Books
Boarding Instructions (Fairwood Press, 2010) — Collection
Meet Me in the Moon Room (Small Beer Press, 2001) — Collection
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000) — Novel
Short Fiction in magazines and anthologies
Aboriginal Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Bedtime Stories to Darken Your Dreams, The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best of Talebones, Best of the Rest 3, Bli-Panika, The Blue and the Gray Undercover, Bones of the World, Buried Treasures, Eugene Weekly, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, The Fault, Flash Fiction Online, Flytrap, Fortean Bureau, Frequency, Green’s Magazine, Hobart, Imagination Fully Dilated, Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction, The Infinite Matrix, Interfictions 2, Is Anybody Out There?, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Like Water for Quarks, The Los Angeles, Lost Pages, Lust for Life, The Metastatic Whatnot, Millennium Science Fiction & Fantasy, Monkeybicycle (online), Night Train, on earth as it is, Phantom Drift, Polyphony, Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine, Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine,Quantum Speculative Fiction, Rosebud, SCI FICTION, Science Fiction Writer’s Market Place & Sourcebook, Sirius Visions, SmokeLong Quarterly, Son and Foe, Strained Relations, Strange Horizons, Tähtivaeltaja, Talebones, Time After Time, Twists Of The Tale, The Urbanite, VB Tech, Welcome To The GreenHouse, Witpunk, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best SF 10.
Boarding Instructions (Fairwood Press)
“Boarding Instructions shows Ray Vukcevich at his best, which is saying something. From short and mind-bogglingly witty “Superpowers” to the heartrending “Over Here,” Vukcevich’s stories engage the mind and the heart. He even makes grocery lists interesting. Boarding Instructions shows why Ray Vukcevich is one of America’s best writers.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of Diving Into the Wreck
“Each story is a tremendous mouthful of unusual and dazzling fiction. Like a marching band that comes in one door and out the bathroom, one never knows how Vukcevich will surprise us with his gifts: outlandish adventures, peculiar circumstances, absurd characters, occasionally dosed with a smattering of hip alien influence or the overarching influence of Pi. Vukcevich’s stories are dreamy, hilarious and uninhibited.” —Stefanie Freele, Fiction Editor, Los Angeles Review
“There is no such thing as a typical Ray Vukcevich story. They all start a strong left turn from reality and then do the Charleston through a space warp. You will find humanity, you will find hilarity, and you will find a one-of-a-kind imagination who deserves to be a household name.” —Adam-Troy Castro, Science Fiction Weekly
“Ray Vukcevich doesn’t quite live in the same world the rest of us do, although his world his full of many of the same things ours is. Flashlights. Wars. Romantic entanglements. But it’s also full of strange magics. I’m not sure those magics aren’t in our world, too, but it’s only after reading Ray that I think I might know how to look for them. Boarding Instructions will let you see signals in the dark.” —Maureen McHugh, author of China Mountain Zhang
“Using our own momentum and expectations, Ray Vukcevich flips us into something unexpected again and again. We end up flat on our backs, laughing at the trick. There are other masters of such literary aikido, but the special genius of Vukcevich is that he finally flips the reader not into mere hilarity, but into something poignant or satisfyingly mysterious. His stories delight, and they also nourish.” —Bruce Holland Rogers, author of The Keyhole Opera
“One thing I really like about Fairwood Press is that they put together some top notch collections by both authors I have heard of before, and authors that I’m glad I’ve found out about through their collections…I am very glad I was introduced to Vukcevich. His wonderful stories take the ridiculous, and while it disarms you with the funny, it works in a deep point that hits you out of the clear blue. It was there the whole time, and you never noticed. In the 33 stories collected inBoarding Instructions, most of them only a few pages, you get tales from all over the gamut of speculative fiction, but each one retains a style very much Vukcevich. Clear prose with a smooth delivery makes these stories easy to read, and the impact behind them keeps them rattling in your head for a while…None of these will let you down.” —Luke Reviews
“It is almost impossible to adequately describe a collection by Ray Vukcevich. In fact, it is often equally impossible to describe even a single story by him. His view of the world is so twisted – in a good way – that he makes his readers look at even everyday things from an entirely new perspective. The stories collected here range from SF to fantasy to just plain weird. They involve vampires and guided missiles and time travel and superhuman powers and secrets of various sorts. There are love stories and mysteries and stories where the plot – if there is one – is relegated to unimportance. I think he is probably the most distinctive short story writer since R.A. Lafferty and David R. Bunch. I couldn’t possibly single out favorites from this one, but good examples of the range of his talent would include ‘Chain,’ ‘Fired,’ ‘Love Story,’ and ‘A Funny Smell.’ Very highly recommended. —Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass
Meet Me in the Moon Room (Small Beer Press)
Ray Vukcevich should be as revered as Donald Barthelme or Salvador Dali in the pantheon of modern surrealists. Unjustly deprived of such honors, he should at least be allowed a few weeks in a time-share vacation condo with Don Webb, Rick DeMarinis, Mark Leyner and James Blaylock, literary peers whose absurdist take on existence Vukcevich shares. Did I mention that the condo would occupy an abandoned ICBM silo, as in Ray’s creepily twisted ghost story, “Pretending”? Or perhaps the luxury beach house would perch on a few square inches of the scalp of the barbershop patron who boasts a monkey-filled jungle in his hair, in “The Barber’s Theme”. The writers’ relaxathon could also take place in the outer reaches of our Solar System, once the lucky vacationers grow their organic spacesuits, as average folks do in “By the Time We Get to Uranus.” Or as a last choice, the writers might congregate in the mysterious highway median of “Fancy Pants”, where metamorphoses that would baffle Ovid occur. Wherever the greats hold their Beach Blanket Oulipo, Vukcevich will doubtlessly be the life of the party. Alternately melancholy and boisterous, plaintive and assertive, sensitive and outrageous, serious and goofy, Vukcevich’s stories portray a universe not only stranger than the average person imagines, but stranger than he or she canimagine! It’s an uncommon, even scary intellect and vision and talent that can make us believe in wisdom out of a baby’s butt (“Poop”) or nose roaches (“Home Remedy”) or shopping bags over the global head as protection from planet-smasher comets (“No Comet”). And believe we do, thanks to Vukcevich’s honed, transparent, yet unmistakeable prose stylings. Plunk down a blindfolded critic in the middle of a Vukcevich landscape, and within two sentences the savant will know just what capricious deity is in charge. The critic will also be reduced to a gibbering, adoring, spastic wreck, but them’s the breaks. If you don’t instantly agree to meet Vukcevich in his unique Moon Room club, solely on his terms–well, you’re the kind of timid soul who would turn down a blind date with Destiny even if the demiurge came dressed in the form of Little Kim or D’Angelo. – Paul Di Filippo
What other writer could make you start laughing halfway down the first page of a story about a man putting on a sweater? Thurber maybe, a long time ago. Buy this book. – Damon Knight, author of Humpty Dumpty, An Oval
These stories cannot be compared to anyone else’s. There is no one in the same class as Ray Vukcevich. The stories are uniquely, splendidly, brilliantly original, a surprise in each and every one, and brimming with wit and laugh-out-loud humor. A stunning collection. – Kate Wilhelm
In Ray Vukcevich’s ingenious stories the absurd and the profound are seamlessly joined through fine writing. Meet Me in the Moon Room is a first-rate collection. – Jeffrey Ford
I once heard Ray Vukcevich say about life, humanity, and writing, “All we have is each other.” In the spaces between us lie some very strange territories, and this is the ground Ray explores in his stories. There is no other planet like planet Ray; once you visit, you’ll want to go back as often as you can. In Meet Me in the Moon Room, you get an explosion of guided tours. Grab the bowl with the barking goldfish in it, wind the cat, curl up in a comfortable chair in an abandoned missile silo, and plunge into the wild mind of Ray Vukcevich. No one else can take you on this trip. – Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Ray Vukcevich is a marvelous writer. His perspective is skewed, giving us a whole new take on the world. His use of language is unique. And, perhaps most delightful of all, is that Vukcevich stories are completely unpredictable. I envy the person who will be reading Ray Vukcevich for the very first time. – Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
“This is the funniest mystery I’ve read in twenty years.” Damon Knight
“On the face of it (or the dust jacket) this might easily have turned into a “gimmick” book, what with tap-dancing twelve-step programs, multiple personalities, and eboards providing real-time commentary on events as they unfold. Vukcevich avoids that trap, however. The technical underpinnings of his novel are flawless, and each and every potential “gimmick” fully supports its piece of the plot mechanics. Nothing is thrown away here, nothing is wasted, and it all comes together in the end without straining credulity or over-burdening one’s suspension of disbelief. I haven’t had so much fun with a novel since I read Daniel Pinkwater’s books about the Snark-out Boys.” Susan R. Matthews
Interviews
Matthew Simmons interviews Ray Vukcevich in Hobart online.
Christian Desrosiers interviews Ray Vukcevich for Interfictions 2.
