What’s the Story? Reading Carol Emshwiller’s “Peninsula”
Sun 11 Nov 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Reviews | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
The first part of this column on Carol Emshwiller’s “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” can be found in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet no.9
There is an odd significance beginning to make itself felt and I must stay open to it. I must understand it when it has finished unfolding itself to me. I see that now, and that I must put together each incident to form a whole. I must not look at things separately. (121)
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 9
Thu 1 Nov 2001 - Filed under: LCRW | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
No. 9
Excellent issue with a column from L. Timmel Duchamp on two Carol Emshwiller stories. Part of the column (on “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison”) is in print and part (on “Peninsula“) is online. There’s a new film column (on really obscure films — there’s a theme there somewhere), and just damn good fiction.
Shake well, Contents may settle.
Fiction
Eliot Fintushel — Drought
Tim Pratt – Annabelle’s Alphabet
Mark Rich — Delivery
Beth Adele Long — The Crystal Ladies’ Ball
Gay Partington Terry — The Ustek Cloudy
Leslie What — I Remember Marta
Amy Beth Forbes — A is for Apple
Barbara Gilly — An Excerpt
Poetries
Christopher Rowe — Our Prize Patrol Will Find You No Matter Where You Are
Mark Rudolph — My Father’s Ghost; Reinventing Emily
Darrell Schweitzer — They Sure Eat a Lot in Epics
Theodora Goss — The Ophelia Cantos; Falling Boy
Nonfictions
L. Timmel Duchamp — What’s the Story? Reading Two Carol Emshwiller Short Stories, “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” and “Peninsula”
Margaret Muirhead — Simple Living
Gilly: On the Verge of Rediscovery
Zine reviews, mostly
William Smith — The Film Column: Phase IV
Classified
Designated Drivers
Those named above. See below.
Capable People
L. Timmel Duchamp’s column, What’s the Story, is a regular feature of LCRW. Much of her critical writing is available on her website. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Leviathan Two, and F&SF.
Eliot Fintushel’s stories are a fixture in theAsimov’s pages. He has also shown up in Crank!, The Whole Earth Review, etc. He is an “itinerant showman” and will apparently be appearing at the right hand of God on the Day of Judgment.
Amy Beth Forbes is a senior majoring in English at Michigan State University. Her new fiction and movie review column, For the Eyes, will soon appear in Mi Gente magazine. This is slightly odd because she isn’t Hispanic, but apparently it’s a small world after all. She is a graduate of Clarion 2001.
Barbara Gilly has yet to get her driver’s license.
Theodora Goss appears for the second time in as many issues. Deservedly so. She has published poetry in mainstream and genre magazines.
Gavin J. Grant recently built a desk.
Kelly Link is busy sorting photographs. Her collection Stranger Things Happen was published last summer by Small Beer Press. It may be a while before her next book comes out. She does have a new story though . . .
Beth Adele Long’s short fiction has won the Asimov Award and has been translated into Italian for the webzine Intercom. She is a graduate of the 2001 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. She lives in suburban Maryland, where she is trying to come to terms with the fact that winter involves cold weather.
Margaret Muirhead lives in Boston. Her poetry has appeared in LCRW and a number of other tasteful journals. This piece is based on true events.
Tim Pratt recently decided to make his life many times more interesting and began working at Locus.He has published fiction and poetry in many venues,Asimov’s and Strange Horizons among them.
Mark Rich writes about toys for a living. His book 100 Greatest Baby Boomer Toys is great fun, even for non-boomers. His art appeared on the cover ofLCRW v3n2. His stories have appeared in most of the magazines in the world.
Christopher Rowe wonders if he wants the prize patrol to find him. In the meantime he writes a column for Columbia! magazine and has had fiction published in various places. He intends to become a publishing magnate the hard way: by publishing, rather than just buying a publishing company.
Mark Rudolph also makes a second consecutive poetry appearance in these pages. He has recently acquired a small, black dog. Everyone loves it. Much of his poetry and fiction can be found online — in the good places!
Darrell Schweitzer is the author of many books, fiction and nonfiction. This poem was his reaction to reading Homer. This was his second reaction, the first was Simpsons-related.
William Smith can usually be found on the other side of the editor’s desk. He owns more films than he should, for a man of his age. Reputedly makes a decent Key Lime pie. His film column will appear regularly here and on the LCRW website.
Gay Partington Terry is a Manx West Virginian insomniac who practices and teaches Tai chi Ch’uan and Qi Gong in New York; a contributing editor ofFrigatezine.com, and, before this, most recently published at clocktowerfiction.com.
Leslie What won the Nebula Award quite recently. Her collection, The Sweet and the Sour Tongue was published in 2000 by Wildside Press. Should you need a party hosted, she’s the one to contact.
Colophonically Speaking:
First Eight Letters
Assembly completed in October 2001. Component parts not guaranteed created in this millennium. Assembly line included new manufacturing equipment (portable where possible) due to July 2001 unexpected reassignment of previous equipment perpetrated by person or persons unknown. If you are a subscriber, somehow reading this while yet not having received your copy, please write or email us. Thank you. Text is in Bodoni Book 10/12pt, Italic, 12/14.4, Trebuchet 10, and 14pt Bold, and ITC Sans Officina Book. Among others. Aesthetic apologies for small outer margin.
Contributors thanked for working hard at their art/calling. Readers thanked for choosing this small zine for purchase.
Latter Ten Letters
Hear this. For an audio version of this zine, find a friend with a good reading voice, or send us a largish check and we’ll send it on tape. Or maybe CD, if we can master it. If we get the writers’ permissions, which as of yet, we haven’t, there being, so far, no demand. But should you create that demand with your non-rubber 100% paper check (or your Paypal transfer, ahem), we’ll respond in our usual timely fashion.
Slowly, slowly. Don’t rush now. After all, who’s waiting? Once we send it out, all those people who didn’t get their subscriber copies are going to start complaining. Who wants that? Maybe, we’ll go a little slower.
Art in this issue is sparse.
Web Exclusive: Art Worries
But we worry about art. Should there be more? We’re not sure. After all, art is hard to reproduce, and we’re limited to balck & white — at least until we start getting grants from large and forgiving foundations.
Chuntering on, as the web encourages. This is a damn good issue, the kind I’d be happy to receive in my mailbox. Or at home, or at work. Or find on your floor, when I come visit. When we talk about the Be Good Tanyas and eat those cactus tamales I dream about when I’m far from here.
If there were more good art, you say, we’d be set! WE’d blow the lid off this joint.
I open another beer and stretch on the floor. Someone told me we should all sit on the floor more, it makes you stretch more, stops you crunching up your bones and muscles. I’m not convinced, but you like it, so I’ll avoid the comfy chair for a bit. Besides, your dog looks pretty happy there, and why would I move him? He likes fantastic art about as much as I like cat food.
What’s to be done? I ask you, but you’re trying to find that other CD, the one with the animals on it, Talk Talk? I ask, but you wave me away, that’s not your style. Don’t know why I said it. Used to love their stuff. Shoudl go looking, see what that guy is up to.
So, you ask, a couple of weeks later. Did you get any good art?
Nah. Not this time. Maybe next time.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.9 November 2001. Fifth anniversary issue. LCRW appears twice-yearly from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Apologies for the price increase: it had to happen sooner or later. Contents copyright the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, checks, books, zines, music, chocolate (preferably dark), stationary supplies, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. As always an SAE will speed up our reply. When we leave this rock we’re gonna go somewhere good, see. You wanna come? Sure you wanna come. Step in, but best strap down, this pony’s got legs, see.
Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews
Tue 31 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Authors | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich
– Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award
– A Locus Best Book of 2001
– Bram Stoker Preliminary Ballot 2001
Book Magazine
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line. Almost every one of his stories has a zinger at the end, but not the kind of zinger that chocks the reader or causes annoyance. Often it’s a perfect line of dialogue that opens up the whole story…. Vukcevich is ingenious with the short-story form. Although the stories read as playful vignettes, Vukcevich covertly works in ideas of self, identity, destiny, and obsession. And occasionally, the dangers of outer space.”
Hartford Courant
“. . . the 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme.Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner’s Star.“
Locus
“Vukcevich is a master of radical recombinations, drawing from (amongst others) the Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, O. Henry, Dali, Asimov, pulpish space opera, and the latest in nanotech to produce works that are all his own. Sometimes in as little as four or five pages, he deftly juggles so many ideas, emotions, and perspectives, it produces a curiously refreshing sense of vertigo — a high with no hangover to follow…. It would be…a great mistake to ignore the extraordinary talent of Ray Vukcevich.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“…Ray Vukcevich is a very slick writer, an authentic sprinter in an era of milers and all-out stayers…. Vukcevich can do punchlines, but he does not rely on them. Indeed, his extraordinarily light touch when it comes to narrative closure is his most distinctive feature. Anyone who considers bizarre surrealism and casual absurdity — the main stocks-in-trade of the fantastic ultrashort story writer — easy clay to mold into narrative form has not given serious consideration to the matter of finishing.”
Asimov’s
“These stories niftily propel their characters down the blurred line between fantasy and psychosis, with effects spanning the gamut from melancholy to goofy, from plaintive to outraged…. This is Vukcevich’s gloriously mad world, and we are lucky to share it.”
Publishers Weekly
The same antic spirit that imbued Vukcevich’s mystery novel The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces moves playfully through this first collection of fantastic fiction, whose 33 helium-filled stories achieve just the right absurdist life to escape the gravity of their themes. “By the Time We Get to Uranus” offers a peculiarly affecting take on terminal illness: the afflicted grow buoyant spacesuits that force them to leave loved ones behind. The mysteries of parenthood manifest amusingly in “Poop,” about a couple who discover that their newborn’s diaper fills variously with birds, mice, and symphonic music. Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers, competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness with which the author’s characters accept the incongruity of their situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human condition. In the poignant title tale, for example, a man does not find it at all strange that a lover from decades past has summoned him to a simulated moon landscape at a theme park, reflecting that the meaning of life really is “nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe.” Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction.
Forecast: With blurbs from Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Jeffrey Ford, this collection is a quality item that should benefit from good word of mouth.
Booklist
A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid of amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich’s outlandish virtuosity. Sf fans with long memories will note Vukcevich’s deadpan delivery and jokey-creepy aura, recall the wonder-workings of Fredric Brown (see From These Ashes [BKL Ap 15 01] and smile.
Also:
Meet Me in the Moon Room – Reviews
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Authors, Meet Me in the Moon Room, Ray Vukcevich, Reviews | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Gavin
Book Magazine
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist”
Review of Contemporary Fiction “Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line. Almost every one of his stories has a zinger at the end, but not the kind of zinger that chocks the reader or causes annoyance. Often it’s a perfect line of dialogue that opens up the whole story…. Vukcevich is ingenious with the short-story form. Although the stories read as playful vignettes, Vukcevich covertly works in ideas of self, identity, destiny, and obsession. And occasionally, the dangers of outer space.”
Hartford Courant
“. . . the 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme. Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner’s Star.“
Locus
“Vukcevich is a master of radical recombinations, drawing from (amongst others) the Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, O. Henry, Dali, Asimov, pulpish space opera, and the latest in nanotech to produce works that are all his own. Sometimes in as little as four or five pages, he deftly juggles so many ideas, emotions, and perspectives, it produces a curiously refreshing sense of vertigo — a high with no hangover to follow…. It would be…a great mistake to ignore the extraordinary talent of Ray Vukcevich.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“…Ray Vukcevich is a very slick writer, an authentic sprinter in an era of milers and all-out stayers…. Vukcevich can do punchlines, but he does not rely on them. Indeed, his extraordinarily light touch when it comes to narrative closure is his most distinctive feature. Anyone who considers bizarre surrealism and casual absurdity — the main stocks-in-trade of the fantastic ultrashort story writer — easy clay to mold into narrative form has not given serious consideration to the matter of finishing.”
Asimov’s
“These stories niftily propel their characters down the blurred line between fantasy and psychosis, with effects spanning the gamut from melancholy to goofy, from plaintive to outraged…. This is Vukcevich’s gloriously mad world, and we are lucky to share it.”
Publishers Weekly
The same antic spirit that imbued Vukcevich’s mystery novel The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces moves playfully through this first collection of fantastic fiction, whose 33 helium-filled stories achieve just the right absurdist life to escape the gravity of their themes. “By the Time We Get to Uranus” offers a peculiarly affecting take on terminal illness: the afflicted grow buoyant spacesuits that force them to leave loved ones behind. The mysteries of parenthood manifest amusingly in “Poop,” about a couple who discover that their newborn’s diaper fills variously with birds, mice, and symphonic music. Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers, competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness with which the author’s characters accept the incongruity of their situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human condition. In the poignant title tale, for example, a man does not find it at all strange that a lover from decades past has summoned him to a simulated moon landscape at a theme park, reflecting that the meaning of life really is “nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe.” Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction. Forecast: With blurbs from Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Jeffrey Ford, this collection is a quality item that should benefit from good word of mouth.
Booklist
A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid of amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich’s outlandish virtuosity. Sf fans with long memories will note Vukcevich’s deadpan delivery and jokey-creepy aura, recall the wonder-workings of Fredric Brown (see From These Ashes [BKL Ap 15 01] and smile.
Also:
Whisper
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories, Ray Vukcevich | 17 Comments| Posted by: intern
And then she fired her parting shot. “And not only that,” she said, as if “that” hadn’t been quite enough, “you snore horribly!”
“I do not,” I said. “I definitely do not snore.” I was talking to her back. “You’re making it up!” I was talking to the door. “Someone else would have mentioned it!” I was talking to myself.
Mistakes were made, relationships fell apart, and hurtful things were said. Life was like that.
Mom’s Little Friends
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | 1 Comment| Posted by: intern
Because he wouldn’t understand, we left Mom’s German shepherd Toby leashed to the big black roll bar in the back of Ada’s pickup truck, and because Mom’s hands were tied behind her back and because her ankles were lashed together, we had some trouble wrestling her out of the cab and onto the bridge.
My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.
No Comet
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Convinced that my slant on Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was our last hope, I bullied Jane, who didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and Sacha into cooperating with a final desperate attempt to save the world.
“This is stupid, Tim,” Jane said, her voice softened a little by the brown paper bag over her head.
“La la, la la, la la,” Sacha sang. She banged the heels of her shoes against the legs of her chair in time to her tune. Wearing a bag over her head was still fun, I thought, but our daughter was seven and had fidgeting down to a fine art. How long would she stick with me?
Stranger Things Happen
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Books | 2 Comments| Posted by: Small Beer Press
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice’s 25 Favorite Books of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.
Cover painting by Shelley Jackson.
Reviews
“My favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
Fifth Printing Note: We are sorry to say some copies of this printing have page 118 reprinted where page 188 should be. There are a couple of remedies. You can download the pdf of page 188 here or you can email us.We are a tiny press and we apologize for our mistake. We hope the replacement page (or the book, below) will satisfy readers. However, if you’d rather, we will replace your book. Please email us if this is the case. How to identify if your copy is a 5th printing: On the copyright page it states “First Edition 5 6 7 8 9 0″Thank you.
July 1, 2005
Kelly Link’s debut collection Stranger Things Happen is now available for as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner. The book is provided below in these formats: Text file, HTML, rtf, and lo-res PDF. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We’ll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below. Please abide by these few rules for file-conversions:
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Send us a link to the reader for your conversion so that we can include it on the downloads page.
-
No DRM. If your format of choice has a means of restricting copying, use or playback, please do not use it.
- If the book has been converted to your format of choice but the conversion doesn’t suit you, go ahead and reconvert it for your own use and distribution. We will host the first and only the first version as the few formats we have provided are pretty much all we know anything about. And we don’t know that much about those.
- Enjoy!
Downloads: To get your Free Download of Stranger Things Happen click on the links below:
Plain text file, 462k
HTML file, 483k
RTF file, 790k
Printable PDF file, 2.5MB
– Click to open in browser. Right click (or Control+click) to “Save link” to save the pdf file to your computer.
Bonus conversions!
MobiPocket — Conversion from the html version for MobiPocket reader with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Daniel Rodriguez)
EReader — Conversion for Palm with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Jeff DeLeo)
HTML file, 483k — Converted so that the table of contents is linked as is license info and about the author info. It is also html optimized for reading on a pocket pc. (Thanks Matt Katz!)
iSilo — Converted for the e-book reader iSilo which is available for various mobile platforms. (Thanks: Colin Dunstan!)
Gnutella — The PDF is now on the Gnutella and Gnutella2 peer-to-peer networks. (Thanks: Jules!)
Plucker — Conversion of the HTML file on this site. Plucker is a reader for mobile devices running the Palm operating system. 198k. (Thanks: Mark Hainline!)
Plucker — Second version that includes links for navigating from the table of contents to each story. 198k. (Thanks: Howard Bales!)
BitTorrent — PDF via BitTorrent
PalmDoc — For most ebook readers. 257k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)
TomeRaider — Ebook format for PDA’s: 241k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)
Audio
“Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water” read by Alex Wilson (and released under CC, of course).
– Ogg Vorbis (.ogg); Q2; 14MB
“The Specialist’s Hat” read by Jason Lundberg (40 minute MP3).
1. Why?
Today, July 1, 2005, we are publishing Kelly Link’s new collection, Magic for Beginners. To celebrate we are releasing Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen, as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). (We hope to release Magic for Beginners later this year once all the individual story rights have reverted to the author.)
When we published our first two books, Stranger Things Happen and Meet Me in the Moon Room, we were incredibly lucky and received an incredible (repeated word on purpose: it really was — and still is — amazing) amount of support, advice, help and enthusiasm from readers, publishers, writers, and others across North America and beyond.
So this is one way to say thanks, everyone.
2. Creative What?
We’re interested in spreading the word about Creative Commons. Copyright is a good thing and artists deserve to be paid whatever society is willing to pay for their work. But, do artists need to retain the rights to their work for 70 years after their death? Uh, no.
3. Can’t I buy the book?
Will giving Stranger Things Happen away kill sales? We hope not. The book is available in hundreds of libraries, on print.google.com and Amazon.com’s Search Inside program, in a few used bookshops and on BookCrossing. But there are 6 billion readers out there! This is just a way we can say thanks and give something back (or pass it on) to everyone who helped us.
So, yes, Stranger Things Happen is in its 4th printing and we certainly encourage readers to buy a copy — we’re a tiny indie press: sales are good!
4. Questions
Got a question? Email us and hopefully we’ll post an answer. We are a tiny press, though, so please don’t get jumpy if we don’t answer immediately. We’re busy freelancing or working on our next books.
More thanks:
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Much of the impetus, information and inspiration for using the Creative Commons license came from author, innovator, and groundbreaker Cory Doctorow. (Thanks, Cory!)
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Thanks also to our webhost Utopian.Net (run by artists for artists) for help with this project (and being great hosts!).
Donate?
A number of readers pointed us toward Jim Kelly’s great page of Free Audiobooks and suggested we add a donation button on this page.
Please note: this is not something you have to do (especially if you own the book!). The electronic editions above of Stranger Things Happen are Free — and hopefully just the first of many Creative Commons-Licensed Free Downloads we’ll release (check for updates).
You can buy the book at the following spots: Paypal | Mail order | Your local bookshop | Powells. If you donate below, we’ll send you a thank you email but nothing else (well, unless you go wild!). We’re an indie press, hoping to survive, bent on publishing the best books we can find and in no way a 501(c)3 or whatever non profit. We are ‘for profit’ even if that’s more of a conceptual aim than an actuality as yet.
So thanks for reading. It’s a noisy world and we appreciate the time you took getting here. Enjoy the book, spread it far and wide, come back sometime, and if you really want to, go ahead and donate.
Meet Me in the Moon Room
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Books | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling — frequently managing to be both — these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space.
Read some stories: “Whisper,” ” No Comet,” “Mom’s Little Friends”
Vukcevich’s loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin.
Here’s an interview with Ray Vukcevich.
“Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist.”
—Book Magazine
“Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line.”
—The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Reviews from Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Locus, SF Chronicle, Tangentonline, F&SF, and more.
- Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
- Locus Recommended Reading 2001.
- Meet Me in the Moon Room and “Whisper“ were on the Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot.
- The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror XV Honorable Mentions: “Pretending,” “Beatniks with Banjos,” “In theRefrigerator,” & “Whisper.”
- “Pretending” was reprinted in The Best of the Rest 3.
- “Meet Me in the Moon Room” was reprinted in the Oregon Quarterly.
- “Miles and Miles of Broccoli,” an essay by Ray posted on the BookSense.com website.
- Read about Ray in the The Hartford Courant and the Register-Guard.
Who is Ray Vukcevich?
Here’s his website (check out that Ziesing link. Mr. Z. puts out a great catalog). Mr. Vukcevich lives in Oregon, has a daytime job at the University of Oregon, and published his novel, The Man With Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces. His short stories are something not to be missed and have recently appeared on Scifiction, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, and many more.
Reader Reviews
“I’ve been reading the Ray Vukcevich stories to people over the phone, so I thought I should send out a couple of the books and save my voice.”
– C.C.F., Columbus, OHRay 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 can imagine! 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 FilippoWhat 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 OvalThese 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, author of Desperate MeasuresIn 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, author of The BeyondI 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, author of Past the Size of DreamingRay 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, editor of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology
Leslie What’s report from the Meet Me in the Moon Room launch party.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Bibliography:
First printing: July 2001
Second printing: October 2001 — changes to copyright, contents, and pages 72, 204, 209, 249.
Cover painting by Rafal Olbinski.
Ray Vukcevich is represented by:
Matt Bialer
Trident Media Group, LLC
Carnegie Hall Tower
152 West 57th Street 16th Floor
New York, NY 10019
Tel: 212-262-4810
Fax: 212-262-4849
mbialer@tridentmediagroup.com
What’s the Story: Reading Anna Kavan’s Ice
Wed 6 Jun 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Reviews | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
LCRW 14 Online Extra
Anna Kavan’s Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s. The novel’s surrealist form demands a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven by narrative causality, but the text’s obsessive insistence on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist literary experiment.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 8
Fri 1 Jun 2001 - Filed under: LCRW | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
No. 8
June 2001
Not a quiet little number. No flab — despite a long winter spent reading zines and eating bon bons. Coming with a chocolate bar if you subscribed at Level 3 (does that sound like Multi-Level Marketers or Dianetiscists?). But Level 3 is, happily, the most popular level. Maybe it’ll catch on and other magazines will do it too. Can’t wait!
Contents
Fiction
As If — Carol Emshwiller
Going Private — Eliot Fintushel
Tato Chip, Tato Chip, Sing Me a Song — Alex Irvine
Love Story — Jeremy Cavin
Suspension — Robert Wexler
Three O’Clock in the Morning — Nancy Jane Moore
Faces, Hands: The Floors of His Heart — James Sallis
Cuttlefish — Alan DeNiro
Pretending — Ray Vukcevich
Poetries
Calling From Eros — Sydney Duncan
Chrysanthemums — Theodora Goss
By Tidal Pools
Helen in Sparta
White — Lucy Snyder
Errand of Mercy — Mark Rudolph
Fourth of July
Nonfictions
What’s the Story? — L. Timmel Duchamp
Zines, alphabetical
Giant Worms Search Update
Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops
Variations on a theme
Contributors’ notes
Extended Colophon
For the most part, the paper edition of this zine was printed in Bodoni Book 10/12pt. The titles are in Trebuchet 14pt bold, authors names in Bodoni Book 12pt.
It was put together on an Mac using OS 9.1 and printed on a Lexmark Optra E312L, a decent printer, but it doesn’t have enough memory to deal with graphics. It was printed and bound by the friendly folk at Park Slope Copy, in Brooklyn. It was later than it should have been, there being the usual unusual problems with PageMaker.
It will probably be sold at a loss, or maybe just breaking even, because I fancied playing with the margins, opening the lines, occasionally dropping text below, just for fun. That made it 52 pages, rather than 44. So, there goes my ice-cream — sorry, my sorbet — money. If you see me this summer, hot, with thirst unslaked, consider the sacrifice made for your reading pleasure.
In a departure from previous issues there is no editorial; because there is nothing to say. There is only a gap, a huge hole
where our friend and fellow publisher should be: Jenna A. Felice. She who we bothered all the time with foolish questions, whose brain we picked, who we promised we would let — let! — proofread this issue, just as we had promised (and never managed, deadlines, deadlines . . .) the last two, or three, or four. We miss her.
Contributors
Jeremy Cavin stories are exponentially increasing in length. We expect his tenth story from now to be approximately 100,000,000 words long. We are interested in seeing which dot.com will consider this a good investment. Mr. Cavin is less interested. He would rather be in Haiti working his fingers to the bone, or working for Medicin Sans Frontiers.
Alan DeNiro’s fiction has appeared in Fence,Strange Horizons, Minnesota Monthly, Altair,and elsewhere. His first published story was shortlisted for the 2000 O. Henry Awards. He reviews for Rain Taxi, and edits Taverner’s Koans online, “a one room schoolhouse of experimental poetics.” He used to blink a lot when he was Mafia.
L. Timmel Duchamp’s thus far unnamed column is expected to be a regular feature ofLCRW. Much of her critical writing is available on her website. Her stories have appeared inAsimov’s, Leviathan Two, and F&SF.
Sydney Duncan teaches English at the University of Alabama. Her poetry has appeared various places, most recently inUncommon Places: Poems of the Fantasticfrom Mayapple Press. She lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, with her husband, writer Andy Duncan, and their dog, Lily.
Carol Emshwiller was scared off of writing by Freshman English (take that as a warning, teachers). Her exquisite stories have been collected in Verging on the Pertinent, The Start of the End of it All, and Joy in Our Cause. She is also the author of the novelsCarmen Dog, Ledoyt, and Leaping Man Hill.
Eliot Fintushel’s stories are a fixture in theAsimov’s pages. It has also shown up inCrank!, The Whole Earth Review, etc. He is an “itinerant showman” and will apparently be appearing at the right hand of God on the Day of Judgment.
Theodora Goss has published poetry in both mainstream and genre magazines. Her family — minor Transylvanian nobility — escaped from communist Hungary when she was four.�Despite wanting to be a writer, she graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as an international lawyer on the 42nd floor of the PanAm building in New York. She is now working on a PhD in English literature at Boston University. We agree that she has a rather nice web site.
Gavin J. Grant still wonders.
Alex Irvine is far too sporty to stay indoors and write, and yet he does. Look at that author photo. He has a story in the anthologyStarlight 3, and probably has one in the nextF&SF. His novel, A Scattering of Jades, will be published by Tor in 2002. In 2001 he was one of the writers on the A.I. webgame and has co-written a novelization (A.I.:The Death of Evan Chan) with Sean Stewart.
The Japanese Prime Minister’s fiction about a right-wing oilman who takes the Presidency through a series of almost unbelievable events had to be postponed when he, the Prime Minister, did not turn in his rewrite in time, due to being ousted. He expects to be back in power shortly, when either he, or his secretary, will finish the piece. We are very curious as to the ending.
Kelly Link is on tour. Her first collection of short fiction, Stranger Things Happen will be published in July 2001 by Small Beer Press. She prefers trains to planes.
Mark Rudolph, poet and mathematician, is single-handedly revitalizing the fantastic poetry genre. While not gardening or dancing he has been (or will be) published in theLouisville Review, Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, Electric Wine, and more.
Nancy Jane Moore and Robert F. Wexlerfigured out within 24 hours of meeting each other in 1997 that they both (a) were born in Houston, (b) lived in Austin for many years (but not the same years), and (c) love Texas singer-songwriters. Although he lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and she lives in Washington, D.C., neither has stopped being a Texan (whatever that is). He has a story forthcoming in The Third Alternative, and his novel, Circus of the Grand Design, is looking for a home. Her fiction has appeared in the anthology Treachery and Treason, theNational Law Journal, and other even-more-unlikely places.
James Sallis’s story “Faces, Hands” first appeared in Nova 1 (as “Faces & Hands”), then in A Few Last Words. The first part of this story appeared in LCRW no.7. His fifth Lew Griffin novel is due this year.
Lucy Snyder runs the Dark Planet web site. Look out for an electronic collection of her work this year from Eggplant Publications.
Ray Vukcevich’s first short fiction collection,Meet Me in the Moon Room, will be published in July 2001. He has now published fiction in two magazines with the word Rosebud in their title. He is balancing the first part of his life, where he lived in a very dry place, by living in Oregon.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.8 the text-heavy, extra-fiction, damn that’s a good one issue, June 2001. Doesn’t explain the playing with the margins, though. LCRW appears occasionally from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $5 per single issue or $16/4. Contents the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, checks (made out to Gavin Grant), books, zines, stock certificates (only in companies making a real profit, not a proforma profit), music, chocolate (preferably dark), stationary supplies, caffeinated and/or alcoholic beverages, requests for guidelines &c should be sent to the address above. As always an SAE — or at least an email address — will speed up our reply. Fiction best approached with care. Unfolding will occur. Contents will settle. Satisfaction is hoped for. Enlightenment is unlikely. The plan is we leave this rock, see, we build one of those improbability drives, and we leave this rock, see.
Prison Is a Place on Earth
Thu 1 Mar 2001 - Filed under: Chuntering On, Free Stuff to Read | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
House prices far out of reach?
Can’t afford an apartment?
Come to Prison!
“It’s just like my old man told me,” says Prisoner X, male, 37, married with two children. “Three squares a day, a job and a place to sleep. I’m doing better here than I ever did outside!”
Tired of the noise, the rat-race, the pressure of urban life? Many prisons are in rural and suburban areas. Enjoy the peace, the fresh air of a new prison. Laugh at people hurrying along from one city to another as you take a relaxed walk beside the highway (Keeping America Beautiful as you go).
Worried by overcrowding? It’s not a feature of all our prisons. Besides, there’s always solitary confinement which Charles Dickens enthusiastically described as a “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.” (American Notes for General Circulation, London: Chapman & Hall, 1842)
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 7
Thu 1 Mar 2001 - Filed under: LCRW | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern
Ellen Klages’ story, “Flying Over Water” was on the final ballot for the Nebula Award.
Number 7 has stories from Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Klages, John Trey, James Sallis, and the usual exceptional extras: the list of my recent breakfasts (powered and non-powered), possible futures for ex-presidential candidates, and last but not least, well, maybe it was, but I’ve gone and forgotten it. Available Now.
Contents
Fiction
High Tea With Jules Verne – Jeffrey Ford
Flying Over Water – Ellen Klages
Imenda – John Trey
My Bet’s On Her – Jeremy Cavin
Faces, Hands: Kettle of Stars – James Sallis
Poetries
Permian Basin Blues – Lucy Snyder
Photograph of a Lady, Circa 1890
A Visit to the Surreal Poet’s House – G.O. Clark
Salome – Dora Knez
Various Nonfictions
One music review, Chris Smither
Naoko Takahashi’s Thank You
Hello Bostonians – Jack Cheng
Height Games
Zines
Definitions
Searching for Giant Worms
Prison
Full Disclosure
Contributors Notes (dropping the seriousness a little)
Decent number of zines &c reviewed, including two of my favorites above. Check out the Snow Monkey site (Simple, but beautiful) and just orderWestern Lore – from No.6:
Western Lore, #3, $1, 28pp. Tim White, 3322 Broadway, Sacramento, CA 95817 What a great zine. I’ll report next time on whether the batch of stuff I’m going to order arrives (t-shirt, Field Guide to Food, stickers and Beer!). ‘Ghost towns and related junk.’ The center of this issue is a strange comix tale where the 3 protagonists take a road trip to Cadillac Ranch. Besides giving it away this is the best destination for a single slim dollar I’ve seen for a long time. Hell, send them one of the new gold ones and listen to them curse.
Yes, the beer came and it was good. The back issues were more than worth it and the t-shirt, well, what can I say? At last, something truly bright red.
Now, really, it’s a buck, order it!
Decorated with a what? Illustrated? A playing card. Why? well, it’s a simple enough story. There’s a game we like to play (or inflict upon others, depending on your perspective) whenever we have about a dozen people together called M*f*a. The first part of the game requires everyone taking a card and discovering from said card their role: either a villager, a m*f*a, or the commandante. The cards were meant to be in envelopes or little plastic sleeves so that everyone could have one, they could be traded, drawn on… you get the idea.
Sadly we went the non-biodegradable route — always a mistake — and bought lots of little plastic sleeves. Then (this is where it becomes obvious that Martha Stewart does not live here) we found that you can’t glue plastic. Oh well. So the cards were permanently attached and the only way to swap them around is to swap copies of the zine with friends.
Now we have all these little plastic sleeves so we’re knitting gloves to go with them.
Contributors
Jeremy Cavin works in many media. He is living off the proceeds from his series of What Would Jeremy Cavin Do products somewhere in the South Seas.
Jack Cheng’s drawings once graced the interior of this magazine. Congratulations go out on his recent engagement. Sadly, he no longer sleeps on a deskbed. He has a rather nice musical instrument collection, pictures of which cannot be seen at this time on his rather neat website.
G.O. Clark lives in Davis, CA, a city with an above average population of good writers.
Electric Eel Embroidery Club, The The editor wishes to thank the members of the Club for their generosity.
Jeffrey Ford is the World Fantasy Award winning author of the novels Physiognomy,Memoranda andThe Beyond. His short fiction is worth searching for-we’ll give you warning when a collection comes out. You can find his stories in the pages of many magazines and online at scifi.com & Event Horizon.
Gavin J. Grant always wanted to.
Ellen Klages is a writer on sabbatical from the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. Her story, “Time Gypsy,” (Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction) was nominated for the 1999 Hugo and Nebula Awards. She is well known in her alternate career as the auctioneer of the James Tiptree Award.
Dora Knez’s first chapbook, Five Forbidden Things, has just come out from Small Beer Press. Her poetry has previously appeared here and in Tesseracts.
Kelly Link is troubled by her neighbors in the village. They seem trustworthy until she examines them a little closer. As the evening, for it is inevitably evening, wears on, she becomes more and more convinced that they are not what they seem.
James Sallis‘ story “Faces, Hands” first appeared in Nova 1 (as “Faces & Hands”), then in his collection A Few Last Words. It has been hard to find but with short fiction collections appearing in the U.K. and the U.S.A. it will now be easier. The second part of this story will appear in LCRW no.8. Read his Lew Griffin series of mysteries.
Lucy Snyder’s writing can be found in such places as Midnight Zoo, Cosmic Visions andSnow Monkey. She also runs the Dark Planet web site.
Margaret Thatcher has given up her attempts to communicate with humanity which alone explains her absence from these pages. A determined fantasist of the social-experiment genre, her work was not always successful. Examples can still be found in the dole queues throughout Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales.
Naoko Takahashi (NT1) did in fact win the Olympic Gold Medal in Sydney for the women’s marathon. The Naoko Takahashi (NT2) that we know, however, did not. NT2 paraphrased and invented this from translations of the winner’s (NT1’s) speeches. Thanks go to NT2 and NT1 for their sense of humor. (We hope).
John Trey is an editor and writer living in a suburb in the Midwest. This is the second appearance of his fiction in print thus far. A fast-talking Midwesterner, he can be found at a range of conventions pulling bar duty, selling patio furniture and leading tours of The House on the Rock, in Spring Green, WI. Despite all this, he still manages to run a decent website and write more than decent stories.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.7, October 2000. LCRW appears twice a year as if by magic from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net $5 for a sample issue or $16/4. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, checks (made out to Gavin Grant), books, zines, stock certificates, music, chocolate (preferably dark), stationary supplies, caffeinated and/or alcoholic beverages, requests for guidelines &c should be sent to the address above. As always an SAE-or at least an email address-will speed up our reply. The comments in this portion of numerous comics, books, and magazines have been so overwhelmingly witty in recent months that none were thought necessary here.
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