Strange Wine was published by Harper & Row in 1978, and it represents Ellison at his most experimental — a collection that pushes the short story form in multiple directions simultaneously, from surrealist poetry to urban horror to metaphysical comedy.
“Croatoan” is one of the most controversial stories Ellison ever wrote. A man whose girlfriend has had an abortion follows the flushed fetus into the New York sewer system and discovers a vast underground world of unborn children — a community of the aborted, living in darkness beneath the city. The story is not anti-abortion (Ellison was pro-choice) but it is unflinching about the emotional reality of the procedure, and its refusal to provide a comfortable political position outraged readers on both sides.
“From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet” is a tour de force: twenty-six micro-stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, ranging from realistic vignettes to hallucinatory fantasies, each one a compressed exploration of some aspect of human desire, cruelty, or longing. The story is a demonstration of Ellison’s extraordinary range — his ability to shift tone, genre, and mode from paragraph to paragraph while maintaining a cumulative emotional impact.
The collection also includes “Emissary from Hamelin,” “The New York Review of Bird,” and “Working with the Little People” — stories that demonstrate Ellison’s conviction that science fiction and fantasy were not genres but modes of imagination, applicable to any subject.
Collecting Strange Wine
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $50–$150