Medlar Comfits: "We measure our works against . . ."

03 July 2007

"We measure our works against . . ."

From a letter I just received, quoted here with the writer's permission:

"We are stuck with a western frame of reference, with the notion all things west are desirable, such that even in our schools, we are fed this kind of thinking. Sure, there are nationalist movements and such, but our literature still has a long way to go. We measure our works against America, we long for the American Dream. Our literature will never be 'free' or truly 'ours' until we recognize our own values, our own merits."

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from Oddness/Forbidden Futures

"Her love for the lives and fortunes of the small is most evident to me in her dog-centered stories. “The Dog Who’d Been Dead”, “Shaking Heaven’s Fleas”, and “Bones from Heaven” involve the afterlife of dogs—where they go, what concerns them, how they feel about the humans with whom they are so closely linked, and their own relationship with d/Death. Tambour beautifully enters into the minds and souls of dogs here, and if nothing else, her concern for the little ones, human creation’s overlooked ones, makes her work and this collection in particular immensely rewarding." -- Jeremy Brett, The SFF Librarian Reviews, Ancillary Review of Books, August 2023

from Infinity Plus

"An awful lot in this book. As with her magnificent CRANDOLIN, perhaps too much. Yet it is not a book measured for a market, and we need more of that. Tambour has, I hope, quite a few more coming. And I hope that the market finds her. The language she is evolving for telling the kinds of wild and biting stories she is interested in is part vernacular, part natural historian, full of wit and pulling its drama from an assumed sharing of empathy for those in the predicaments in which her characters find themselves." - Paul Voermans, "Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real", 10/22/2017, The New York Review of Science Fiction