The baum plan for financial independence and other stories

“Pride and Prometheus,” a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.

A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Kessel, whose story “A Clean Escape” was filmed as part of ABC’s Masters of Science Fiction, ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon.

John Kessel’s latest collection — which includes the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award winner “Pride and Prometheus” — is a long-awaited road map to the fantastic where Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor intersect. Kessel’s four-story modern classic sequence about life on the moon, The Lunar Quartet, makes up the center of the book.

“A sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel’s wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you’ll ever read (“The Red Phone”).” A-
—Entertainment Weekly

Winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree awards, John Kessel is the author of The New York Times Notable Book Meeting in Infinity. He co-edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange and Rewired. Kessel and his family live in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University.