- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Running Press; 1 edition (Jun 10 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1560258179
- ISBN-13: 978-1560258179
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 249 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,473,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The 15 stories in Di Filippo's latest collection (after 2005's The Emperor of Gondwanaland) show his command of a colorful palette of ideas and approaches. The title tale is an amusing satire of a sleepless 24/7 near-future in which time is traded like a commodity by professional (if sometimes incompetent) brokers. In the screwball fantasy "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," a male writer hires an actress to play the pseudonymous female "author" of his bestselling chick lit novel—then finds himself getting absorbed like one of his feckless male characters into her far too authentic performance. The book also features respectful homages to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Jules Verne. Most of the stories percolate with the author's trademark gushes of wit and humor, but several of the best are deadly earnest, including "Underground," a spooker set in the New York City subway system, and "Shadowboxer," a tale of a psychic assassin fighting "the war on terror" that brilliantly captures the moral ambiguity of attitudes in post-9/11 America. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Most of Di Filippo's previous collections have been thematic. The stories in Strange Trades (2001) explored unusual professions, while those in The Steampunk Trilogy (1995) lampooned Victorian science. This time Di Filippo displays his versatility, with quirky contemporary fantasy sitting beside cutting-edge hard sf. Two early stories, "Captain Jill" and "Billy Budd," are set in the mythical New England town of Blackwood Beach, whose citizenry includes a centuries-old wizard and a green-tinted gardener who grew from a mandrake seedling. The title story explores a future when drugs have vanquished sleep, and the extra time available to businesses is handled by "timebrokers." Other tales span the spectrum of genres from horror (a New York subway rider encounters the ghost of a teenage suicide) to the avant-garde, best exemplified in the final story, "The Furthest Schorr," which consists of 32 mind-bending vignettes inspired by the paintings of surrealist artist Todd Schorr. As in all of Di Filippo's work, superior craftsmanship shines from every page. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Shuteye for the Reader, Mar 26 2009
By doomsdayer520 - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories (Paperback)
Paul di Filippo has some unique and offbeat ideas, but most of the short stories in this collection fail to take hold with the reader. In most of these tales, witty dialogue and surreal plot twists merely become momentarily impressive writing shenanigans, leading to vague and obtuse resolutions that will probably leave the reader unsatisfied. Granted, there are a few strong stories in the collection, with a touch of weird romantic whimsy in "Billy Budd," postmodern celebreality in "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," and an especially effective look at the morals of the war on terror in "Shadowboxer." But these are among the few stories in this collection with themes robust enough to truly connect with the reader.Other tales are built on disappointingly thin premises, like a cheesy rockstars-with-superpowers conceit in "Slowhand and Little Sister," and inconclusive tributes to Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, several of the stories here are vanity exercises for unknown themed anthologies and tributes, and without similarly-themed stories by others, they suffer in isolation here. The ultimate vanity project in this collection is "The Farthest Schorr," a collection of 32 disconnected mini-tales of about one page each, inspired by the paintings of fantasy artist Todd Schorr. This exercise wouldn't have worked much better if you could actually see the paintings in this book, which you can't. di Filippo admits that many of the stories here are inspired by the works of his predecessors, and that's a fine way to find interesting story ideas, but his level of inspiration is only partially passed on to the reader. [~doomsdayer520~]
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dream-like Science Fiction and Fantasy, Oct 8 2006
By David B Richman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories (Paperback)
Paul Di Filippo is certainly a talented fantasy and SF writer. His short stories in "Shuteye for the Timebroker" are gems of the trade and remind me of the days a friend used to send me copies of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." In fact one of the stories was published in this old standard.From the lusty "Captain Jill" to the surrealistic "The Farthest Schorr" (the latter commemorated by the painting on the cover) Di Filippo has fashioned a brilliant collection of hard core SF-fantasy that is difficult to put down, If you have ever thought about the possibility of being awake 24 hours a day, or what would have happened if Jules Verne's Captain Nemo were real and his inventions had been applied to solving the world's problems in Iowa, or what it might be like to really go aboriginal, this is your book.
Good reading on a trip, each story will reward the reader with odd and unexpected twists. If you like stories like those presented by Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone, you will love this collection!
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