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    Strange Wine: Stories
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    Strange Wine: Stories
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    Strange Wine: Stories
    Ebook316 pages4 hours

    Strange Wine: Stories

    By Harlan Ellison

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From “one of the great . . . American short story writers,” comes a collection of dark fantastical fiction (The Washington Post).
     
    In the Locus Award–winning “Croatoan,” a man descends into the sewers of New York City to confront the detritus of his irresponsibility.
     
    An “Emissary from Hamelin” presents humanity with an ultimatum, or everyone on Earth will have a dear price to pay the piper.
     
    And in the title story—famously written by the author in the storefront window of a Santa Monica bookshop—Willis Kaw is convinced that he is an alien trapped inside an Earthman’s body, only to discover his suffering serves a purpose.
     
    Strange Wine includes these three stories and a dozen more unique visions from the writer the Washington Post hails as a “lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, and purveyor of pure horror and black comedy.”
     
    Includes: “Croatoan,” “Working With the Little People,” “Killing Bernstein,” “Mom,” “In Fear of K,” “Hitler Painted Roses,” “The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet,” “Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time,” “Emissary from Hamelin,” “The New York Review of Bird Seeing,” “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Strange Wine,” “The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497604230
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    Strange Wine: Stories

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    Reviews for Strange Wine

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 1980-11-07)I was reading a book by the name of 'Strange Wine' by Harlan Ellison recently. The book is very good, but that is not what I want to talk about. He has an introduction titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself." I would like to tell you a few things from this introduction. According to an HEW study, only 8% of the American population buy books (I wonder what those numbers are in Portugal). Furthermore, only 2% buy more than one book per year. Harlan once said, in front of a university audience, that he had thought up the words that Spock had said in a Star-Trek episode. A student jumped to his feet, with tears in his eyes, screaming that Harlan was a liar. The average American watches between 3-8 hours of TV PER DAY. In some of the lectures he gives at Universities, Harlan found this to be true in University audiences as well. Harlan tells about a friend of his who is a High School media teacher. She had students who would not read books because they were 'not real'. TV was considered real. She had normal 17 year old students who could not tell the difference between a TV dramatization and real life. She found that if she turned a TV monitor on in an unruly classroom, WITH NOTHING BUT SNOW ON THE SCREEN, that the entire class would quiet down and watch the screen. He tells about an experiment where a monitor was set up one side of a lecture hall and the lecturer stood on the other. The monitor carried a picture of the lecturer. Everyone watched the monitor. He tells about a case where a mother was being raped and her 7 year old child walked in. The rapist told the child to go watch TV. The child watched TV for 6 hours while his mother screamed repeatedly. I highly suggest reading the book, or at least the introduction. Perhaps the 'glass teat' is worse than we think.[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]
    • 4/5
      Like most short story collections, this one runs a bit hot and cold. If you are a fan of science fiction or fantasy, Ellison is a founding father. Most of what he does here has been done better by other authors since, but if you are at all interested in the roots of some of the primary ideas in the genre, Ellison is a must-read, an influence for an entire generation, from William Gibson to Stephen King. More even that the stories themselves, which run from didactic to entertaining to outstanding, Ellison's introductions to the stories are fascinating insights into everything from his writing process to the state of the 20th century publishing industry.
    • 3/5
      this is rather a grab-bag anthology, but one does find some curious gems in these fifteen stories. I liked "Hitler Painted Roses", but more for the rant in the introduction than anything else. Your knowledge of Harlann Ellison is incomplete if you haven't read this book.
    • 5/5
      Original, disturbing and darkly humourous. Another treasure trove of Ellison, with introductions to each story.
    • 3/5
      “And reading is the drinking of strange wine.”“Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.”“The dinosaurs had no strange wine.”All the above quotes are from the Introduction, which is mostly about the evils of television, something I wholeheartedly agree with! And most of the author's introductions to each short story are pretty on-the-mark as well!As for the stories... This collection starts off well! I liked the first four stories right away, and five of the first six! "Killing Bernstein" may be my favorite of them! Then my enjoyment fell precipitously! Maybe four of the final nine held any entertainment value for me, with "Emissary From Hamelin" being the best of those four. The more sci-fi the stories became, the less I enjoyed them. But make no mistake, Ellison is an excellent writer! And he included one of may favorite quotes by Jack Kerouac in here, from "The Dharma Bums" - “But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.”
    • 5/5
      When someone says the name “Harlan,” I usually think Harlan Coben. I am afraid to say I have never heard of Harlan Ellison for fear it might send this caustic, “speak your mind” author into apoplexy. Ellison is more known for short stories than full length novels. STRANGE WINE is a collection of fifteen short stories “from the nightside of the world” published in 1978. I had heard his name tossed around on a few chat lists, even saw a video of a rant against studios that expected him to donate a script rather than receive payment. One excellent example of his distaste of the publishing “experts” is “The New York Review of Bird.” This story finds Cordwainer Bird wreaking havoc on a bookstore that dares to hide his books in the basement versus in the front window with the bestsellers. I like the story “Mom” the best as the ghost of a Jewish mother still tries to control her son’s life. The title story, “Strange Wine” leaves the reader, or should leave the reader with a great lesson about life. Ellison has an unforgettable writing style, somewhere between exceptional and phenomenal.
    • 1/5
      Bizarre and overall unimpressive.
    • 3/5
      Harlan Ellison has written a lot of great short fiction. Often stories that have scared me one way or another. Sometimes stories that made me laugh. Typically stories that forced me to look at something familiar in a new way. I’ve read quite a few of his stories, and count him among my favorite authors. Of course, with an author so prolific, you know you won’t like everything, but I’ve generally admired the fearless risk taking behind even the stories that I haven’t particularly liked. Reading the fifteen stories in Strange Wine made me think that, somewhere along the line, he went from an author that writes stories that speak to me in a powerful way to an author who writes stories about what a great author he is. (Note that, from the plethora of laudatory quotes on the cover and within, there were obviously plenty of reviewers who didn’t feel that way about the book.)None of these stories were great. Almost half of the fifteen stories in the collection were decent enough that I gave them a 6 out of 10 rating: “Working with the Little People,” “Killing Bernstein,” “In Fear of K,” “The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” “Seeing,” “Strange Wine,” and “The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel” A little more than half, then, left me disappointed enough to rate them a 5 out of 10 or less. I thought that “The New York Review of Bird,” a story about an avenging literary superhero who takes on the Publishing Establishment, was truly awful (and that a shared storywriting game that I participated in a couple of years back which touched on the same topic was in fact funnier, more creative, and more satisfying). “Mom,” a story about a recently deceased Jewish mother who comes back to haunt her son in a stereotypically nagging manner, was an utter waste of time. “From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet” did nothing for me, and wasn’t a story at all.I would probably have liked this book more without the story introductions. I don’t really care whether he wrote a story after a adulterously impregnating a woman who had told him she was on the Pill, or sitting inside a bookstore window, or during a live radio broadcast, or at a Chinese restaurant, or winning a race with two other respected science fiction authors. I care about whether the story itself works for me, and more often than not, these didn’t. One of the relatively decent stories in this collection, “Working with the Little People,” tells of an amazingly talented young writer of science fiction and fantasy who suddenly finds his creative genius has run dry. Looking at the stories in this volume, I can’t help thinking that Harlan Ellison was speaking from personal experience.
    • 2/5
      A wealth of ideas, many wasted. "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" were the only good stories; the rest were slapdash and lacklustre.