Book excerpt: Winner of the Tiptree Award and a Mythopoeic Award finalist, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic fable that invites revisitation. Praise for Cloud & Ashes: "A rich poetic prose laden with fetching archaisms that's unlike anything else being written today. Brilliant and truly innovative fiction, not to be missed."—The Washington Times Greer Gilman is the author of Moonwise. A graduate of Wellesley and the University of Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.