The Baum Plan for Financial Independence

John Kessel, ever at the forefront of fiction, mashes up Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein and comes up with a huge win: “Pride and Prometheus,” which received the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards and was nominated for many others. The fourteen stories in this astonishing, long-awaited collection intersect imaginatively with literary classics (The Wizard of Oz, Flannery O’Connor) and history. The Baum Plan also includes Kessel’s modern classic “Lunar Quartet” sequence about life on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men,” won the Tiptree Award.

By turns satirical, horrific, funny, and generous, these stories showcase the manifold gifts of the modern-day master of the screwball science fiction novel Corrupting Dr. Nice, a writer Publishers Weekly has called “capable of the most artful and rigorous literary composition, but with a mischievous genius that inclines him toward speculative fiction . . . he writes with great subtlety and wit . . . and his craftsmanship is frequently absolutely brilliant. Plus, his sense of comedy is remarkable.”

An ex-con finds himself falling, once more, under the spell of a seductive, amoral woman. A hidden door in the closet of a summer house leads to a land of plenty. The life of an inventor converges with the pulp fiction he reads in “Powerless.” In “Pride and Prometheus,” the Bennett sisters encounter Victor Frankenstein and his monster. And, in his acclaimed and award-winning Lunar Quartet, John Kessel explores the gender dynamics, politics, and long-term sustainability of a matriarchal lunar colony.