The BURIED Book Club discussion

Writing conceptual stories blurring autobiography, essay, and invention in New York in the 60s and 70s, Emshwiller's first collection Joy In Our Cause came out in 1974, the same year as the formation of Fiction Collective, and indeed some of her formally playful pseudo-auto-bio relationship dissections evoke, for me, Ronald Sukenick and his contemporaries. Emshwiller's output was rather sparse, though, and she seems to have been on a separate track from those younger contemporaries. Her second collection, Verging on the Pertinent in 1989, took her work into even more conceptual, often fantastical areas, with a strong feminist throughline. On the strength of these two quite buried works (and likely her 1988 novel of unexpected transformation, Carmen Dog), Emshwiller's decades of early writing seems especially overlooked and ripe for rediscovery. Still living (now age 97!) Emshwiller gained greater fame in the sci-fi world in her 80s with The Mount (which may explain why of the early work Carmen Dog alone has had much attention here), though most of her work seems likely too singular to conform to genre.

Of most interest here:

Joy In Our Cause (1974, 4 ratings / 1 review)
Carmen Dog (1988, 195 ratings / 26 reviews)
Verging on the Pertinent (1989 / 11 ratings, 1 review--mine)
The Start of the End of It All (1990, 36 ratings / 8 reviews)

The rest of the work that followed:

Ledoyt (1995)
Leaping Man Hill (1999)
Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories (2002, notably covers back to 1977 with much previously unpublished early work)
The Mount (2002)
Mister Boots (2005)
I Live With You (Tachyon Publications, 2005)
The Secret City (Tachyon Publications, 2007)
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (2011)
In The Time Of War & Master Of the Road To Nowhere (2011)