Weird Women, Wired Women

by Kit Reed

Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.

Contents:
The Wait (1958)
The New You (1962)
Cynosure (1964)
Winter (1969)
The Food Farm (1967)
In Behalf of the Product (1973)
Songs of War (1974)
The Weremother (1979)
Chicken Soup (1980)
Pilots of the Purple Twilight (1981)
Frontiers (1982)
The Bride of Bigfoot (1984)
The Hall of New Faces (1992)
Like My Dress (1993)
Last Fridays (1998)
Unlimited (1998)
The Mothers of Shark Island (1998)
Mommy Nearest (1998)
Whoever (1996)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Kit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Camilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for a challenge in a GR group (the task was to choose a book with less than 500 ratings in GR) and enjoyed it quite a lot. Kit Reed was a new author to me, I hadn't read anything from her before this. The book comprises of 19 short stories, written between 1958 and 1996, thus reflecting the long career of Kit Reed. There was also a foreword written by Connie Willis and a sort of introduction by the author. It was nice that the stories were presented in a chronological order, with the original publication year printed at the end of each story, so you can follow how the themes change and reflect the time when they were written.

The overall theme in the stories is feministic, although it is most pronounced in the stories written in the late 1960's and early 1970's. I would probably classify the stories as speculative fiction: they often started as quite "normal" stories, but ended up with a weird twist, which made them interesting to read. Of the stories I liked "The Wait", "Winter", "Frontiers", and "The Bride of Bigfoot" best. I feel that Kit Reed is truly an underrated writer and intend to read more of her work. I recommend the book to readers who like short stories.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short stories. I heard about the author on a women's scifi anthology and I'm really glad I found the whole book. These are speculative short stories that criticize the role a woman was expected to play back in the 40s and 50s. There's a lot you can read between tue lines, not only of the expectations of women, but also on motherhood. These are fantastic stories and the book and ots ideas as a whole haven't aged that much as some of these still resonate in today's society. There are some that take more of a funny turn but others are quite scary. I would like to read more from Kit Reed.

[Sue Chant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tiptree shortlist 1998

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent (if a tad dated)collection of stories highlighting women's life dilemmas. You'll laugh and perhaps cry a bit as you read through stories involving palstic surgery and the fear of aging, trying to be the perfect picture of domesticity, trying to cope with the competing ideals in everyday life.

[Laura Floyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some excellent short stories, all centered around various issues faced by women.