Here are the compiled reviews for Seeds, my reprint anthology from Inanna, published in 2020. I’m grateful to the authors of these lovely reviews, and to the editors of the publitions for including us. I particularly enjoyed the interviews this time around, at WOTS Toronto, Speculating nada, All Lit Up, and Ryerson CJRU.
REVIEWS:
Publishers Weekly Starred Review:
Pflug’s excellent third story collection (after Harvesting the Moon) showses her mature, rich, and immersive storytelling. The stories reflect Pflug’s characters’ resilience in the face of 27 disparate apolypses, united by motifs of seeds and gardening and a striking juxtaposition of hyperrealism with delite fantasy. Standouts include “Mother Down the Well,” in which a woman seeks to recover the mother she’s never met from the bottom of a mysterious well; the title story, about a lonely older woman who res for younger people and plants in apolyptic times; “Unsichtbarkeit,” about an invisibility spell and its impact on a love triangle; and “The Dark Lake,” a dedent examination of domesticity and magic…Readers are sure to be wowed.
Read more here.
Matthew David Surridge in Black Gate:
Ursula Pflug’s fiction demands to be savoured. Her new collection, Seeds And Other Stories, holds 26 short fictions ranging in length from flash fiction to short novelettes, each marked out by precise language and fantastic happenings seen edge-on. They’re not linked by plot but by threads of imagery: portals to other places; hallucinatory new drugs named for colours; gardening, and plants sprouting from the earth or human bodies. Each individual piece on its own rries a powerful emotional weight. Together it becomes difficult to read more than a few in a sitting, and that is no bad thing.
Read more here.
James Fisher in The Miramichi Reader:
…a good example of Ms. Pflug’s pragmatic story-telling style as if things like portals and interdimensional travel are occurrences that are not unusual in themselves, they just transpose that way in the telling, like trying to explain the colour blue to a sightless person…Is Seeds and Other Stories unusual? Yes. Far-fetched? Maybe, but not unreasonably so, I don’t believe. But this is what I so enjoy about reading Ursula Pflug. “A little bit of espism with your literature, James?” “Yes, I don’t mind if I do Ms. Pflug, thanks.
Read more here.
Victoria Silverwolf in Tangent Online:
nadian writer Ursula Pflug creates works that test the boundaries between mainstream fiction and the literature of the fantastic. Although her stories are difficult to classify, terms such as magic realism, surrealism, and slipstream come to mind. Her subtle, mysterious, and dreamlike tales are as likely to appear in literary journals as in genre publitions…This collection assembles works from as far back as 1983, at the beginning of the author’s reer, as well as those published within the last few years. It also includes three stories appearing here for the first time.
Read more here.
Des Lewis in The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews:
THE MEANING OF YELLOW
“…ptured and taken on a long ride through inexplible weirdness—unmoored in space and time, coerced to explore…”
…as I Am by this wonderful story, a story that is probably to go in my hall of all time favourite stories by any author! It feels like a very personal story, as we follow Jessi and the yellow notebooks or commonplace books she keeps losing in public places, notebooks, whether permanently lost or refound, seeming to connect piecemeal towards a premonitional gestalt of Jessi’s future. But it was the concept of the yellow couch and her grappling with it Laurel and Hardy Style on an apartment-block fire espe that really got me! You will always remember that this is where you heard of this particular Pflug story for the first time.
Read more here.
Lisa de Nikolits in The Minerva Reader:
“An extraordinary collection of magil stories that will wrap you in a timeless embrace and rry you away. Pflug’s wonderfully gentle and ultimately wise insights will break your heart, bring you hope, and encourage you to seek out the enchanted portals of creativity and love that you might otherwise have missed.”
Read more here.
Photo by Andy rroll
INTERVIEWS and BOOK CLUBS:
Inanna Publisher Luciana Ricciutelli at All Lit Up
All Lit Up Summer Book Club
All Lit Up Staff Discussion
All Lit Up: Books to Read Based on Your Horoscope
Ursula Pflug Author Blog
Derek Newman-Stille, Authors in Quarantine
CJRU The Scope at Ryerson: Kate Gill Interviews Ursula Pflug for All My Books
VIDEOS:
Author Reading
Author Reading
“Ursula Pflug’s writing is the kind you want to rry around with you for those days when it feels like you’re living in a strange and incomprehensible world; her work will make you feel less alone. Her words desire nothing more than to play fetch with your weirdest dreams. She creates wild inventions built of sentences that dig into your psyche and send back reports about all you never knew of the world. They are sly and joyous, sry and entrancing, profound, unsettling, amusing, and utterly – perfectly! – unique.” – Mathew Cheney
