If Lions Could Speak is the first collection from Paul Park,
acclaimed author of The Starbridge Chronicles, Coelestis,
and The Gospel of Corax. Subtle, stylish, at once
forthrightly simple and ingeniously complex, the pieces
gathered here are compelling and penetrating explorations of
cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and
reconciliation. It is a marvelous literary labyrinth, a
realm of memory palaces, eerie doppelgangers, terrifying
theocracies, implosive revelations. Here time travel, sordid
and ludicrous, becomes emblematic of how all lives are led;
here, disease is an index to how the past is rewritten;
here, the Other, extravagantly alien or simply alienated,
can collapse into the Self with the suddenness of a lethal
gunshot. Sometimes sardonically hilarious, sometimes gravely
humane, always fiercely shocking, these stories constitute
one of the finest bodies of short fiction by any
contemporary SF writer.
"Paul Park's short stories are subtle, blunt, funny,
distressing, strange, true--all these qualities, often all
at once--they are like those dreams or nightmares that seem
to plumb right to the meaning of things. In other words,
beautiful fiction." --Kim Stanley Robinson
"Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If
those who don't read science fiction could discover Paul
Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as
ambitious and as many-faceted as any they will find under
any rubric. I hope this collection will help them discover
him. The rest of us can simply open and enjoy." --John Crowley
"Paul Park does not remind us of James Sallis or Marcel
Proust; the mark of genius is that it never makes us recall
anyone else, not even earlier selves." --Gene Wolfe
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