study of James Merrill's poetry; she has also written an unpublished memoir of her long friendship with Merrill. Her work in poetry, translation, and science fiction has earned numerous awards and award nominations, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, an NEH Translation Grant, the Swedish Academy's Tolkningspris (Translation Prize), and in science fiction the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for the year's best short story. Two of her novels were New York Times Notable Books.

Moffett earned a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, with a thesis on Stephen Vincent Benét's narrative poetry, directed by Daniel Hoffman. She taught American literature and creative writing at several colleges and universities, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Kentucky, and for fifteen years the University of Pennsylvania. She has lived for extended periods in England (Cambridge) and Sweden (Lund and Stockholm), as well as around the US, living/​teaching/​writing in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Utah. In 1983 she married Medievalist Edward B. Irving, Jr., her colleague at Penn. Widowed in 1998, Judy now divides her year between Swarthmore PA and her hundred-acre recovering farm in Lawrenceburg KY, sharing both homes with her standard poodles, Fleece and Corbie.

Reviews

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Très beau texte sur le Sida.
Attention de même, si le jardinage vous ennuie, vous n'allez pas aimer haha

[Cheryl]

currently requesting a year's best that includes this from Evergreen