Charley is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives in a stable. He isn't a runner, he's a mount. He belongs to a Hoot: The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn't seen his mother for years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he's going to have to learn how to be a human being.

The Mount is the new novel by Carol Emshwiller, author of Carmen Dog and Ledoyt.

"[T]urns our supposed certainties into beautiful and terrible insights....Glimpses of arresting sorrow meld here with teenage dreams and hopes and anguish, shaped subtly with a poet's sure touch into finely crafted characterizations....Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute...this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times." Publishers Weekly

"We are all Mounts and so should read this book like an instruction manual that could help save our lives. That it is also a beautiful funny novel is the usual bonus you get by reading Carol Emshwiller. She always writes them that way." Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Years of Rice and Salt

"I've been a fan of Carol Emshwiller's since the wonderful Carmen Dog. The Mount is a terrific novel, at once an adventure story and a meditation on the psychology of freedom and slavery. It's literally haunting (days after finishing it, I still think about all the terrible poetry of the Hoot/Sam relationship) and hypnotic. I'm honored to have gotten an early look at it." Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil

"If The Mount is an allegory, it?s more real, more human, more deeply moving than any allegory I?ve ever come across. If it?s a coming-of-age novel, I guarantee you it is more outrageously original than any coming-of-age novel ever written, while also and always remaining human, and real, and deeply moving. And if it?s a novel about an alien invasion, it?s more brilliantly imaginative than any alien invasion novel I?ve ever read — oh, and also more human, more real, more moving than any of them. All of Carol Emshwiller?s gifts are gathered here, all of her warmth and compassion and her wry humor, her surprising and brilliant imagination, her clear-eyed devotion to the truth of human lives, her ear for voice and language, the sheer beauty and spark of her prose. If you are not already a devoted fan of Carol Emshwiller, The Mount will make you one." Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life

"I've loved everything Carol Emshwiller has ever written, but in her new novel, The Mount, she outdoes herself. This story of mounts and riders has so much to say about slaves and masters, humans and animals, parents and children, cruelty and kindness — and about tunnel vision and tricks and tears and society and history and the world — that it¹s impossible to believe she's gotten it into one small, simple, unforgettable book. A true original by a true original!" Connie Willis, author of Passage and Everything But the Dog

"This novel is like a tesseract, I started it and thought, ah, I see what she's doing. But then the dimensions unfolded and somehow it ended up being about so much more." Maureen McHugh, author of Nekropolis

"Carol Emshwiller's The Mount is a wicked book. Like Harlan Ellison's darkest visions, Emshwiller writes in a voice that reminds us of the golden season when speculative fiction was daring and unsettling. Dystopian, weird, comedic as if the Marquis de Sade had joined Monty Python, and ultimately scary, The Mount takes us deep into another reality. Our world suddenly seems wrought with terrible ironies and a severe kind of beauty. When we are the mounts, who — or what — is riding us?" Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Six Kinds of Sky

* Philip K. Dick Award Winner* Best of the Year: Locus, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Magazine* Nominated for the Impac Award

Charley is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives in a stable. He isn't a runner, he's a mount. He belongs to a Hoot: The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn't seen his mother for years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he's going to have to learn how to be a human being.I've been a fan of Carol Emshwiller's since the wonderful Carmen Dog. The Mount is a terrific novel, at once an adventure story and a meditation on the psychology of freedom and slavery. It's literally haunting (days after finishing it, I still think about all the terrible poetry of the Hoot/Sam relationship) and hypnotic. I'm honored to have gotten an early look at it.--Glen David Gold

Carol Emshwiller's The Mount is a wicked book. Like Harlan Ellison's darkest visions, Emshwiller writes in a voice that reminds us of the golden season when speculative fiction was daring and unsettling. Dystopian, weird, comedic as if the Marquis de Sade had joined Monty Python, and ultimately scary, The Mount takes us deep into another reality. Our world suddenly seems wrought with terrible ironies and a severe kind of beauty. When we are the mounts, who--or what--is riding us?--Luis Alberto Urrea

We are all Mounts and so should read this book like an instruction manual that could help save our lives. That it is also a beautiful funny novel is the usual bonus you get by reading Carol Emshwiller. She always writes them that way. --Kim Stanley Robinson

This novel is like a tesseract, I started it and thought, ah, I see what she's doing. But then the dimensions unfolded and somehow it ended up being about so much more. --Maureen F. McHugh

The Mount is so extraordinary as to be unpraiseable by a mortal such as I. I had to keep putting it down because it was so disturbing then picking it up because it was so amazing. A postmodernist would call it The Eros of Hegemony, but I'm no postmodernist. Nearly every sentence is simultaneously hilarious, prophetic, and disturbing. This person needs to be really, really famous. --Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights Bookstore

Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute in its delineation of the complex relationships between masters and slaves, pets and owners, the served and the serving, this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times.--Publishers Weekly

Adult/High School - This veteran science-fiction writer is known for original plots and characters, and her latest novel does not disappoint, offering an extraordinary, utterly alien, and thoroughly convincing culture set in the not-too-distant future. Emshwiller brings readers immediately into the action, gradually revealing the takeover of Earth by the Hoots, otherworldly beings with superior intelligence and technology. Humans have become the Hoots' mounts, and, in the case of the superior Seattle bloodline, valuable racing stock. Most mounts are well off, as the Hoots constantly remind them, and treated kindly by affectionate owners who use punishment poles as rarely as possible. No one agrees more than principal narrator Charley, a privileged young Seattle whose rider-in-training will someday rule the world. The adolescent mount's dream is of bringing honor to his beloved Little Master by becoming a great champion like Beauty, his sire, whose portrait decorates many Hoot walls. When Charley learns that his father now leads the renegade bands called Wilds, he and Little Master flee. This complex and compelling blend of tantalizing themes offers numerous possibilities for speculation and discussion, whether among friends or in the classroom.--School Library JournalEmshwiller's prose is beautiful--Laura Miller, Salon

The Mount is a brilliant book. But be warned: It takes root in the mind and unleashes aftershocks at inopportune moments.--The Women's Review of Books

Carol Emshwiller has been writing fantasy, speculative and science fiction for many years; she has a dedicated cult following and has been an influence on a number of today's top writers.... it is very easy to fall into the rhythm of Emshwiller's poetic and smooth sentences.--Review of Contemporary Fiction

Emshwiller's themes--the allure of submission, the temptations of complicity, the perverse nature of compassion--are not usual fare in novels of resistance and revolt, and her strikingly imaginative novel continues to surpass our expectations to the very last page.--The Philadelphia Inquirer

Both fantastical and unnerving in its familiarity. And like her work in romance and westerns, its genre-twisting plot resists easy classification.--The Village Voice

Emshwiller uses a deceptively simple narrative voice that gives The Mount the style of a young-adult novel. But there's much going on beneath the surface of this narrative, including oblique flashes of humor and artfully articulated moments of psychological insight. The Mount emerges as one of the season's unexpected small pleasures.--San Francisco Chronicle

A memorable alien-invasion scenario, a wild adventure, and a reflection on the dynamics of freedom and slavery.--Booklist

A brilliant piece of work.--Bookslut

...a beautifully written allegorical tale full of hope that even the most unenlightened souls can shrug off the bonds of internalized oppression and finally see the light.--BookPage

A fable/fantasy/cautionary tale along the lines of, say, Animal Farm. It's the story of Charlie, a preadolescent human who's being used as

"A wicked book. Dystopian, weird, comedic."-Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird's Daughter

"Terrific."-Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil

Both a coming-of-age story and a political fable, Carol Emshwiller's novel looks at what it means to be human. Charley, a boy raised to serve an alien master, must choose between comfort and freedom, vengeance and a new future.

Carol Emshwiller is the author of four short story collections, The Start of the End of it All (Winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award), Verging on the Pertinent, Joy in Our Cause, and Report to the Men's Club, and four novels, Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill, and The Mount. She lives in New York and teaches writing at the New York University continuing education program. In summer she lives in a shack in Bishop, CA.