The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (70 page)

Carroll began writing fiction while at college, and decided to pursue a career as a novelist after being encouraged by one of his first professors. His debut novel,
The Land of Laughs
(1980), tells the story of a children’s author whose imagination has left the printed page and begun to influence reality. The book introduced several hallmarks of Carroll’s writing, including talking animals and worlds that straddle the line between the real and the surreal. Though Carroll’s work is often classified as fantasy or horror, some critics align it with the South American tradition of magic realism.

After publishing
Voice of Our Shadow
(1983), Carroll wrote
Bones of the Moon
(1987), which touched on his childhood experience with Hollywood and became the first installment of the loosely connected Answered Prayers sextet. He continued the series with
Sleeping in Flame
(1988) and
A Child Across the Sky
(1989), and ended it with
From the Teeth of Angels
(1993).

His book
Outside the Dog Museum
(1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works, drawing favorable comparisons to
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy,
Glass Soup
(2005), and
The Ghost in Love
(2008). His short stories have been collected in
The Panic Hand
(1995) and
The Woman Who Married a Cloud
(2012).

Carroll’s novels have long been popular in Europe, most notably in Poland, where, Carroll has said, his books sell “like free sex.” He continues to live and write in Vienna.

Jonathan Carroll, at age nine, in New York, where he spent part of his childhood.

A Carroll family Christmas. Brother David Carroll and father Sidney Carroll watch as Jonathan's other brother, Steve Reich, composes an impromptu song.

Carroll married Beverly Schreiner the day he graduated from Rutgers University in 1970.

Carroll strolls the University of Virginia campus in 1972, with his brother David.

Carroll in Pacific, Missouri, in 1973. Pacific inspired the fictional town of Galen, the setting of his first novel,
The Land of Laughs
.

Carroll at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1995. (Photo courtesy of Jo Pesendorfer.)

Carroll sits with his wife, Beverly, his son, Ryder, and the family's dog, Nails. (Photo courtesy of Bela Borsodi.)

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Carroll

cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4532-8926-6

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Available wherever ebooks are sold