Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer (Editor), Elizabeth Hand, Michael Moorcock

For most of us, these prizewinning spelling bee words would be difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. We asked twenty-one of today’s most talented and inventive writers to go even further and pen an original tale inspired by one of dozens of obscure and fascinating championship words. The result is Logorrhea–a veritable dictionary of the weird, the fantastic, the haunting, and the indefinable that will have you spellbound from the very first page. There’s only one word for such an irresistible anthology: Logorrhea

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Reviews

[Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this fantasy story! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature. This 2008 World Fantasy Award-winning short story is free online here at Lightspeed Magazine.

In this story, Theodora Goss weaves together past and present. The past is an Asian folk tale type of story about a young woman named Kamora, the favorite maiden of the Empress Nasren. Kamora wishes to marry the Cloud Dragon, who turns into a handsome man at night. In return the Cloud Dragon will give his whiskers to Kamora’s uncle Alem Das, a blind instrument-maker, to use as strings for a dulcimer. The Empress, however, refuses to give Kamora permission to marry unless she can find someone who amuses the Empress more than Kamora does.

The present-time part of this story follows Sabra, a student and teaching assistant at a university in Boston. She was born in Ethiopia (once Abyssinia) to a powerful and wealthy man who died in the revolution against the Emperor, and his still-lovely but rather heartless wife.

I insisted on providing for myself, and living in a city that was too cold for her, because it kept me from feeling the enchantment that she threw over everything around her. She was an enchantress without intention, as a spider gathers flies by instinct. One longed to be in her web. In her presence, one could not help loving her, without judgment. And I was proud of my independence, if of nothing else.

Sabra begins a relationship with Michael, her co-TA, who introduces her to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his evocative poem “Kubla Khan.” But she fears that if her mother ever comes to visit, she will steal Michael away, even though her mother is far older. One day Sabra begins to write a term paper on Coleridge in her ice-cold apartment, and suddenly she finds herself in the cold, stone palace of Kubla Khan, alone … except for Coleridge. They chat, and at his request Sabra picks up a dulcimer and sings for him.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

These two stories are both intriguing: Kamora’s story reads like an authentic fairy tale, and Sabra’s story is brimming with the small, sometimes painful details that make her human and sympathetic. As the two stories to connect together through Coleridge, a woman with a dulcimer, and a name of an empress, I was caught in the enchanting web Goss wove. It’s a lovely work.

I recommend taking a few minutes to read “Kubla Khan” first (it's quite short, and here's an online copy of it) … and don’t forget the “person from Porlock,” the now-legendary unexpected visitor who interrupted Coleridge’s creative spell while writing “Kubla Khan.” Also, in Goss’ Author Spotlight on Lightspeed, she relates a fun story about how “Singing of Mount Abora” came to be, which involves an anthology of spelling-bee inspired stories, a list of words including “dulcimer,” and a fascination with minor characters in others’ stories.

Highly recommended!

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!

last year, i carved out my own short story advent calendar as my project for december, and it was so much fun i decided to do it again this year! so, each day during the month of december, i will be reading a short story and doing the barest minimum of a review because ain't no one got time for that and i'm already so far behind in all the things. however, i will be posting story links in case anyone wants to read the stories themselves and show off how maybe someone could have time for that.

here is a link to the first story in last year's project,

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

which in turn links to the whole monthlong project, in case you wanna do some free short story reading of your own! links to the stories in this year's advent-ure will be at the end of each review.

enjoy, and the happiest of decembers to you all!

DECEMBER 28

“Very well. You may marry your Cloud Dragon. Do not look surprised that I know whom you love. I am not so insensible as all that. But first, you must complete one task for me. When you have completed it, then you may marry whom you please.”

“What is that task?” asked Kamora.

“You must find me someone who amuses me more than you do.”

oh, man. SO GOOD! this story is all of my favorite things: disparate narratives weaving together in unexpected, deeply satisfying ways, fiddling with a pre-existing work (in this case, Kubla Khan by coleridge, a poem i can barely stay awake through and do not see the appeal of), and a beautiful union between realism and fabulism. i love this - love, love, love this. thank you to tadiana for kicking me towards it. you will read her review here. i'm so glad to be coming across such fine stories so deep into this project. three more days to go!

read it for yourself here:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fic...

and read Kubla Khan, too, if you enjoy being bored by drug addicts:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

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[Mitticus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Singing of Mount Abora by Theodora Goss

4.5 *

En Boston, Sabra, una estudiante universitaria nacida en Etiopia , nos narra acerca de su madre abrumadora, conocer a un muchacho, escribir algo para sus estudios, el poeta Coleridge, y termina entrelazándonos en el poema de Kubla Khan de dicho autor mediante un relato fantástico lleno de imagenes orientales.

Es una historia dentro de otra historia. Lo de Kamora y el tio sabio es encantador en un sentido bastante clásico de cuento. Me encantó, valga la redundancia.

Gotta love clever singer women. Though, Sabra , honey, I very much doubt that your lover will be near either as impressive or beautiful as the Cloud Dragon
---------
My mother was beautiful. I should say rather that she was a beauty, for to her, beauty was not a quality but a state of being. Beauty was her art, her profession.
----------

She tapped the drum once with her finger, and Kamora heard a reverberation, not only from the drum itself, but from the stones around her, the scrubby cedars, bent by the wind, and even the air. It seemed to echo over the forested slopes of the mountain, and the hills below, on which she could see the tomb of the Great Khan, as white as the rising moon, and the plains stretching away into the distance.
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Lo pueden hallar : aqui

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how the two stories were woven together. Gentle and lyrical, almost like a poem itself. Four stars.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

it centres around one of my least favourite poems, so i guess i should have expected this

[papilionna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most polished writing I've ever read, but whimsical and imaginative

[Yules · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short story collection based on winning words from the National Spelling Bee. Each story is written by a different contributor, mostly writers of sci-fi or fantasy. The words range from totally obscure (i.e. "cambist") to ordinary (i.e. "eczema"). Considering how uneven collections can be, this one turned out really well. A few of my favorite were:

• “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham: Hugo Award finalist and my favorite story of the bunch. In this economics parable, a cambist - which is a person who deals with foreign currency - asserts that principles of currency exchange can be applied to all things. He claims that the value of anything can be stated in terms of anything else, ex: "How many lemon tarts is a horse worth?...It isn’t harder to determine than some number of rubles for another number of yen." Under pressure to solve cambistry puzzles put to him by an evil lord, he applies his theory to human lives and souls. I also liked this discussion of the story by economists. I sent the story to a couple of my economist friends and it led to some great conversation.

• “Eczema” by Clare Dudman: A young man discovers that a trio of strange women have moved in across the street. They dress in all black, have no furniture, and sometimes turn into crows. They tell him they're from a world that has only had a limited number of participants since the beginning of time, and it functions in such a way that their numbers never increase or decrease. Evolution is wild, especially when crossing space-time continuums.

• “From Around Here” by Tim Pratt: A spirit who takes on human form from time to time ("I always forgot how much 'feelings' depend on the particular glands and muscles and nerve endings you happen to have at the moment") has arrived in an area where he senses evil lurking. He situates himself in the neighborhood, making friends and even taking a human lover, all while trying to ascertain the source of its evil so he can kill it on the low. Even in his human body, he's got a few supernatural abilities, but the only people he can really tap into and manipulate on a subconscious level are the locals, those "from around here." Pratt takes his story as an opportunity to think about belonging somewhere and nowhere. I was sad to see it end and wished there were a whole series of this creature's crime-solving adventures.

My least favorite of the stories I read (as usual with collections, I didn't read them all) was actually the eponymous “Logorrhea” by Michelle Richmond. It set us up with interesting characters, including a man covered head to toe with super sharp scales and a woman suffering from logorrhea (a condition where one can never stop talking), but doesn't really go anywhere. Overall, though, I don't regret reading any of them.

[Chhavi · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED it. I like how she wove in the myth, the poem, her story.

[Ashley Zhang · Rating 3 out of 5]

some were rly good

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This lovely short story won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. It weaves together two threads in the best fairy tale story telling fashion - one a romantic modern day thread (Ethiopian Sabra and American Michael are Literature students) and the second a more classic fairy tale one of quests to win tue love (Kamora and the Cloud Dragon) , the linkage around which both storylines are built is Samuel Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan from where the stories title comes. Exquisite.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this a lot. The premise is very cool - each story was inspired by a word that was the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in recent years. I don't know if it was because of the oddness of the words, or if it's just the types of things these authors write, but the stories were really strange and wonderful -- exactly what I like to see in short stories. The kind of thing where sometimes you're not sure if you know what's going on, and you have to piece it together as you read. Some were funny, some were disturbing, some were just plain odd. Some were a little bit sci-fi, some were completely based in the reality we know, some were somewhere in between. I liked them all, and if you like short stories (or weird stories) I highly recommend this.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very pleasant book for the word nerds out there. Each short story is focused around one of the final words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee from the preceding 2 decades. A few of the stories fizzled, but that was more than made up for by the romping good ones. This is definitely worth picking up if you appreciate a well wrought story or have ever found yourself looking up the etymology of an obscure word so you could really get at its' meaning.

[rivka]

One of these shorts is nominated for a Hugo, and can be read here. Not only is the story marvelous, it made me want to read the entire collection!

[Tania]

My review is up on The Short Review at http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews... along with more reviews of short story collections and anthologies.

[Gayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection of imaginative stories, especially enjoyable for those of us who appreciate the history and meanings of individual words.

[Trey Wren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some hit or miss but the story by Tim Pratt, "From Around Here" is worth the price of admission.

[elana · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most creative books i've ever read.
splendid!!!

[Kristel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable book of short fiction, mostly of the science fiction/fantasy variety. It's a little hit and miss, but most collections are.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicely done, although a little emotionally flat, especially given the importance of both romance and family relationships to the plot.