Paul Park has written an extraordinary, challenging, and disturbing novel about a human colony on a distant alien world, the planet Celestis. The native humanoid population is subjugated by the human colonists, but many of the Aboriginals undergo medical procedures involving surgery and drugs to make them look and think more like humans. As support from home wanes, the "improved" Aboriginals launch a rebellion against the colonists. Simon, a political functionary from Earth, and Katharine, the altered daughter of a successful native merchant, are taken hostage by the rebels. Simon falls in love with Katharine, but, cut off from a supply of the medication she needs to maintain her humanlike state, her suppressed alien nature begins to reemerge. As she discovers her true self, hidden vistas of expanded alien perception are revealed in a stunning exploration of the limits of humanity.

Paul Park is one of modern fiction’s major innovators. With exotic settings and characters truly alien and disturbingly normal, his novels and stories explore the shifting interface between traditional narrative and luminous dream, all in the service of a deeper humanism. “Climate Change,” original to this volume, is an intimate and erotic take on a global environmental crisis. “A Resistance to Theory” chronicles the passionate (and bloody) competition between the armed adherents of postmodern literary schools. “A Conversation with the Author” gives readers a harrowing look behind the curtains of an MFA program. In “A Brief History of SF” a fan encounters the ruined man who first glimpsed the ruined cities of Mars. “Creative Nonfiction” showcases a professor’s eager collaboration with a student intent on wrecking his career. The only nonfiction piece, “A Homily for Good Friday,” was delivered to a stunned congregation at a New England church. Plus: A bibliography, and our candid and colorful Outspoken Interview with one of today’s most accomplished and least conventional authors, in which personal truth is evaded, engaged, and altered, all in one shot.

This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town. The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in. This story is a triumph of contemporary fantasy. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. **Review “No one writes like Paul Park, and when he turns to magic, the results are magical. A Princess of Roumania is weirder and wilder than any fantasy you've read before and even those elements which might have been familiar -- a princess, a werewolf, a jewel, a gypsy, magic and murder -- are transformed into strangeness. Park's characters, incidents, and images will stay with you long after you've finished this book.” ―Karen Joy Fowler “A Princess of Roumania is at once a vastly ambitious and passionately realized work of art, and immediately appealing in all the ways that the heart-tugging matter of high fantasy ought to be. Park's Miranda is as brave and questing as a heroine of fantasy should be, and his Baroness Ceaucescu is a fascinating portrait of unstoppable evil that is never more or less than appallingly -- even appealingly -- human. Every page of this book holds something you couldn't have imagined and yet that strikes you as supremely right and satisfying. A huge achievement.” ―John Crowley “Complex, elusive, haunting, written in a transparent prose that slips you from one world to another with...ease” ―Ursula Le Guin “I love it! I think it's wonderful.” ―Elizabeth Hand “A superb new fantasy, the first in what I hope will be many books in a series.” ―Ed Greenwood About the Author PAUL PARK is the author of A Princess of Roumania, and numerous other novels. He published his first novel in the 1980s and swiftly attracted notice as one of the finest authors on the "humanist" wing of American SF. His powerful, densely written narratives of religious and existential crisis on worlds at once exotic and familiar won him comparisons with Gene Wolfe and Brian Aldiss at their best. He lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.

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This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town. The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and...