Podcast: Kessel 2!

Thu 3 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Small Beer Press

Greg Frost is a multi-talented (and sharp-dressed) man. Here’s his IMDB page and his latest novel, Shadowbridge (the second part of the duology is due this summer), is a celebration of storytelling in all its forms.

This week John Kessel posted Greg’s reading of his story “Every Angel is Terrifying”:

Railroad is a murderer and a man haunted by God. What happens in the aftermath of his latest crime, when the pet cat of his last victims offers him a chance ot change his life? (With apologies to Flannery O’Connor).

Every Angel is Terrifying (39:05)Read by Gregory Frost, author of Shadowbridge. First published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1998

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Previously:

“The Baum Plan for Financial Independence”


13 days early

Wed 2 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Small Beer Press

baum2.JPGBaum1.JPGArrived! The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories is a real and actual physical object even outwith that bandwidth one thinks of as one’s reading brain.

We’ll have more about it as the publication date (April 15) approaches including a nice surprise for peeps everywhere.

It’s already in some stores (especially those John is reading in) and should be arriving at your local book store soon.

Indie book shops may have it in their Book Sense section, chains will have it in New Books, Excellent Books, Short Story Collections by Extremely Smart People, or in the Tall section.


Carol: such hard good sentences. (and)

Wed 2 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Small Beer Press

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats loves Black Sabbath (but who doesn’t) and has a book out on them soon. Interviewed on io9, he showed amazing good taste:

When I was a kid I pretty much worshiped Harlan Ellison and I still think he’s a good writer. Through his interviews & his introductions in the Dangerous Visions books I got into James Sallis & Carol Emshwiller, and I’m still a big Emshwiller fan to this day — she writes such hard good sentences.

Maybe he’s the reason The Mount has been selling so much recently?

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Update: Missed this until the kind people at The Stranger mailed us a real, paper copy. (We love paper, so there internets!) This was from Paul Constant’s Constant Reader column where he wrote a lovely piece about why people should go to Norwescon:

The best reason to pay attention to Norwescon is the Philip K. Dick Awards, an annual ceremony dedicated to celebrating a “distinguished original science-fiction paperback published for the first time during the award year in the USA.” Unlike most book awards, the PKD Awards almost always single out an excellent book. Of the last five years’ worth of PKD winners, three of them—Life by Gwyneth Jones, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and The Mount by Carol Emshwiller—are books that, in a world unprejudiced to genre, would wind up on almost any critics’ annual best-of lists.

The Mount, particularly, is a marvel; originally published by a tiny Massachusetts art-house publisher, this novel—about a distant future wherein humans are content to be the transport animals (complete with bits and saddles) for tiny aliens who have enslaved us—is so refreshingly weird and allegorical that it evokes some of the earliest masters of the genre, like Orwell and Verne. If the PKD awards didn’t recognize The Mount, it’s doubtful that anyone else would have, either, which means that they’re possibly the only book awards in the world that actually do exactly what they’re supposed to do. recommended


Generation Loss – Chapter One

Tue 1 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Novel Excerpts | Leave a Comment| Posted by: intern

Generation LossThere’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I’d blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?

Read more


Generation Loss

Tue 1 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Books | 1 Comment| Posted by: Small Beer Press

Shirley Jackson Award Winner

“Although it moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound. A dark and beautiful novel.”
—Washington Post Book World

Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

generation loss: the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data, such as sound recordings, video, or photographs.

Generation Loss was published in hardcover by Small Beer Press followed a year later by Harcourt Harvest’s paperback edition.

Reviews + Quotes

“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.” — Los Angeles Times

“Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B) — Entertainment Weekly

* “Hand (Mortal Love) explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A riveting page-turner.” — Valley Advocate

“The novel crackles with energy: it is alive.” — Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)

“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.” — George Pelecanos

“Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book.”
– Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain

On the web:

Credits

Note: An excerpt from this book appeared in 2005 in Gargoyle 50, edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody.

Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
” sister morphine” from Babel by Patti Smith, copyright © 1978 by Patti Smith. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.