Presenting a series of very short stories by Michael Swanwick based on Los Caprichos, a series of etchings by Francisco Goya. This is Mr. Goya's first collaboration with Mr. Swanwick, and we hope it will not be his last.
the stories
1. The Sleep
of Reason Produces Nightmares
2. Elena's Heart
3. The Sentinel
4. Death and Elena
5. The Child-Buyer
6. Prick the Donkey
7. The Children of Utopia
8. Live! Nude! Witches!
9. Spontaneous Human Combustion
10. The Godmothers
11. The All-Devouring
12. Concerning Elena and a Certain Mouse
13. Silly Old Clown
14. The Education of Young Prick
15. The Nightmare Court
16. The Forge of Witches
17. Dirt
18. The Sorrows of Young Grace
19. The Clyster of San Bernardino
20. True Love
21. The Beer of Eternity
22. Witches and Nightmares
23. Spanking
24. Elena on the Street
25. Prick in Love
26. Grace in the Bordello
27. Trolls
28. The Homunculus
29. Death in Venice
30. Grace and Elena
31. A Sad Story
32. Slander
33. Wicked Grace
34. A Sad Story Continued
35. Witches' Orgies
36. The Miser
37. A Sad Story Concluded
38. The Nightmares in Concert
39. Elena By Herself
40. The Picadors' Club
41. Grace Violated
42. Paint Your Goat
43. Elena's Day of Rest
44. Prick Among the Demons
45. A Close Shave
46. Grace at the Gallows
47. The Donkey Method
48. The Morning After
49. The Rookie
50. Nightmares and Witches
51. Capitalism for Dummies
52. Prick the Warrior
53. Poor Little Girls
54. Elena's Little Secret
55. The Stone of Folly
56. The Empress Herself
57. Grooming Your Nightmares
58. Prick the Physician
59. Grace and Nightmares
60. Haute Couture
61. Elena's Playful Side
62. Worshipping the Scarecrow
63. Your Family in a Nutshell
64. The Parrot with a Golden Beak
65. Grace in the Madhouse
66. Commedia dell'Arte
67. Dein Kampf
68. The Great Wheel of the World
69. Elena the Libertarian
70. How the Witches Love to Pluck!
71. Tall Tales
72. Prick and Posterity
73. The Lions of the Law
74. Grace's Final Irony
75. Veterans of Heroic Wars
76. The End of the Witches
77. The Apotheosis of Elena
78. The Dark Night of the Soul
79. The Nightmares Awaken
80. Afterword: The Age of Goya, the Age of Swanwick
the artist and the illustrator
Michael Swanwick is the Hugo-bedizened
science-fiction writer who
single-handedly has reclaimed the short-short story from the dustbin of history, with Puck Aleshire's
Abecedary, Writing in My Sleep, Picasso Deconstructed, and, of course, the Periodic Table of Science
Fiction,, now playing on SciFiction. Cigar-box Faust and Other
Miniatures, a collection of much (though far from all) of his short-short
output is forthcoming from Tachyon Publications in winter of 2002.
Francisco Goya, hardly a new light
on the artistic horizon, is
well known at age 255 for his
paintings, and for his
fantastical and satiric etchings, of which Los Caprichos, the sequence of eighty etchings featured here, may be the most famous. /p>
We are indebted to Rob Lancefield, Registrar of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, and to the DAC
itself, for giving us permission to use their digital images of Goya's Los Caprichos made from the museum's
collection of etchings from the first edition. We encourage you to visit the DAC website,
which displays substantial online gallery of their extensive collection of prints, photographs, and other works
of art on paper.
Want the back-story for The Sleep of Reason? Michael Swanwick tells all, or some anyway, in an interview with Nick Gevers in Sci-Fi Weekly. Check it out.
|