Ice Bar

Book excerpt: In nineteen wildly imaginative and gemlike tales of reinvention and reclamation, Ice Bar offers us a world resembling our own, uncannily, but with both terrifying and reassuring differences. Kuppers is a writer of rare gifts, one who transports herself and her reader into visionary, complicated, but also utterly plausible places. With her empathy, combined with a piercing insight, we encounter through this work a world refusing to be set aside. Ice Bar's tales, like the best myths, both chill us and warm us as they expose our as-yet unexamined psyches, and reinventing our time, place, and positions in it. This book's insights are offered up by a rare talent, a serious and generous intelligence. These are the stories we have been waiting to read, by the writer we've long needed. Laura Kasischke, author of The Raising and Space, in Chains