Jack Dann

"In 1972, Jack Dann was a law school student and aspiring writer who had published stories in Worlds of If and Fantastic when a story he had sent to Damon Knight for his famed Orbit anthology series was published. These early stories eventually led to a Nebula Award for his novella “Da Vinci Rising” in 1997 and to increasing acclaim as one of science fiction and fantasy’s most original writers. Jack Dann’s imagined worlds are so rich in detail as to become hallucinatory; a reader doesn’t so much peruse a Dann story as experience it. In “The Dybbuk Dolls,” the owner of a sex shop in a future ghetto finds himself involved with weird customers, a political feud, alien dolls, and a number of complicated and often hilarious events. “Jumping the Road” and “Timetipping” also draw on Dann’s Jewish heritage and his gift for humor, while “Amnesia,” a darker tale in which a man searching for his dead wife plugs into a dying man’s mind, demonstrates Dann’s range, as does “Blind Shemmy,” a story of gamblers playing for the highest of stakes. In “Bad Medicine,” a man searching for meaning in his life embarks on a spiritual quest with a Native American shaman, while the Ditmar Award-winning “The Diamond Pit,” an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald set in the 1920s, is an adventure story of an aviator shot down and confined by an eccentric millionaire in a luxurious prison from which he and other confined flyers must escape." --