دانلود کتاب James Tiptree, Jr. - The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

JAMES TIPTREE, JR., burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a string of hard-edged, provocative stories. He redefined the genre with such classics as “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Women Men Don’t See.” He was hailed as a brilliant writer with a deep sympathy for his female characters.For nearly ten years he carried on intimate correspondences with other writers — Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name a few. None of them knew his true identity. He was so reclusive that he was widely believed to be a top-secret government agent. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: a mysterious sixty-one-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon.A native of Chicago, Alice traveled the globe with her mother, the writer and hunter Mary Hastings Bradley. At nineteen, she eloped with the poet who had been seated on her left at her debut. She became an artist, a critic for the Chicago Sun, an army officer, a CIA analyst, and an expert on the psychology of perception. Beautiful, theatrical, and sophisticated, she developed close friendships with people she never met. Devoted to her second husband, she struggled with her feelings for women. An outspoken feminist, she took a male name as a joke—and found the voice to write her stories.Alice Sheldon’s bold appropriation of a “masculine” style and a male identity (she once contributed to a feminist symposium as one of the “sensitive men”) not only demolishes assumptions about gendered writing, it speaks, in a way no other writer’s life has, to the mystery of the writing persona. Only when she became someone else could she tell the truth about herself. Only in writing about the alien could she speak about her body and her experience.Tiptree stands alongside Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin as one of the most important and exciting writers of speculative literature. As new generations of readers are drawn to her prescient work, her passionate life and her suicide in 1987 continue to haunt those who knew and admired her.With ten years of work, Julie Phillips has written a first-rate biography of Alice Sheldon. Based on extensive research, exclusive interviews, and full access to Alice Sheldon’s papers, this is the definitive biography of a profoundly original writer and a woman far ahead of her time.