Welcome to Whatworld
The Webworld of Writer and Teacher Leslie What
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CRAZY LOVE
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Here's what people say about ... |
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An ace at the new weirdness defined by the anthology Feeling Very Strange (2006), What uses it to be creepy, polemical, and funny, all at once or in various blendings. These 17 stories progress from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous without ever derogating their common subject, love, though they do depict it as fairly insane. The opening stories, "Finger Talk" and "Babies," feature women in abusive relationships they don't want to change; that one is trapped in a gorilla suit and the other is, unbeknownst to hubby, carrying sextuplets leavens their dire circumstances some, but enough? "The Cost of Doing Business" is about a professional victim, whose clients must be able to afford her subsequent hospitalizations and quite adequate comfort between jobs. Things lighten up through the predicaments of a man who masturbated for science when 18 and at 49 discovers he has thousands of offspring, a man who realizes that work doesn't proliferate during vacation without cause, a nauseating senior who expects familial love although he intends to live forever, and others, until at last there is the hermit researcher's tale, from which we learn, through a vale of our own tears of laughter, why there are always hermits. Love is why, of course. Crazy! Ray
Olson ~
Booklist
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"Queen
of
Gonzo" What (Olympic
Games)
drags love out of its
gooey, schmaltzy rut and takes it for a joyride in this exuberant
collection of 17 stories. "Finger Talk" is a poignant take on
unwanted pregnancy and cavalier men. "Babies" gives a
Kafkaesque touch to a pregnancy that may or may not have been
affected by pesticides during the first trimester. "All My Children"
asks whether the provider of a sperm sample is legally responsible
for the children that come from its use - and if he is, how does he
pay for 10,000 college tuition fees? The 1999 Nebula-winning
"The Cost of Doing Business" posits possibly the most incredible
premise in the book: a love for others that is completely selfless
and nonjudgmental. No matter how brief or long, no matter how
bizarre, each tale in this collection grabs readers and demands they
rethink how they see all the myriad forms of
love. ~ Publishers Weekly  |
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"Crazy Love is crazy good! Leslie
What's brain is
evidently
crowded with strangeness, awfulness, wonderfulness, wildness,
madness of all
kinds...and love. Lots of love. How lucky we are that her
imagination runs deep,
runs true, runs onto the page in crazily beautiful stories - and
lucky, so very lucky,
to be holding those stories right now in our
hands."
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"If
unbearable guilt makes you wish to suffer vicariously, and
professionally, for others; if you suddenly find yourself the father
of
thousands and thousands of children; if your ambition is to
occupy the
Chair of Hermit Studies at the University of Oregon, or to be a ghost
in
a hot-air balloon, or if you have considered wearing a gorilla mask
while having an abortion - Crazy Love is your
operating
manual. These
seventeen achingly funny and hilariously sad stories will give you
invaluable advice on how to love, how to be crazy, how to be
human."
~
Ursula K. Le
Guin
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"Leslie
What finds a surreal joy in the
most awful things that can
happen."
~ Eileen Gunn Crazy
Love is a collection
of 17 short stories that stop at nothing to convey the limitless
possibilities of love and its tremendous potential for both honesty
and
hilarity.
~Cynthia Reeser New Pages |
"Classic Leslie
What!"
~ William Sullivan "Babies" is a blistering allegory of motherhood that fuses together bug exterminators, marital problems and obsessive solicitude in 13 pitch-perfect pages. ~Edward Champion Washington Post |
Here's what people say about... Olympic Games
"This
is a wonderful novel; it may well become a cult classic."
~
Elizabeth
Hand, Fantasy and
Science Fiction
"This
very funny
fantasy
is especially impressive in the way it turns serious and genuinely
moving in
its final pages."
~ Michael Berry, San
Francisco Chronicle
"A
powerful,
lean, direct, taut, sinewy, substantive, holy,
prayerful piece
of work that matters
~
Brian
Doyle
Surrealism - or perhaps I should call it surreality - of one sort or another is also an element that permeates this collection. It seems sometimes to be a matter of style more than substance, seemingly mismatched images veering close to word salad (and also close to preciosity), but never quite going over the edge. More interesting are those in which the surreal quality is foundational, such as Leslie What's amazing and completely engaging 'Post Hoc,' in which a pregnant woman, trying to mail herself to her lover, winds up living in the post office."
"Over the
past few years I
have been watching Leslie What blossom from a nice little comic
talent into a
great big scary comic talent. "Leslie What's
stories
have the power to strike an emotional chord in me, and whether
that chord
summons tears or laughter it is deeply satisfying." "Things the Mirror
Sees does what
speculative fiction
ought to do;
it provides us with a wonderful piece of alien viewpoint. The true
and best
piece of speculative fiction is changing the nature or perception by
giving us
something new or truly marvelous to consider." "Hera follows Zeus to a bar,
watches him
hustle a ditzy blonde, transforms herself into a microscopic mite,
mates with other mites, transforms the blonde into a bag of
marshmallows and makes up with Zeus. This is a story?"
~
Damon Knight
~ Kate Wilhelm
~
Don Webb
~ Tangent
~ Leslie's Mom
| Leslie' s writing has been translated into German, Italian, French, Japanese, Russian, Greek, and Klingon. | |
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| A normal family out for a walk. Mask by Leslie What. Knitting by Leslie's mom. |
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First came love, then came marriage, then came junior in a baby carriage. Stories were a natural progression. |
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Updated January
2009 Website gltiches? Please tell the site
genie.
Contents
copyright 2002-2009 by Leslie What. All rights reserved,
but you can
ask.
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