Creative Surgery

by Clelia Farris, Rachel S. Cordasco (Translator), Jennifer Delare (Translator)

Overview

In Clelia Farris' mind-bending tales, you'll find captivating characters with elusive identities like Kieser, who longs to transform himself through horrific procedures in "Creative Surgery," or Yuliano (“Secret Enemy”), a man with no aesthetic taste, or Gabola, engaged in the battle of a lifetime against the expropriation of the Little Tuvu Hill. With dry and polished prose, like the stones of her native Sardinia, Clelia Farris takes us on adventures among the ruins of a future marred by climate change ("A Day to Remember") and in a haunting prison inhabited by the enigmatic figure of "Rebecca." Collected and translated into English for the first time, these seven stories represent some of the greatest works from one of Italy's best science fiction authors. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781732638839
Publisher:	Rosarium Publishing
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	172
Sales rank:	1,049,434
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Clelia Farris is considered one of Italy's best science fiction authors. She won the Fantascienza.com award with Rupes Recta, the Odyssey award with No Man Is My Brother, and the Kipple Prize with The Weighing of the Soul. She was a finalist for the Urania Mondadori Award in 2016 with "Uomini e Necro." Rachel Cordasco has a Ph.D in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She’s written for World Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and Samovar Magazine and also translates Italian SFF. Jennifer Delare is a full-time Italian-to-English translator.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/06/2020

This transcendent and deeply unsettling collection introduces English-language readers to Italian science fiction heavyweight Farris. “Gabola” and “The Substance of Ideas” anchor the collection with bittersweet meditations on history and devotion, and are the closest Farris gets to comfort reading. Though some stories, like “A Day to Remember,” suffer from underexplanation, readers who take the time to read between the lines will be richly rewarded. And the title story is a gruesome standout, chronicling the friendship between two misfit surgeons as they construct ever more elaborate chimera—and ends in a twist that demands the story be read again, and again. Across all seven marvelous tales, Farris effortlessly melds near-future settings, a fabulist tone, and magical, bizarre details: including sea urchins that can confer skills like knitting or poker playing; a university full of feral, borderline cannibalistic biologists; and a computer capable of editing human memory contained inside a marble. Farris has the gift of making her wildly imaginative worlds feel fully lived-in. Readers of literary science fiction will devour this collection. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Farris has the gift of making her wildly imaginative worlds feel fully lived-in. Readers of literary science fiction will devour this collection.” 

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Biopunk at its best, complicated and organic and above all compellingly real.” 

 —Cat Rambo

“Clelia Farris is a discovery! Every story surprised me in profound, unsettling, and fascinating ways.” 

 —Kij Johnson

“Creative Surgery by Clelia Farris is not quite like anything else I’ve read. Stories feel like memories, and memories appear like the sky seen from the bottom of the ocean. There’s nostalgia and beauty and strangeness. It is glorious.” 

 —Angela Slatter

“Lyrical, sharp, a little disturbing and, above all, clever— stories that stick in the mind and invigorate the senses.” 

 —Foz Meadows

"By turns charming, pithy, and brutal, Creative Surgery accomplishes so many things so well you'll hardly realize you're still contemplating certain lines weeks later. Devour this book, and then quote its many eccentric characters to mystify friends. But do read it."

—Strange Horizons

From the Publisher