The Fires Beneath the Sea

by Lydia Millet

April 2012 · 280 pp · trade paperback · 9781931520478
— Includes a sneak preview of the second book in the Dissenters series, The Shimmers in the Night (July 2012, 9781931520782)

July 2011 · 256 pp · hardcover · 9781931520713 | ebook · 9781931520416

Now in paperback.

A Junior Library Guild Pick
Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011
Selected for the ABC Best Books for Children Catalog

Cara’s mother has disappeared. Her father isn’t talking about it. Her big brother Max is hiding behind his iPod, and her genius little brother Jackson is busy studying the creatures he collects from the beach. But when a watery specter begins to haunt the family’s Cape Cod home, Cara and her brothers realize that their scientist mother may not be who they thought she was—and that the world has much stranger, much older inhabitants than they had imagined.

With help from Cara’s best friend Hayley, the three embark on a quest that will lead them from the Cape’s hidden, ancient places to a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. They’re soon on the front lines of an ancient battle between good and evil, with the terrifying “pouring man” close on their heels.

Packed with memorable characters and thrilling imagery, Lydia Millet weaves a page-turning adventure even as she brings the seaside world of Cape Cod to magical life. The first in a series of books about the Sykes children, The Fires Beneath the Sea is a rip-cracking middle-grade novel that will make perfect beach reading—for readers of any age!

* “Millet’s prose is lyrically evocative (“the rhythmic scoop and splash of their paddles”). A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Read more


Errantry: Strange Stories

by Elizabeth Hand

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trade paper · 9781618730305 / ebook ·

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand’s new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

Table of Contents (not final)

Winter’s Wife
The Return of the Fire Witch
Hungerford Bridge
The Far Shore
The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Near Zennor
Summerteeth
Errantry

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The Freedom Maze

by Delia Sherman

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November 15, 2011 · 9781931520300 / 9781931520409 · $16.95 · 272 pp · trade cloth/ebook

Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011
Andre Norton Award finalist
Tiptree Award Honor List
Prometheus Award finalist

Set against the burgeoning Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and then just before the outbreak of the Civil War, The Freedom Maze explores both political and personal liberation, and how the two intertwine.
In 1960, thirteen-year-old Sophie isn’t happy about spending summer at her grandmother’s old house in the Bayou. But the house has a maze Sophie can’t resist exploring once she finds it has a secretive and playful inhabitant.
When Sophie, bored and lonely, makes an impulsive wish inspired by her reading, hoping for a fantasy adventure of her own, she slips one hundred years into the past, to the year 1860. On her arrival she makes her way, bedraggled and tanned, to what will one day be her grandmother’s house, where she is at once mistaken for a slave.

“Ensnares the reader with mysteries and conundrums of many varieties: social, historical, and magical. Adroit, sympathetic, both clever and smart, The Freedom Maze will entrap young readers and deliver them, at the story’s end, that little bit older and wiser.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Out of Oz

“The Freedom Maze is, frankly, a stunning book on every level.”
—Tor.com

“Delia Sherman riffs on Edward Eager’s classic The Time Garden in her deeply affecting time travel and coming-of-age novel The Freedom Maze. . . . Realistic, compelling, and not the slightest bit condescending, The Freedom Maze is all about changing your world. Well done, Ms. Sherman.”
—Colleen Mondor, Bookslut

“There are books you just know will stay with you forever. This is one of them. Rating: 10: Perfect.”
— Book Smugglers

“It’s 1960, but on the decayed Fairchild sugar plantation in rural Louisiana, vestiges of a grimmer past remain—the old cottage, overgrown garden maze, relations between white and black races.
“Stuck for the summer in the family ancestral home under the thumb of her cranky, imperious grandmother, Sophie, 13, makes a reckless wish that lands her in 1860, enslaved—by her own ancestors. Sophie’s fair skin and marked resemblance to the Fairchilds earn her “easy” employment in the big house and the resentment of her peers, whose loyalty she’ll need to survive. Plantation life for whites and blacks unfolds in compelling, often excruciating detail. A departure from Sherman’s light fantasy Changeling (2006), this is a powerfully unsettling, intertextual take on historical time-travel fantasy, especially Edward Eager’s Time Garden (1958), in which white children help a grateful enslaved family to freedom. Sophie’s problems aren’t that easily resolved: While acknowledging their shared kinship, her white ancestors refuse to see her as equally human. The framing of Sophie’s adventures within 1960 social realities prompts readers to consider what has changed since 1860, what has not—for Sophie and for readers half a century later—and at what cost.
“Multilayered, compassionate and thought-provoking, a timely read on the sesquicentennial of America’s Civil War.”
—Kirkus Reviews (*starred review*)

“Halfway through the narrative, I thought a tale like this could be improved if we can see how the transformation has changed the character—more than a glimpse given the amount of time spent developing the opening. This was exactly what Sherman did…. This is a novel worth checking out: a fine exemplar of a well-written children’s book, or of the fantastic for fans of history and especially of the Civil War, reminiscent in ways of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.”
—Trent Walters, SF Site

“While heartache thrums throughout the book–children have been sold away from their parents, bodies are worked like machines and beaten liberally, living conditions are despicable–there is the clear bell of hope, that sound in children’s literature that is too tough to destroy.”
—The Pirate Tree

“Sherman has created a finely honed work of art, a novel that deals eloquently with complex and intersecting issues of race, womanhood, class and age. In transporting the reader so fully into another time, The Freedom Maze becomes timeless. This is true magic.”
—Alaya Dawn Johnson, author of Moonshine

“A seamless blending of wondrous American myth with harsh American reality, as befits young Sophie’s coming-of-age. I think younger readers and adults alike will be completely riveted by her magical journey into her own family’s double-edged past.”
—N. K. Jemisin, author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“This is an absolutely fascinating story. The Freedom Maze draws you into a world of danger and mystery, of daring and change, at the dawning of the Civil War. Sophie’s adventures in the history of her family’s Louisiana plantation feel real, and lead her to a real understanding of racial truths she would never have caught a glimpse of without magic. Beautifully imagined and told with satisfyingly matter-of-fact detail: pot liquor and spoon bread, whips and Spanish Moss, corset covers and vévés and bitter, healing herbs.  The Freedom Maze is deep, meaningful fun.”
—Nisi Shawl, author of Filter House

“Sherman’s antebellum story exposes a wide sweep through a narrow aperture, where the arbitrary nature of race and ownership, kindred and love, are illuminated in the harsh seeking glare of an adolescent’s coming of age.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“A bold and sensitively-written novel about a supposed-white child, Sophie Fairchild returned magically to a time of her ancestors who were slavemaster and slaves in the old South. This book puts the lie to those today making loose political statements about happy, comfortable slave families of that brutal era while telling a strong story that will not let the young reader stop turning pages to see how things will work out for Sophie and her fellow slaves, especially the cook Africa, and house slaves Antigua and Canada. I was mesmerized.”
—Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic

“A riveting, fearless, and masterful novel. I loved Sophie completely.”
—Nancy Werlin, author of Extraordinary

“A subtle and haunting book that examines what it means to be who we are.”
—Holly Black, co-author of The Spiderwick Chronicles

“The Freedom Maze is destined to become a classic of time-travel fantasy alongside Edward Eager’s Time Garden and Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Sherwood Ring. Yes, it is thatgood. But it’s also something more: a novel that slides skillfully past all the usual stereotypes about plantation life in the ante-bellum South, encouraging young readers to look at race, gender, and American history in a deeper, more nuanced way. It is, quite simply, one of the very best books I’ve read in years. Now I want everyone to read it.”
—Terri Windling

“Vividly realized and saturated with feeling.”
—Elizabeth Knox, author of DreamHunter

“An entertaining, cracking adventure yarn, The Freedom Maze elegantly unravels many myths of the antebellum South, highlighting the resistance of the enslaved, and showing how even the kind hearted are corrupted by their exploitation of their fellow human beings.”
—Justine Larbalestier, author of Liar

“A story that says what no story has quite said before, and says it perfectly. Stuck on her family’s Louisiana plantation in 1960, adolescent Sophie Fairchild wishes for adventure—and travels magically from the beginning of Civil Rights to the beginning of the Civil War. Enslaved by her own ancestors, Sophie finds kinship among the other people secretly traveling tangled paths toward freedom and home. No matter what age you are, this is a book for the permanent shelf.”
—Sarah Smith, author of the Agatha-winning The Other Side of Dark

“A dramatic yet sensitively-written coming-of-age story that succeeds both as classic fantasy and issue-oriented children’s literature. When Sophie Martineau travels back in time from 1960 to 1860, she discovers the painful complexity of her own heritage as a descendant of both Louisiana planters and the slave women who were forced to bear their children. Sherman offers a non-sugarcoated portrayal of life for black women under slavery, and she never falls into the trap of reducing them to simple stereotypes. Instead, Sophie’s adventure becomes a window into the daily lives of the women who manage the Martineau family’s plantation, work their fields, cook their food, and even raise their children–all while their own reality as thinking, feeling human beings remains strangely invisible to their white owners. Young readers will stay up late to find out if there’s a happy ending for Sophie and Antigua. And by the time they turn the last page, they will have gained a deeper appreciation of the real human cost of slavery–and of the intelligence and resourcefulness with which generations of women struggled to protect their families under a system that denied their most basic rights as human beings.”
—Chris Moriarty

“Vivid and compelling, The Freedom Maze will transport you completely to another time.”
—Sarah Beth Durst

Small Beer Press: In your nearly twenty years of working on this book, what was the most surprising thing you found?

Delia Sherman: “The most surprising thing, really, was finding an advertisement for a runaway slave in the library of Loyola University in New Orleans that read more or less as follows: “Wanted, [name], a woman of [however many] years. Blond and blue-eyed, could pass as white.” That was the most dramatic example, but once I’d seen it, I began to notice others, for “fair-skinned” or “red-haired” slaves escaping with darker companions as slave and master or mistress. It really made me think about how race was constructed in the ante-bellum South.”

Delia Sherman was born in Japan and raised in New York City, but spent vacations between her mother’s relatives in Texas and Louisiana and her father’s relatives in South Carolina. With a PhD in Renaissance Studies, she proceeded to teach until she realized she’d rather edit and write instead. But retaining her love of history, she has set novels and short stories for children and adults in many times and places. Her work has appeared most recently in the YA anthologies The Beastly Bride, Steampunk!, and Teeth.  Her “New York Between” novels for younger readers are Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. Delia still enjoys teaching writing workshops, most recently at the Hollins University Masters Degree Program in Children’s Literature. After many years in Boston, she once again lives in New York City, but travels at the drop of a hat.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze: a novel


Paradise Tales

by Geoff Ryman

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Trade paper/ebook · 9781931520645/9781931520447 · 320 pp · July 12, 2011

Lambda Award Finalist

“Paradise Tales includes one of the most powerful stories I’ve read in the last 10 years.”
—New York Times

Geoff Ryman writes about the other and leaves us dissected in the process. His stories are set in recognizable places—London, Cambodia, tomorrow—and feature men and women caught in recognizable situations (or technologies) and not sure which way to turn. They, we, should obviously choose what’s right. But what if that’s difficult? What will we do? What we should, or . . . ?

“In the best of Ryman’s fiction, the world unfolds in ways that are at once astonishing and thoroughly thought out, both radically disorienting and emotionally powerful.”
—Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“I recommend this collection to both Ryman’s existing fans and those new to his work. It is a beautiful and challenging treasure of a book.”
—Cascadia Subduction Zone

* “Often contemplative and subtly ironic, the 16 stories in this outstanding collection work imaginative riffs on a variety of fantasy and SF themes. “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter,” a Cambodian ghost story, and “The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai,” a samurai-style narrative, have the delicacy of Asian folktales or lyrical fantasies. By contrast, “V.A.O.,” about a future society destabilized by prohibitively expensive health care, and “The Film-makers of Mars,” which suggests that Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter stories were drawn from life, are set in futures that credibly extrapolate current scientific and cultural trends. Ryman (The King’s Last Song) frequently explores human emotional needs in heartless environments, as in “Warmth,” which poignantly portrays a young boy’s bond with his robot surrogate mother. Readers of all stripes will appreciate these thoughtful tales. ”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Paradise Tales follows the success of Ryman’s most recent novel, The King’s Last Song, and builds on that with three Cambodian stories included here, “The Last Ten Years of the Hero Kai,” “Blocked,” and the exceedingly-popular “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter.” Paradise Tales includes stories selected from the many periods of Ryman’s career including “Birth Days,” “Omnisexual,” the very popular “The Film-makers of Mars,” and a new story, “K is for Kosovo (or, Massimo’s Career).”

Small Beer Press is also reprinting two of Ryman’s novels, The Child Garden and Was (November 2011), and another collection, Unconquered Countries (June 2012), with new introductions or afterwords to continue to build the readership of one of the most fascinating writers exploring the edges of being, gender, science, and fiction.

Contents

The Film-makers of Mars
The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai
Birth Days
V.A.O
The Future of Science Fiction
Omnisexual
Home
Warmth
Everywhere
No Bad Thing
Talk Is Cheap
Days of Wonder
You
K is for Kosovo (or, Massimo’s Career)
Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter
Blocked

Praise for Geoff Ryman’s most recent novel:

“[Ryman] has not so much created as revealed a world in which the promise of redemption takes seed even in horror.”
—The Boston Globe

“Inordinately readable . . . extraordinary in its detail, color and brutality.”
—The Independent (UK)

Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The King’s Last Song, Air (a Clarke and Tiptree Award winner), 253, Lust, and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner). Canadian by birth, he has lived in Brasil, resides in the UK and is a frequent visitor to Cambodia.
Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman


The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

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June 7, 2011 · trade paper/ebook · 9781931520287 · New Introduction by Wendy Pearson.

Winner of the John W. Cambell and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

Following The King’s Last Song, The Child Garden is the second Geoff Ryman title in our list—and it’s by far the furthest out there!

Are you ready for polar bear families in London—who have their own black sheep: after all, what can a polar bear mining family do with a daughter who wants to write operas? And what is London to do with a woman who, resistant to the viruses, might be able to provided the cure for the cure for cancer? (No, that’s not a typo!)

In a future, tropical London, humans photosynthesize, organics have replaced electronics, viruses educate people, and very few live past forty. Milena is resistant to the viruses and unable to be Read. She has Bad Grammar. She’s alone until she meets Rolfa, a huge, hirsute Genetically Engineered Polar Woman, and Milena realizes she might, just might, be able to find a place for herself after all.

If you’ve been missing reading about polar bears since finishing Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, this is the novel for you.The Child Garden is one of the original biopunk novels: it’s over the top baroque . . . it’s a masterpiece.

Praise for The Child Garden:

“An exuberant celebration of excess set in a resource-poor but defiantly energetic 21st century.”—The New York Times

“I fell in love with this book when Jeff VanderMeer gave it to me for my birthday when we were both at Clarion in 1992. I’ve thought about it more or less constantly ever since.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“Undoubtedly a classic and one of the best novels ever written within the genre.”
—SF Site

“A richly absorbing tale—with a marvelous premise expertly carried out.”—Kirkus Reviews

“One of the most imaginative accounts of futuristic bioengineering since Greg Bear’s Blood Music.”—Locus

“A heady novel bursting with speculation.”—Library Journal

“Excellent . . . Dark and witty and full of love, closely observed, and sprinkled with astonishing ideas. Science fiction of a very high order.”—Greg Bear
The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

Praise for Geoff Ryman’s books:

“Ryman—best known as a fantasy writer but one who proved his power as an author of nuanced, rich historical fiction in the unsung novel Was—has not so much created as revealed a world in which the promise of redemption takes seed even in horror.”
—Boston Globe

“The novel conveys not merely a story, but the light and darkness, despair and hope, tradition and Westernization that is Cambodia itself…. While peaceful William, war-consumed Map, and Cambodia-loving Luc could easily be flat, typecast characters, Ryman steers clear of such simplifications. Their interwoven histories are at times noble and at times horrifying, laced with profound emotions and punctuated with atrocities…. The King’s Last Song leaves one questioning preconceptions of good and evil, and conflicted between hope for and discouragement with the human race.”
—Rain Taxi

“An unforgettably vivid portrait of Cambodian culture past and present.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Ryman’s knack for depicting characters; his ability to tell multiple, interrelated stories; and his knowledge of Cambodian history create a rich narrative that looks at Cambodia’s “killing fields” both recent and ancient and Buddhist belief with its desire for transcendence. Recommended for all literary fiction collections.”
—Library Journal

“Inordinately readable . . . extraordinary in its detail, color and brutality.”
—The Independent

“Sweeping and beautiful. . . . The complex story tears the veil from a hidden world.”
—The Sunday Times

About the Author

Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The King’s Last Song, Air (a Clarke and Tiptree Award winner), and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner), and the collection Paradise Tales. Canadian by birth, he has lived in Cambodia and Brazil and now teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester in England.

Geoff Ryman was in Boston in July 2011 as the Guest of Honor for Readercon.


The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories

by Joan Aiken

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April 19, 2011 · hardcover/ebook · 224 pp · 9781931520744 · $24

“It’s always the children’s book writers that you have to watch out for.”
—Jessa Crispin, Kirkus Reviews

“Part of a storytelling tradition that predates MFA programs and quiet epiphanies, and she concerned herself with a snappier brand of narrative entertainment.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Joan Aiken’s collection of short stories The Monkey’s Wedding may sport a creepy cover illustration by artist and author Shelley Jackson, but the stories inside, which make the commonplace sinister, bear more of a resemblance to the work of another literary Jackson: the queen of the Gothic short story and author of The Lottery, Shirley Jackson. Like Shirley Jackson’s elegantly suspenseful tales, Aiken’s stories use the commonplace to show the darker truths beneath the familiar, but with a twist of humor and magic that makes the collection thought-provoking and fun, and one that begs to be shared and revisited often.”
—Bookslut

“Brisk, matter-of-fact accounts of annoying mermaids, hospitable devils, unionizing mice and robot prototypes that make flipping light switches an act of menace. And the women range from self-willed wives to beautiful stunt motorcyclists to knitting spinsters. Sometimes they conform to the stereotypes of the times they were created in, but Aiken is full of surprises: Her plots and characters continually wander off the beaten track, leaving far behind what fantasist Lord Dunsany called ‘the fields we know.’”
—The Seattle Times

Joan Aiken’s stories captivated readers for fifty years. They’re funny, smart, gentle, and occasionally very, very scary. The stories in The Monkey’s Wedding are collected here for the very first time and include seven never before published, as well as two published under the pseudonym Nicholas Dee. Here you’ll find the story of a village for sale . . . or is the village itself the story? There’s an English vicar who declares on his deathbed that he might have lived an entirely different life. After his death, a large, black, argumentative cat makes an appearance. . . .

This hugely imaginative collection of incongruous, light, and unexpected stories features Shelley Jackson’s spooky and eyecatching cover painting inspired by the story “A Mermaid Too Many” and includes introductions by Joan Aiken as well by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.

Read an excerpt on Scribd.

“Hair” was reprinted in the July/August issue of F&SF.
“Spur of the Moment” was reprinted in the eleventh issue of the journal Eleven Eleven.

Reviews

* “This imaginative posthumous collection includes among others six never before published short stories and two originally published under a pseudonym…. Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising, this collection—like the mermaid in a bottle—is a literary treasure that should be cherished by fantastical fiction fans of all ages.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Each story has a surprise or twist. Many are ironic, go-figure pieces. They are just like real life, only more so. VERDICT: This book will appeal to readers of short stories and literary fiction. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“Aiken writes with surpassing spirit and alertness, never ceasing to find interest or amazement in the traps people set for themselves. Some of the stories are slight, but Aiken’s elegant restraint and dry wit never fail to leave their mark.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A writer of great skill and charm.”
—Booklist

“Almost all the stories assembled in The Monkey’s Wedding—except for the devastating title story itself, from 1996, and “The Fluttering Thing” from 2002, which is set on a journey towards Final Solution; it is even more terrifying than The Scream, also 2002—flow with a porcelain lucidity and gaiety that manifests the high energy of Aiken’s early prime.”
—John Clute, Strange Horizons

“William Powell and Myrna Loy needed only ninety minutes to sparkle in The Thin Man, and the good-natured, prevaricating, meet-cute stars of “Spur of the Moment” require just twelve pages to showcase their equally impressive bantering skills.”
—James Crossley, Weird Fiction Review

“From a bottled mermaid brought home from a sailor’s adventures at sea to a vicar reincarnated as a malevolent cat, fantasy is combined with magic, myth and adventure to form weird, wonderful and immersive tales.”
—For Book’s Sake

“In the author’s introduction, Aiken claims that many of her stories are inspired by dreams. I only wish my dreams were half as entertaining as Aiken’s tales.”
—New Pages

“Perhaps one reason Aiken’s stories have weathered the decades so well is that they are concerned with the lives of ordinary people–they just happen to be ordinary people who live in a world where a mermaid or other such mythical or supernatural being might suddenly appear in order to play mischief with one’s well-maintained schedule.”
—Green Man Review

“Aiken’s vivid descriptions move nimbly through pastoral meadows and circus chaos, gothic grotesques and quirky romances. In the end, all of her narratives tease the reader by rejecting our desire for neatness or closure. No didacticism here. As Aiken’s narrator sweetly laments, ‘No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.’”
—California Literary Review

Things You Might Like

  • Aiken’s brilliant characterization
  • The fantastic mix of fantasy and realism
  • Incredibly visual writing
  • The ease with which the author skips from twee to slightly disturbing
    —Bullet Reviews

“A fine introduction to her work – and may very well ensnare you forever.”
—Aishwarya Subramian, Practically Marzipan /  The Sunday Guardian

Table of Contents

Introduction by Joan Aiken
Introduction by Lizza Aiken
Girl in a Whirl
Hair
Harp Music
Honeymaroon
Octopi in the Sky
Reading in Bed
Red-Hot Favourite
Second Thoughts
Spur of the Moment
The Fluttering Thing
The Magnesia Tree
The Monkey’s Wedding
The Paper Queen
The Sale of Midsummer
Water of Youth
Wee Robin
A Mermaid Too Many
Model Wife
The Helper

Praise for Joan Aiken:

“Aiken writes with the genius of a born storyteller, with mother wit expanded and embellished by civilized learning, and with the brilliance of an avenging angel.”
—The New Yorker

“The wit is irrepressible, the invention wild. . . . Such delicious lightness, paradoxically, is the fiction’s raison d’être.”
—Ed Park, Los Angeles Times

“An extremely active and creative mind, in all ways dedicated to the enjoyment of the reader.”
—The Short Review

“Admirable stories for any age because they are dug from a delightful mind. Many will drop into their readers lives like those enriching stones which break the surfaces of still pools and leave rings long after their splash.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“A consummate story-teller.”
— The Times

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”
—Philip Pullman

“The best kind of writer, strange and spooky and surprising, never sentimental or whimsical.”
—Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners)

“Distinguished and sometimes beautiful writing.”
—Naomi Mitchison, New Statesman

About the Author

Best known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1924-2004) wrote over a hundred books (including The Serial Garden) and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband’s death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women’s Own, and many others. Visit her online at: www.joanaiken.com.


Solitaire: a novel

by Kelley Eskridge

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9781931520102 · paperback/ebook · January 2011

A New York Times Notable Book, Borders Original Voices selection, and Nebula, Endeavour, and Spectrum Award finalist.

“A stylistic and psychological tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Suspenseful and inspiring.”—School Library Journal

“Teen readers who are fond of the genre will embrace Solitaire with ease while fans of YA dystopian titles will find a character who possesses all the cool and quiet power of the best girl hero in a story that is light years beyond the standard fare. Jackal is no wimp or whiner, nor is she a born “chosen one.” In every way that matters she is the product of the corporate culture (both personally and professionally) that embraced her from birth; she is certainly a twenty-first century construct we can all recognize. The struggles she goes through are always tempered with very personal loss, both as a result of the accident that finds her imprisoned and the distance from the love of her life who remains back on Ko. What rocks so much about Solitaire is that Eskridge has put as much time and attention into her character building as the plot and that means that while we marvel at the world she created, we also respond on a fundamental level with Jackal and the girl she loves who never stops loving her back. This book is a treasure; a true jewel for readers longing for big ideas and intimate story.”
—Colleen Mondor, Bookslut

Kelley’s Big Idea: “I wrote Solitaire to explore the complicated landscape of alone. I found a character named Jackal who defines herself foremost in terms of her community and her connection to others; then I took all that away, and trapped her in the most alone place any of us can go – inside our own heads. Jackal ends up in virtual solitary confinement facing an utterly realistic experience of being locked in a cell for eight years. What happens to her there – her journey through alone – changes everything.”

Solitaire received a lovely thoughtful review on Eve’s Alexandria in response to “a very long discussion thread over at Torque Control — sparked by an interview with Tricia Sullivan — about why so little of the science fiction published in the UK these days is written by women.”

And John Mesjak says: “When I first read the manuscript of this reissue edition, I was just blown away. There are three distinct sections to the book, and each one has its own flavor and energy – all adding up to a dark but wonderfully described future. It was absolutely one of my favorite novels from the Fall 2010 Consortium catalog.”

“In a certain way, Solitaire is ahead of its time. It’s a title that old, conventional marketing will tell you won’t sell: it features a multicultural, non-white, female protagonist who happens to be a lesbian; the author is telling us the details rather than showing us; it’s a science fiction concept within a science fiction concept. Yet it is for these reasons that the book succeeds.”
—Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker

Chapter One

So here she was, framed in the open double doors like a photograph: Jackal Segura on the worst day of her life, preparing to join the party. The room splayed wide before her, swollen with voices, music, human heat, and she thought perhaps this was a bad idea after all. But she was conscious of the picture she made, backlit in gold by the autumn afternoon sun, standing square, taking up space. A good entrance, casually dramatic. People were already noticing, smiling; there’s our Jackal being herself. There’s our Hope. It shamed her, now that she knew it was a lie.

Read the first chapter here. Or read an excerpt on Scribd.

We are proud and happy to bring Kelley Eskridge‘s debut novel, Solitaire back in print:

Jackal Segura is a Hope: born to responsibility and privilege as a symbol of a fledgling world government. Soon she’ll become part of the global administration, sponsored by the huge corporation that houses, feeds, employs, and protects her and everyone she loves. Then, just as she discovers that everything she knows is a lie, she becomes a pariah, a murderer: a person with no community and no future. Grief-stricken and alone, she is put into an experimental program designed to inflict the experience of years of solitary confinement in a few short months: virtual confinement in a sealed cell within her own mind. Afterward, branded and despised, she returns to a world she no longer knows. Struggling to make her way, she has a chance to rediscover her life, her love, and her soul—in a strange place of shattered hopes and new beginnings called Solitaire.

Praise for Solitaire:

“An ageless story.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

“A knock-out . . . wonderful!”
—Karen Joy Fowler ( The Jane Austen Book Club)

“Solitaire is a novel of our time: a story of dashed expectations and corporate manipulations. Eskridge explores what it means to really see ourselves, and what we are ultimately capable of. Jackal, a slight adolescent, matures into an adult capable of living well, no matter what her circumstances. She is a worthy role model for any reader.”
—BookPage

“Vivid and provocative.”
—The Baltimore Sun

“As with Eskridge’s short fiction, the vividness of the characters is what makes this book so memorable.”
—Locus

“Psychological insights that would warm the heart of Alice Hoffman.”
—The Seattle Times

Kelley Eskridge is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. Her stories have received the Astraea Award and been adapted for television. A movie based on Solitaire is in development. She lives in Seattle with her partner, novelist Nicola Griffith.

Cover photos: iStockphoto.com.
Cover design: Frances Lassor.
Author photo: Jennifer Durham


Stories of Your Life and Others

by Ted Chiang

4 Comments

Trade paperback/ebook · October 2010 · 9781931520720

A new edition of Ted Chiang’s masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, which includes his first eight published stories plus the author’s story notes and a cover the author commissioned himself. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore’s cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers readers the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar.

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story, a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college’s initiative to “turn off” the human ability to recognize beauty in “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.

This edition:
1st printing, October 2010
2nd printing, February 2011

Praise for Stories of Your Life and Others:

“Shining, haunting, mind-blowing tales . . . this collection is a pure marvel. Chiang is so exhilarating so original so stylish he just leaves you speechless. I always suggest a person read at least 52 books a year for proper mental functioning but if you only have time for one, be at peace: you found it.”
—Junot Díaz (author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

“Meticulously pieced together, utterly thought through, Chiang’s stories emerge slowly . . . but with the perfection of slow-growing crystal.”
—Lev Grossman, Best of the Decade: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Techland.com

“In Chiang’s hands, SF really is the ‘literature of ideas’ it is often held to be, and the genre’s traditional “sense of wonder” is paramount. But though one reads Stories of Your Life with a kind of thematic nostalgia for classic philosophical SF such as that of Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the collection never feels dated. Partly this is because the “wonder” of these stories is a modern, melancholy transcendence, not the naive ‘50s dreams of the genre’s golden age. More important, the collection is united by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang’s calm passion.”
—China Mieville, The Guardian

“Ted is a national treasure . . . each of those stories is a goddamned jewel.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“Newly reissued by Small Beer Press, the stories range widely in time, subject and style but are united by a patient but ruthless fascination with the limits of knowledge.”
—Ed Park, Los Angeles Times

“Chiang is the real deal. His debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others is one of the finest collections of short fiction I have read in the last decade. These tales possess the imaginative frisson that is a trademark of the best conceptual fiction, but, also bespeak a confident prose style and a willingness to take chances in tone and narrative structure.”
—Ted Gioia, Conceptual Fiction

“This collection of short stories deserves constant re-introduction. Ted Chiang narrows the broad line between fiction and science fiction by taking a scalpel to “normal,” transforming it in ways that will blow your mind and challenge your beliefs. It’s a breathless ride.”
—Capitola Book Cafe

Dreams & Speculations · Fantasy Literature.

“Chiang’s work confirms that blending science and fine art at this length can produce touching works, tales as intimate as our own blood cells, with the structural strength of just-discovered industrial alloys.”
—The Seattle Times

“Summarizing these stories does not do justice to Chiang’s talent. Seemingly ordinary ideas are pursued ruthlessly, their tendons flayed, their bones exposed. Chiang derides lazy thinking, weasels it out of its hiding place, and leaves it cowering.”
—The Washington Post

“Essential. You won’t know SF if you don’t read Ted Chiang.”
—Greg Bear

“Chiang writes seldom, but his almost unfathomably wonderful stories tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch—and explode in your awareness with shocking, devastating force.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“The first must-read SF book of the year.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“He puts the science back in science fiction—brilliantly.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

These stories were originally published as follows:
“Tower of Babylon,” Omni, 1990
“Understand,” Asimov’s, 1991
“Division by Zero,” Full Spectrum 3, 1991
“Story of Your Life,” Starlight 2, 1998
“Seventy-Two Letters,” Vanishing Acts, 2000
“The Evolution of Human Science,” Nature, 2000
“Hell is the Absence of God,” Starlight 3, 2001
“Liking What You See: A Documentary,” Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002

Cover art © Shelley Eshkar.

Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and holds a degree in computer science from Brown University. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. His fiction has won three Hugos, four Nebulas, three Locus awards, and a Sturgeon award. He lives near Seattle, Washington.


What I Didn’t See and Other Stories

by Karen Joy Fowler

6 Comments

9781931520683 · September 21, 2010 · trade cloth/ebook

World Fantasy Award winner.

“One of the most accomplished and most adroit fiction writers in America.”
—Brooks Landon, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Beautifully written & subtly discomforting stories.”
—Nancy Pearl in “Spooky-book suggestions from Seattle literati” in the Seattle Times

~ A short interview at The Short Review.
~ Read Karen’s new story: “Younger Women” on Subterranean Online.
~ Follow Karen’s occasional Small Beer blog: What I See
~ Read a short interview in the LA Times.
~ Listen to an interview with Rick Kleffel. [mp3 link]
~ Preview on Scribd.

In her moving and elegant new collection, New York Times bestseller Karen Joy Fowler writes about John Wilkes Booth’s younger brother, a one-winged man, a California cult, and a pair of twins, and she digs into our past, present, and future in the quiet, witty, and incisive way only she can.

The sinister and the magical are always lurking just below the surface: for a mother who invents a fairy-tale world for her son in “Halfway People”; for Edwin Booth in “Booth’s Ghost,” haunted by his fame as “America’s Hamlet” and his brother’s terrible actions; for Norah, a rebellious teenager facing torture in the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award winner “The Pelican Bar” as she confronts Mama Strong, the sadistic boss of a rehabilitation facility; for the narrator recounting her descent in “What I Didn’t See.”

With clear and insightful prose, Fowler’s stories measure the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness. This collection, which includes two Nebula Award winners and some stories which have been significantly rewritten since first publication, is sure to delight readers, even as it pulls the rug out from underneath them.

Awards

Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist
Locus Award shortlist
Story Prize Notable Books
Frank O’Connor Award longlist

Table of Contents

The Pelican Bar
Booth’s Ghost
The Last Worders
The Dark
Always
Familiar Birds
Private Grave 9
The Marianas Islands
Halfway People
Standing Room Only
What I Didn’t See
King Rat

Reviews

Locus Recommended Reading

“Gripping from the start…. We are can never be sure where we are or what each page might bring. This is eclectic approach to a collection is exciting, and steers us away from the safer approach that many other collections take. ”
—The Short Review

“[Fowler] refuses to engage fantastic elements in an expected way, often confining them to the edges of a story, leaving the choice of how real a character’s perception is to the reader. Her work reflects how strange and unpredictable life is, how difficult–perhaps impossible–to fully understand.”
—Gwenda Bond, Subterranean Online

“Because of this range and because of the plain high literary quality of so many of its stories, What I Didn’t See would provide an excellent introduction to Fowler’s work if you’ve somehow managed to remain unacquainted with it.”
—Strange Horizons

“An exceptionally versatile author . . . Fowler has “the best possible combination of imagination and pragmatism,” as she applies unique narratives into carefully crafted structures.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“In all these stories, Fowler (“Sarah Canary,” “The Jane Austen Book Club”) delights in luring her readers from the walks of ordinary life into darker, more fantastical realms. There, as one of her characters remarks, “Your eyes no longer impose any limit on the things you can see.” . . . Fowler’s closing story, “King Rat,” is a masterpiece. Reading more like a personal essay than fiction, it pays eloquent tribute to “the two men I credit with making me a writer.” Here’s a volume that serves as a fine introduction to Fowler, if you haven’t come across her before—and one that will deeply satisfy fans who’ve been with her from the beginning.”
—Seattle Times

“That rare writer who can match the power of her novels with the power of her short stories. She works in the world of myth with great ease. We feel, reading her stories, that we are in our world, but some portion of it that connects vitally with everything else. What happens here is gripping, important, compelling, and often terrifying. Her new collection of stories, ‘What I Didn’t See’ offers readers perfect renderings of a New American Mythos”
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

“Karen Joy Fowler takes the short story in directions readers could never anticipate, and her latest collection from the wonderful Small Beer Press, What I Didn’t See: Stories, offers up numerous delights for the smart and creative reader. From the wham-bang start of “The Pelican Bar” to the Hemingway-esque title story, Fowler takes you from the past to the future in stories that feature speculative fiction elements, or are starkly true to life. Cast your preconceived notions aside and settle in to explore the human mysteries Fowler mines with abandon. This is literature at its most intriguing, and a reminder of how bold and daring a gifted writer can be.”
—Colleen Mondor, Bookslut

“The practicality of her views is what makes them upsetting, a reminder how tragedies great and small affect people everyday even if we aren’t privy to them. And that is where Fowler succeeds — even if her brutal boarding houses or Congolese misadventures aren’t real to us, post-traumatic stress disorder is. All of her narrators are survivors, and they tell their stories in blunt, practical ways we imagine they need to protect themselves.”
—For Books’ Sakes

“Fowler cements her place in fiction history–genre or otherwise–not because of her fancy tricks but through sheer technique and her excellence in characterization.”
—Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker

“Witty and humane.”
—Cascadia Subduction Zone

“The bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club goes genre-busting in this engrossing and thought-provoking set of short stories that mix history, sci-fi, and fantasy elements with a strong literary voice. Whether examining the machinations of a Northern California cult, in “Always,” or a vague but obviously horrific violent act in the eerie title story, the PEN/Faulkner finalist displays a gift for thrusting familiar characters into bizarre, off-kilter scenarios. Fowler never strays from the anchor of human emotion that makes her characters so believable, even when chronicling the history of epidemics, ancient archeological digs, single family submersibles, or fallen angels. She even displays a keen understanding of the historical world around Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in two wonderfully realized historical pieces. Her writing is sharp, playful, and filled with insights into the human condition. The genre shifts might surprise fans of her mainstream hit, but within these pages they’ll find familiar dramas and crises that entertain, illuminate, and question the reality that surrounds us.”
—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Karen Joy Fowler:

“No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness.”
—Michael Chabon

“Fowler’s witty writing is a joy to read.”
—USA Today

“Stories that engage and enchant.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

“She has a voice like no other, lyrical, shrewd and addictive, with a quiet deadpan humor that underlies almost every sentence.”
—Beth Gutcheon, Newsday

“What strikes one first is the voice: robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected and never boring.”
—Margot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review

“Arresting . . . each piece puts us on notice in its own way that an intriguing intelligence is at work.”
—The Boston Globe

“Unforgettable . . . incandescent . . . bewitching.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including Wit’s End and The Jane Austen Book Club, which spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was adapted as a major motion picture from Sony Pictures. Her novel Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her short-story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award. She has co-edited three volumes of The James Tiptree Award Anthology. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.

Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories — Excerpt

Publication History

These stories were originally published as follows:

The Pelican Bar, Eclipse 3, 2009
Booth’s Ghost appears here for the first time.
The Last Worders, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 20, 2007
The Dark, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1991
Always, Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2007
Familiar Birds, Journal of Mythic Arts, Spring 2006
Private Grave 9, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, 2003
The Marianas Islands, Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, 1996
Halfway People, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, 2010
Standing Room Only, Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1997
What I Didn’t See, SciFiction, 2002
King Rat, Trampoline, 2003

Author photo by Beth Gwinn.
Cover collage by Erica Harris.

Previous Readings:

Oct. 7, 7 PM, Copperfields, Santa Rosa, CA
Oct. 11, 7 PM, Moe’s Books, Berkeley, CA — check out their new site with the lovely ad for Karen’s reading on the front page!
Oct. 15, NCIBA, Oakland, CA (Friday evening Author Reception)
Oct. 16, SF in SF (with Claude Lalumière), San Francisco, CA
Oct. 19, Capitola Book Cafe, Capitola, CA
Oct. 21, read. booksellers, Danville, CA
Nov. 5, 7 PM, Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena, CA


Redemption in Indigo

by Karen Lord

18 Comments

July 6, 2010 · 9781931520669 · Trade paper/ebook/audiobook · 200 pp

Karen Lord’s debut novel is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit. Paama’s husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents’ home in the village of Makendha—now he’s disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones—the djombi— who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.

Bursting with humor and rich in fantastic detail, Redemption in Indigo is a clever, contemporary fairy tale that introduces readers to a dynamic new voice in Caribbean literature. Lord’s world of spider tricksters and indigo immortals is inspired in part by a Senegalese folk tale—but Paama’s adventures are fresh, surprising, and utterly original.

Awards

Mythopoeic Award winner.
Crawford Award winner.
Frank Collymore Award winner.
World Fantasy Award finalist.
Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature.

Interviews

World SF Blog interview by Chesya Burke · Locus Magazine · Notes from Coode Street podcast

Reviews

Locus: Recommended Reading · Best of the Year

“Filled with witty asides, trickster spiders, poets and one very wise woman, “Redemption in Indigo” is a rare find that you could hand to your child, your mother or your best friend.”
—Washington Post

“”he perfect antidote to the formula fantasies currently flooding the market…. Précis fails to do justice to the novel’s depth, beauty and elegant simplicity. Written from the point of view of an omniscient storyteller in the style of an oral narrative, this is a subtle, wise and playful meditation on life and fate.”
—The Guardian

“A clever, exuberant mix of Caribbean and Senegalese influences that balances riotously funny set pieces (many involving talking insects) with serious drama initiated by meddlesome supernatural beings.”
—New York Times

“Lord’s novel is very sprightly from start to finish, with vivid descriptions, memorable heroes and villains, brisk pacing — and an “authorised” epilogue that raises goosebumps along with expectations for a sequel. Iffy or not, that’s clever storytelling.”
—Caribbean Review of Books

—Read the Introduction and first chapter on Tor.com.
—Karen writes about Paama’s origins for Scalzi’s Big Idea.
—Karen blogged for one of our favorite bookstores, Powell’s.com: Listening to stories. Making a book trailer. Cake! Authenticity. The Muse.
—A report on the book launch in Barbados.
—Second printing.
—Audio edition available from Recorded Books.
—Available in the UK from Jo Fletcher Books/Quercus

“Full of sharp insights and humorous asides (“I know your complaint already. You are saying, how do two grown men begin to see talking spiders after only three glasses of spice spirit?”), Redemption extends the Caribbean Island storyteller’s art into the 21st century and hopefully, beyond.”
—Seattle Times

“There’s never a doubt we’re in the hands of a contemporary taleteller with a voice both insouciant and respectful of its sources, and it’s a voice we’d like to hear more from. Redemption in Indigo is wise, funny, and very promising.”
—Locus

“The seamless weaving of fantasy, folklore, and science creates a speculative text that is diasporic in its dimensions. Most compelling, however, is Lord’s ability to bring the past, present, and future of diasporic narrative together in a way that is not stereotypically timeless but instead innovatively time conscious.”
—Alisa K. Braithwaite, Small Axe

“As I read the first pages of Karen Lord’s slim debut novel Redemption in Indigo, I knew I wouldn’t put the book down until the story was finished. A modern retelling of a Senegalese legend, the book is both modern and mystical. There is magic in these pages, both in the story and Lord’s flowing prose. Her narrator is humble, articulate, and wise, and Redemption in Indigo is yet another skillfully told fairy tale (of several this year) that truly transports the reader to another world where spirits take the shape of men and alter lives for better and for worse.”
—LargeHeartedBoy

“Redemption in Indigo is a quick, engaging read, and I expect that most readers will find it a fresh addition to the genre. I’ll certainly be looking forward to Karen Lord’s future books. Should she choose to revisit these characters in particular, I know I’d enjoy it very much.”
—BSC Review

“What if Paradise Lost were recast in an African setting, its themes of rebellion, disobedience, greed, innocence lost, and redemption intact, its trickster characters both earthly and heavenly also intact, but its storyline adjusted to suit a more contemporary audience and adjusted to avoid having the young (or older) skeptic call it a fairy tale?
“Karen Lord’s first novel is unique, warm, funny, and smart, and her speculative imaginings should awaken every fantasy fan’s sense of wonder. It might not make it to a bestseller list, but given time, it might be found on a list of hidden gems—as might whatever Lord writes next.”
—Reflection’s Edge

“A great deal happens in the novel’s relatively short course, but confusion is minimal because Lord has found the ideal voice for the narrator—feminine yet authoritative, amusing yet soothing, omniscient yet humble. This is one of those literary works of which it can be said that not a word should be changed.”
—Booklist *Starred Review*

“Lord’s debut, a retelling of a Senegalese folktale, packs a great deal of subtly alluring storytelling into this small package…. An unnamed narrator, sometimes serious and often mischievous, spins delicate but powerful descriptions of locations, emotions, and the protagonists’ great flaws and great strengths as they interact with family, poets, tricksters, sufferers of tragedy, and—of course—occasional moments of pure chaos.”
—Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*

“The impish love child of Tutuola and Garcia Marquez. Utterly delightful.”
—Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring)

“Adventure, mystery, familial relations, discourse of power, ananse, the spirit world—a difficult mix/transition between conventional ‘plot’/narrative and magical realism—between cooking and xtreme lyric—beyond the boundary of what we conventionally/conveniently think of as ‘Bajam’, as ‘West Indian writing’, but part of and contribution to the ‘new generation’ of Caribbean imprint, pioneered by Lawrence Scott (TT/UK), in development now by Nalo Hopkinson (Guyana/Canada), (Marina Warner’s Indigo too?) and being incremented on/to by this challenging first novel by prize-winning Karen Lord of Barbados.”
—Kamau Brathwaite (Born to Slow Horses)

“Drawing on a multicultural mélange of narrative traditions—both oral and written—this Barbadian author surprises. She tap dances across the conventional, using it to make spirited sounds. She twists out of tired modes: “Once upon a time—but whether a time that was, or a time that is, or a time that is to come, I may not tell.” Then, Lord ends the tale by challenging “those who utterly, utterly fear the dreaded Moral of the Story.” Expect a work that can revive this and other exhausted elements of story.”
—Foreword Reviews

Karen Lord was born in Barbados in 1968 and decided to explore the world. After completing a science degree at the University of Toronto, she realised that the course she had enjoyed most was History of the English Language. Several degrees, jobs, countries, and years later, she had taught physics, trained soldiers, worked in the Foreign Service, and gained a PhD in sociology of religion. She writes fiction to balance the nonfiction she produces as an academic and research consultant. She lives in Barbados and now uses the internet to explore the world, which is cheaper.

Author photo © Risée N. C. Chaderton.
Cover photo © Corbis.

Previously:

Sept. 10, 2010:
Reading with Julia Holmes
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street, New York, NY

Sept. 12: 2 PM,
Karen read at the Brooklyn Book Festival and signed books at the Small Beer Press table.
Brooklyn Borough Hall
209 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Sept. 14: Reading with Julia Holmes (Meeks)
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY


The Poison Eaters & Other Stories

by Holly Black

3 Comments

9781931520638 · A Junior Library Guild Pick · Big Mouth House

Now available as an audiobook.

Pick your poison: Vampires, devils, werewolves, faeries, or . . . ? Find them all here in Holly Black’s amazing first collection.

In her debut collection, New York Times best-selling author Holly Black returns to the world of Tithe in two darkly exquisite new tales. Then Black takes readers on a tour of a faerie market and introduces a girl poisonous to the touch and another who challenges the devil to a competitive eating match. Some of these  stories have been published in anthologies such as 21 Proms, The Faery Reel, and The Restless Dead, and many have been reprinted in many “Best of ” anthologies.

The Poison Eaters is Holly Black’s much-anticipated first collection, and her ability to stare into the void—and to find humanity and humor there—will speak to young adult and adult readers alike.

Table of Contents

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
A Reversal of Fortune
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Night Market
The Dog King — listen to it on Podcastle
Virgin
In Vodka Veritas
The Coat of Stars
Paper Cuts Scissors — listen to it on Podcastle
Going Ironside
The Land of Heart’s Desire
The Poison Eaters

Read more


We know you’re excited for new books…

Leave a Comment

…so we’re going to keep stoking the flames!

Coming in June 2010 is Karen Lord’s fantastic and award-winning debut novel, Redemption in Indigo.karen lord We like Karen’s book because it’s choc-a-bloc full of magic–trickster spiders, metamorphic spirits, and clairvoyant nuns, oh my!  An imaginative re-telling of a Senegalese folk tale, Redemption in Indigo tells the story of Paama, whose overweight and overbearing husband causes nothing but trouble and embarrassment.  When Paama abandons her husband and returns to her home village, the magic really begins.  Unbeknownst to Paama, she wields the Chaos Stick, a handy device that controls the course of Fate, and the Indigo Lord wants it back…

As you might remember, Karen won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados for Redemption in Indigo–then she just won it again for her novel “The Best of All Possible Worlds.”

If you aren’t impressed yet, Nalo Hopkinson called Karen’s book “The impish love child of Tutuola and Marquez. Utterly delightful.”

We think so, too.  It’s a perfect read for the summer weather (though it’s possible the Chaos Stick is wreaking havoc on our weather patterns here in Massachusetts!).

Updated to add: more coverage of the award in The Barbados Advocate and The Nation.

More news of delightful reads to come…


Hound – Reviews

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Reviews of Hound
by Vincent McCaffrey

“If you favor a leisurely but still intriguing mystery with amiable characters and a devotion to the printed word, Hound will provide a pleasant diversion. As much about books — and love and knowledge and family — as about murder, Hound is the first in McCaffrey’s projected trilogy, and book lovers will eagerly await Henry’s next outing.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“One of the strengths of this book is McCaffrey’s droll description throughout…. As quick as McCaffrey’s wit is, so is his un-saccharine sentimentality…. In the end, that careful attention is what makes Hound evoke such a Jimmy Stewart-movie atmosphere. It wraps up completely like a, yes, package—but an honest one, skillfully wrapped and artfully offered.”
—Rain Taxi

“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love. McCaffrey peppers his prose with all kinds of allusions and references to books and literature, new and old, classic and arcane, as well as multiple passages of verse. Clearly, as a career bookseller, McCaffrey knows his books.
—The Hippo, NH

“Henry Sullivan is just squeaking by as a “book hound,” a wholesale rare book dealer. He scrounges yard and estate sales picking up the odd bibliographic treasure here and there. He thinks he might be onto a second shot at happiness when an ex-girlfriend asks him to appraise a collection of first editions left by her late husband. But when this former love is murdered, Sullivan turns from reading Raymond Chandler to trying to solve the crime himself. With a faster pace tempered by real emotional resonance, Hound is different from John Dunning’s “Bookman” series, yet there is enough behind the scenes information about the rare book trade to appeal to Cliff Janeway fans. (McCaffrey ran an independent bookstore for 30 years, so he knows what he’s talking about.) The tale is packed with references not only to mystery writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, but a variety of others from Charles Dickens to Nevil Shute. McCaffrey even name checks Harlan Ellison as an example of “The good ones are all difficult.” Set in a beautifully-evoked contemporary Boston, the old town soon provides a wealth of other mysteries for Sullivan, like a hidden stash of letters belonging to a flapper adventuress of the 1920s. As with all good books about books (even novels), this one will send you out looking for the other writers discussed.”
—Author Magazine


Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead – Reviews

by Alan DeNiro

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Reviews

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead

“Deeply weird, sometimes challenging, but always smart and affecting.”
– Locus (Notable Books)

“Endlessly imaginative.”
– Venus

“Deniro’s greatest gifts are those of a poet, and his prose is filled with stunning images and incantatory rhythms. Debuts often come along with press releases touting them as “assured,” and sure enough, Deniro’s was no different. But with talent as deep as his, it’s no wonder Deniro is confident in touring us around his strange worlds.”
–Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“Thoughtful, ambitious writing and truly transformative reading.”
– Small Spiral Notebook

“Maybe the future of sf is Alan DeNiro. The title story here, set in twenty-third-century Pennsylvania, is its nameless-till-the-last-sentence narrator’s university-application essay, numbered footnotes and all, which explains why not to expect him on campus anytime soon; he is in love and considering getting gills. Maybe DeNiro is the future of alternate history: in “Our Byzantium,” a college town is invaded by horse-and-chariot-led soldiers who demolish cars, wheelchairs, and other machines; reestablish Greek as the lingua franca; and otherwise conquer. He could be fantasy’s tomorrow, too, if the offhandedness of the impossible transformations in “The Cuttlefish,” “The Centaur,” “The Excavation,” and “If I Leap” catches on. In “The Fourth” and “A Keeper,” DeNiro is one of the most powerful, least partisan prophets of consumerist totalitarianism. “Salting the Map” confounds the distinction between artifice and reality as deftly and daftly as Andrew Crumey’s Pfitz (1997) and Zoran Zivkovic’s Impossible Stories (2006). The long closer, “Home of the,” about Erie, Pennsylvania, now and then, is as laconic and associative as its title is elliptic. Refreshing, imaginative, funny-scary stuff.”
– Ray Olson, Booklist

“A commitment to experimental structure and oddball elements provides this debut collection’s consistency…. The collection argues for DeNiro as a writer to watch.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Many of these stories unfold like dreams, startling in their detail but elusive in their meaning. Yet, the prosaic as well as the poetic features in these stories as characters attempt to create a detailed but incomplete record, like a dream book of their own histories. Objects such as a college entrance essay, maps, postcards, outdated computer disks, the provenance of a chess set, all become documents which convey the fragility of histories”
– Greenman Review

Advance Readers say:

“Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is a thrill ride. Men jump from buildings and walk away, Assassins are hired to murder novels, Byzantines spring from the hills and sack college towns. On each page Alan DeNiro performs feats of acrobatic skill, holding the edge with remarkable control. He has created a brand new world, and I believe every word of it.”
– Hannah Tinti (Animal Crackers)

“I’m not ordinarily an editor, so finding stories for the first six issues of Fence magazine was a guilty pleasure, and the subsequent work by formerly unknown Fence writers like Kelly Link and Julia Slavin has made me look like a prognosticator, or maybe an annoying drunk guy on a streak at a casino. Now here’s Alan DeNiro, whose “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” was always my favorite. I’m thrilled to see him in bookstores at last.”
– Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude)

“Alan DeNiro’s stories move in unexpected ways into unexpected places — up in the air, under the water, out of this world. He has a gift for precise language and poetic logic, his own unique sort of circus realism. Sharp, smart, and completely original, this is a lively, lovely collection from a memorable talent.”
– Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

“Reading Alan DeNiro’s new collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, made me feel like a dog that twists its head a bit to the side on hearing a whistle too high for humans to hear. The dog is perplexed and intrigued by the sound — it knows where it’s coming from but not really. Familiar enough, but maybe not. So too with these strong, out of kilter stories. DeNiro blows his own distinctly different sounding whistle and once you’ve heard it, you can’t help but stop and take real notice.”
– Jonathan Carroll (Glass Soup)

“The wholly original, carefully crafted tales that comprise Alan Deniro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are like colorful pinatas full of live scorpions — playful, unexpected, and deadly serious.”
– Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)


Generation Loss – Reviews

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Generation LossReviews + Quotes for Generation Loss

“Thirty years ago, Cassandra Neary’s grim photos of punks and corpses briefly made her the toast of the downtown art scene. Now an alcoholic wage slave, Neary accepts a magazine assignment to interview one of her reclusive photographer heroes on a Maine island, where a rash of missing-teenager cases and an off-kilter populace grab her attention. It takes time to warm to the self-destructive, sour-tempered protagonist –she drives drunk, pops Adderall and Percocet, and generally tries to not stick out her neck. Luckily, Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B)
– Entertainment Weekly

“Although Generation Loss moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound.”
– Graham Joyce, Washington Post Book World

“This novel disturbs like Cass’s photos of dead junkies and squalid club scenes. While in some ways she’s just another self-destructive person, Cass’s intelligence and talent make her an appealing mess. Hand propels this oddly appealing character through an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with stirring results. In the end, Generation Loss is a conventional story of sin and redemption. With darkly inventive polish, Hand reveals a character so deeply disordered, she’s both unlikable and compelling.”
—Time Out Chicago

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

“This smart, dark, literary thriller will keep you up at night. A photographer who has been drinking, doing drugs, and alienating everyone around her since the ’70s goes to Maine to interview a legendary photographer and gets caught up in the case of a missing girl.”
– Megan Sullivan’s Pick of the Week at the Boston Globe

“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking…. [Graham Sleight]‘”
– Locus Notable Books

“Just as lives that are only momentarily brilliant deserve celebration and respect, though, so do such novels, because life is dark enough that we need whatever illumination we can get, and there’s plenty to be had in Generation Loss.”
– Strange Horizons

“A formerly famous punk photographer attracted to the dead and damaged stumbles on a serial killer case when she takes a job inteviewing a famous reclusive photographer in this dark thriller of art and damaged souls, and despite only a hint of the supernatural, ‘…something of a departure for the author, but fully as elegant and significant as her overtly fantastic works. There is grave beauty her, and great thematic power.’ [Nick Gevers]”
– Valley Advocate

“Hand (Mortal Love, Black Light) expertly ratchets up the suspense until it’s at the level of a high-pitched scream near novel’s end.”
– Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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

“Ægypt is a metamorphosis, a metensomatosis, a memory play and a meta-novel; a story about many stories, a book with a larger book inside it. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
– Elizabeth Hand, F&SF

“Cass Neary, Elizabeth Hand’s unlikely heroine in her latest novel Generation Loss, may be hard to like, but I found her story is easy to love.”
– Feminist Review

“A dark, literate mystery that’s easy to appreciate and hard to put down.”
– The Olympian

“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

Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s previous novels:

” A literary page-turner . . . deeply pleasurable. . . . A delightful waking dream.”
– People (****)

“One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time.”
—Peter Straub

*”[Hand’s] language has an incantatory beauty.”
– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)


Interfictions – Bios

by Delia Sherman

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About the Editors

Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are The Porcelain Doveand The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers, Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia.

About the Contributors

Karen Jordan Allen spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Century, A Nightmare’s Dozen, Bruce Coville’s Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Christopher Barzak spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in August 2007.

K. Tempest Bradford is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.

Matthew Cheney’s work has appeared in One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual Best American Fantasyanthology from Prime Books.

Michael J. DeLuca would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead.

Adrián Ferrero was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include Verse, a collection of short stories, and Cantares, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing Diagonautas.

Colin Greenland is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include Finding Helen and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning Take Back Plenty. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle’s works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.

Joy Marchand lives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she’s shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she’s currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. .

Holly Phillips is the author of the award-winning story collection In the Palace of Repose. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.

Rachel Pollack is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels Unquenchable Fire and Godmother Night. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online and offline in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Veronica Schanoes is a writer and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio, and Jabberwocky.

Léa Silhol was born in Africa and grew up in Europe, but considers herself a “citizen of the world.” She is considered one of the leading writers in fantasy in the French language, with four short stories collections and a novel, La Sève et le Givre, which won the Fantasy Merlin Award in 2003.

Jon Singer grew up in Brooklyn, NY, wanting to be a scientist. That didn’t work out, but he is now semi-officially a Mad Scientist, which may even be better. You can find some of his work here.

Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer born and raised in New Delhi. She lives in the Boston area, where she also teaches college physics and has published a children’s book:Younguncle Comes to Town (Viking 2006).

Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &, and her novel,Spotted Lily, are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her website is Anna Tambour and Others and she blogs at medlarcomfits.blogspot.com.

Mikal Trimm has sold works of speculative fiction and poetry to a number of venues in the past few years. Recent or upcoming stories may be found in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Postscripts, Polyphony 6, and Shadowed Realms. He maintains a web presence (for no apparent reason) here.

Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth,Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards as well as the Pushcart Prize. She was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs.

Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author who writes short stories, essays, and novels. Visit Whatworld.


Kelly Link Bio

by Kelly Link

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a short biography of Ms. Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, was a Firecracker nominee, a Village Voice Favorite Book and a Salon Book of the Year — Salon called the collection “…an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards.

Her second collection, Magic for Beginners, was a Book Sense pick (and a Best of Book Sense pick); and selected for best of the year lists byTime Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. It was published in paperback by Harcourt.

Kelly is an editor for the Online Writing Workshop and has been a reader and judge for various literary awards. With Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow she edits The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press). She also edited the anthology, Trampoline.

Kelly has visited a number of schools and workshops including Stonecoast in Maine, Washington University, Yale, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Brookdale Community College, Brookdale, NJ, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC, the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University, New England Institute of Art & Communications, Brookline, MA, Clarion East at Michigan State University, Clarion West in Seattle, WA, and Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia.

Kelly lives in Northampton, MA. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kelly and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, publish a twice-yearly zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet — as well as books — as Small Beer Press.

Low resolution (for web use only) author photos. Links below are for high-resolution print-ready versions.(T-shirt — always — Gama-Go.)

Credit: Courtesy of the author.

Click here for hi-res download

Click here for hi-res download

Click here for hi-res download

Kelly Link is represented by:

Renee Zuckerbrot
Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency
115 West 29th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 967-0072
(212) 967-0073
renee@rzagency.com

Foreign Rights:

Jenny Meyer
Jenny Meyer Literary Agency, Inc.
115 West 29th St., 10th Flr
NY, NY 10001
(212) 564-9898

Asia:
Whitney Lee
The Fielding Agency, LLC.
269 South Beverly Drive, #341
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
310.276.7517

Film rights:

Sarah Self
The Gersh Agency
41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor
New York, NY 10010


Kelly and friend pose at a Japanese subway stop (1998)


Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 4)

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Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Quoting Mr. Denton:

Dear Ben,

Which was just a quick way of saying:

The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.

– Bradley Denton


Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 3)

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Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Quoting Mr. Denton:

Dear Ben,

Unfortunately, I’m an atheist, so someone might accuse me of dishonest deity interjection (thus casting a cloud of doubt over the entire sentence). Another problem is that “My God, these are beautiful” is quite short . . . and a proper blurb, particularly for stories as fine as those in Other Cities, should be long enough to be quoted with ellipses . . . like so . . . thus suggesting that the blurber had so many good things to say that they wouldn’t all fit . . . and that some of the best ones had to be left out.

On the other hand, “My God, these are beautiful,” although blasphemous and short, is true and concise. It’s also an improvement over my first draft:

“Holy shit!”

– Bradley Denton

Order here or send a check or a money order using this form.



Limited Editions

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Small Beer Press limited editions
Available from this website and a few select bookshops.

+++++++++

July 2005
Kelly Link
Magic for Beginners
illustrated by Shelley Jackson
edition of 150

Magic for Beginners is the highly anticipated second collection by Kelly Link, the author of the cult favorite collection Stranger Things Happen. As the title suggests, this is an engaging, funny, and magical selection of stories about haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, superheroes, marriages, and cannons, and includes several stories original to the collection. Stories from Magic for Beginners have previously been published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Conjunctions, and The Dark.

Hand-numbered and signed by the author and illustrator and includes two tipped-in plates: an enlargement of the title story illustration and a color reproduction of the trade dustjacket painting by Shelley Jackson which is based on “Lady with an Ermine” by Leonardo da Vinci held in The Czartoryskich Museum in Krakow. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, MI, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Oatmeal Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Cobalt Blue Pearl Linen Cloth, with a ribbon to keep your place.

Accompanied by a deck of poker cards backed with the cover illustration and illustrated with Shelley Jackson’s interior illustrations.

$100

+++++++++

July 2005

Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers & Other Monsters
edition of 150

Maureen F. McHugh is the author of four acclaimed novels. Her genre-expanding short fiction has won the Hugo and Locus Awards and has frequently been included in Best of the Year anthologies. Since 1988 she has attracted a broad readership in publications such as Asimov’s, Scifiction, Starlight, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Now, in her long-awaited first collection, McHugh’s subtle talents illuminate the relationship between parents and children from angles that everyone — mother or father, daughter or son — can relate to. These are beautiful stories about the ways in which social and technological shifts impact family dynamics.

Signed and hand-numbered by the author includes five poems not in the trade edition. This edition also includes a tipped-in print of Judith Anderson photographed in the role of Medea by Erwin Blumenfeld. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Red Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Pearl Linen Cloth. We have included a ribbon to keep your place.

$100

+++++++++

Order Both

$175

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Prices include shipping.



Stranger Things Happen – Reviews

by Kelly Link

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stranger things happen by Kelly Link

2001 Year’s Best Lists:
Salon The Village Voice San Francisco Chronicle
Fantastic Metropolis: Cory Doctorow, Jeffrey Ford, L.Timmel Duchamp, Luis Rodrigues
Locus Best Book of 2001 | Locus Recommended Reading List: John Clute, Gardner Dozois, Charles N. Brown, Faren Miller
Also, noted in: Publishers Weekly

Awards:
Salon Book of the Year | “Louise’s Ghost” — Nebula Award | “The Specialist’s Hat” — World Fantasy Award | “Travels with the Snow Queen” — Tiptree Award | World Fantasy Award Nominee | Firecracker Alternative Book Award Nominee

reviews

“my favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
– Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered, June 2003

China Mieville’s list of books to read

Philadelphia City Paper, Sept. 26, 2002
New York Magazine, February 11, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday November 18, 2001
New York Times Book Review, Sunday November 11, 2001
Washington Post
Science Fiction Weekly
Ink19
A review in Hebrew — any translations?
Strange Horizons
Tangentonline
Gadfly Online
Locus
Science Fiction Chronicle
F&SF
Montreal Mirror
one in Finnish!

Eclectica Review, 7/05
[Link's] stories go in places you never thought of, never imagined. Her talent is clear and obvious but her stories are often mysterious and even frightening…. [Stranger Things Happen] is a collection that defies genre assignment and stereotyping, that insists instead that it simply be read and enjoyed.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, $16) by Kelly Link is a delightful collection of short stories set in a familiar-seeming world.These stories have a dreamy quality, and like traditional fairy tales, Link’s often end with a Grimm little twist.
“Shoe and Marriage” borrows more than a bit from the story of Cinderella, and “Travels With the Snow Queen” and “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” play on fairy-tale titles and content. There is also a recurring character, the Girl Detective, who is a lot like a twentysomething Nancy Drew.
Link’s stories include lots of fairy-tale staples like ghosts, stepmothers and talking ravens. Still, her characters’ fears more often involve parents, careers, relationships and being left than things that make noises in the night.
We are still afraid of poisoned needles, strangers who offer candy to children, and what a mirror might say when we look into it.
But the things that haunt Link’s characters are more subtle; they are the kinds of things that really do keep people awake at night and leave them hungry for a comforting word.
And no matter how odd the events in her stories may seem, as this book’s title says, stranger things happen.

The Miami Herald, May 25, 2002
Sinister. Dreamy. Supernatural. Link’s stories dazzle even as they unsettle. It’s hard to imagine anything stranger than a multi-legged beauty contestant, a noseless, nimble-fingered father with a collection of metal and wood prosthetics or a deceased man mailing letters to his widow from a netherworld bordered by a nappy ocean with teeth. And that’s for starters. The bizarre atmospherics within these stories are driven as much by what is left unexplained, as in The Specialist’s Hat, where two identical 10-year-olds move to a dark mausoleum of a house with their father after their mother’s death. The first sentence spotlights the Samantha twin while she speculates that ”when you’re Dead, you don’t have to brush your teeth.” The Claire twin chimes in with ”when you’re Dead, you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” In this fashion, the twins’ fates are foreshadowed but never quite delineated, as their transformation, of sorts, takes place off the page. Link blends myths, ghosts and alien landscapes with a healthy ladle of modern life for stories that at first confound but eventually order themselves into a titillating weirdness.

Rain Taxi
Link’s stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling.

Asimov’s
[H]er writing belongs in the same camp as Jonathan Carroll’s: spooky, indeterminate, a kind of exemplar of literary Heisenbergism. The more you push on any one dimension of her eerie, funny tales, seeking to know the unknowables she deftly sketches, the less you know about other slippery aspects of the text. Link is a fantasist in the grand tradition of Carol Emshwiller, John Crowley, and Robert Coover, blurring the lines between dreams, myths, and reality in exciting new ways. All this talent is on display in Stranger Things Happen, an astonishingly good collection — which gathers her World Fantasy Award winner “The Specialist’s Hat,” plus two stories new to the world, as well as eight others — into an assemblage of awesome proportions. From its campy retro Nancy Drew-style cover to its closing credits, this is a postmodern fairy-tale landmark.

Booklist
Link offers strange and tantalizing stories — contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience — that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party’s descent into cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus’ many illegitimate sons, and June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life.

Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” a naïve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover’s physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in “Travels with the Snow Queen” reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clichés of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws the readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way, In the books’s most effective tale, “Vanishing Act,” a young girl’s efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. “The Specialist’s Hat” features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father’s parental neglect as their mother’s death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward exercises on the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.

Kirkus Reviews
Eleven stories showcase a dexterous use of language and a startling, if frequently elusive, imagination as ghosts, aliens, and the living dead invade the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Newcomer Link references fairy tales, mythology, and bits of our common contemporary cultural experience, not to offer commentary but to take off on her own original riffs. So in “Shoe and Marriage” we meet a dictator’s widow, unavoidably reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, living in a museum that displays the shoes she took from her husband’s murder victims. The story, which also describes a bizarre beauty pageant, plays verbally with shoe metaphors from Cinderella’s slippers to Dorothy’s ruby reds, but what touches you is not the author’s verbal acrobatics but the widow’s deep sense of sorrow and horror. Like many of the pieces here, “Shoe and Marriage” joins disparate parts that don’t always fit together, but linear connections are not the aim. When she depends too much on pure cleverness, Link ends up sounding derivative and brittle. “Survivor’s Ball, or The Donner Party,” in which two travelers come to an inn where a creepy if lavish shindig is in full swing, reminds you too insistently of Poe. “Flying Lessons,” about a girl’s love for a boy whose desire to fly ends tragically (hint, hint), and “Travels With the Snow Queen,” in which the fairy tale is revamped to read cute, come across as writing-school literary. But at her best, Link produces oddly moving imagery. In “Louise’s Ghost,” two friends named Louise have overlapping affairs. The shared name at first seems like another joke, but the tale gradually digs deep into the emotionally charged waters of loss and redemption. Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.

Staff recommendation by someone nice at Cody’s.

Kelly Link’s collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores.

– Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

“Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy.”

– Washington Post Book World

“quirky and exuberantly imagined….the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds,
illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.”

– Publisher’s Weekly

“Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“It is the tradition of the dust-jacket “blurb” to exaggerate the excellences of a book in hopes of enticing readers between its covers. But I do not follow that custom when I say that Stranger Things Happen is one of the very best books I have ever read. These stories will amaze, provoke, and intrigue. Best of all, they will delight. Kelly Link is terrific!“This is not blurbese. It is the living truth.”

– Fred Chappell, author of Family Gathering

“Finally, Kelly Link’s wonderful stories have been collected. My only complaint is the brevity of her oeuvre to date; as an avid reader of her work , I want her to continue to create more gems for me to read. I predict that “The Specialist’s Hat,” winner of the World Fantasy Award, will become part of the canon of classic supernatural tales.”

– Ellen Datlow, fiction editor, Scifiction.com

“I’ve been impatiently awaiting a collection of Kelly Link’s stories. Now that it’s here, it will sit in my library on that very short shelf of books I read again and again. For those who think Fantasy tired, Stranger Things Happen is a wake-up call.”

– Jeffrey Ford, author of The Beyond

“A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they’re not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don’t happen.”

– Karen Joy Fowler, author of Sister Noon

“Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them-funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines.”

– Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods

“Link’s writing is gorgeous, mischievous, sexy and unsettling. Unexpected images burst on your brain like soap bubbles on a dog’s tongue. I’ve been trying to imitate her since I first read one of her stories. It’s impossible. Instead I find myself curling up with a satisfied sigh and enjoying once more.”

– Nalo Hopkinson, author of Midnight Robber

“Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.”

– Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Kelly Link is a brilliant writer. Her stories seem to come right out of your own dreams, the nice ones and the nightmares both. These stories will burrow right into your subconscious and stay with you forever.”

– Tim Powers, author of Declare

“Of all the books you’ll read this year, this is the one you’ll remember. Kelly Link’s stories are like gorgeous tattoos; they get under your skin and stay forever and change your life. Buy this book, read it, read it again, congratulate yourself, and then start buying Stranger Things Happen for your friends.”

– Sarah Smith, author of A Citizen of the Country

“Kelly Link makes spells, not stories. She is the carrier of an eerie, tender sorcery; each enchantment takes you like a curse, leaving you dizzy, wounded, and elated at once. Her vision is always compassionate, and frequently very funny–but don’t let that fool you. This book, like all real magic, is terribly dangerous. You open it at your peril.”

– Sean Stewart, author of Galveston

“If Kelly Link is not the “future of horror,” a ridiculous phrase, she ought to be. To have a future at all, horror in general, by which I might as well mean fiction in general, requires precisely her freshness, courage, intelligence, and resistance to received forms and values. Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. Story by story, she is creating new worlds, new frameworks for perception, right in front of our eyes. I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.”

– Peter Straub, author of Magic Terror


The Baum Plan – Reviews

by John Kessel

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Crowley, Endless ThingsThe Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel

Reviews

“In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In “Pride and Prometheus,” Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while “A Lunar Quartet” introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel’s wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you’ll ever read (“The Red Phone”).” A-
—Entertainment Weekly

“Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories.”
–Charlotte Observer

“Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head.”
–Time Out Chicago

“Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please — or to defy prediction.”
– Metro Magazine

“Kessel’s blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing.”
– Booklist

“One of the best collections of the year.”
– Locus

“These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless.”
– – SciFi.com

“Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous.”
–The Fix

“A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction.”
–The Stranger

Library Thing


Mothers & Other Monsters – Talking Points

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Talking Points for Maureen F. McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters

from the Reading Group Guide (PDF Download)

Maureen McHugh, Mothers and Other Monsters

Some things to talk about. There are no right answers.

1. What is your take on the title of this collection – Mothers & Other Monsters? Is it that mothers are monstrous? How about the mothers in this collection? Who are the Other Monsters?

2. Science-fiction stories may be set in places real or imaginary, in real or imaginary times. Even so, they are usually about the here and now. Do you feel McHugh is able to address contemporary issues in a more — or a less — effective way through the use of her imaginary settings? What contemporary issues seem to interest her most?

3. Advances in technology allow parents to monitor their children in ways that were impossible a generation ago. What along these lines has already changed since you were a teenager? Would you prefer to be a teenager now? Would you prefer to have been a parent then?

4. How much oversight is too much?

5. Does McHugh’s treatment of stepmothers seem accurate? What are some of the difficulties stepmothers face here? Why are stepmothers traditionally seen as wicked? With more families being headed by single parents, will the stereotype of the wicked stepmother lose popularity?

6. McHugh works within a number of literary traditions including realism (“Eight-Legged Story“), ghost stories (“In the Air”), science fiction (“The Cost to Be Wise”), fantasy (“Ancestor Money“), fairy tales (“The Beast”), and narrative nonfiction (“Interview: On Any Given Day”). Science fiction has been characterized as a literature of exploration and therefore seen as especially appropriate for teenagers. Are these stories you would give to a teenager to read? What aspects of these stories would you have enjoyed as a teenager?

7. One of the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease is that life decisions for an individual have to be made by someone else. Do the reactions of the Alzheimer’s sufferer’s families in these stories seem realistic to you? How about the treatment of and the treatments for the disease?

8. What would you do if your partner were cured of Alzheimer’s but was not quite the person they had once been? (As in “Presence”)

9. In “Laika Comes Back Safe,” is Tye a werewolf or a kid who thinks he’s a werewolf? Which is scarier?

10. In “Ancestor Money,” a woman burns an offering for her grandmother. In China, these offerings include paper money called ‘Hell Money’ and elaborate paper models of houses, cars and even things like paper model fax machines and paper model cell phones. The idea is that when they are burned, the ancestors receive them as goods and money. What would you send your ancestors?

11. McHugh’s protagonists are frequently trapped in some way — by love, by law, by history, by illness. How do you feel about reading stories in which the narrator has little power and few choices? How well do you think McHugh’s narrators do in the circumstances in which they find themselves?

12. When it’s possible to rejuvenate your body, will you?

13. Would you describe these as love stories?

14. Did this collection remind you of any other books? What did these stories gain by being collected together? What differences do you experience between reading stories separately in magazines as compared to reading them in a collection or anthology?

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Maureen McHugh Interview

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An Interview with Maureen F. McHugh
from the Reading Group Guide (PDF Download) for Mothers & Other Monsters

Maureen McHugh, Mothers and Other MonstersQ. The title of the collection identifies the recurring motif of mothers, and their interactions with other family members, a motif central to many of these stories. Was this a conscious choice or a pattern that you recognized after writing and publishing the stories?

A. I started writing stories about mothers because of something the writer Karen Joy Fowler said at a workshop. In a story by another writer, the main character’s mom called, and Karen made the offhand comment that she was glad to see a mother in a story. At the time I was struggling mightily with the whole exercise of being a stepmother and one of the things I had trouble sorting out was the difference between issues that were ‘step’ issues and just the same stuff that comes up for every parent. In my eyes, everything was because I wasn’t my kid’s ‘real mom’. (We had full custody of my stepson.) Some of those things were just parent things. When something is important to me and I don’t understand it, I often write about it.

Mothers were just expected to be so perfect, you know?

Some of the pieces in the collection had already been written by this point, but I found that mothers had already started coming up in my fiction, and came up more and more. I had been thinking about a collection on and off for years and kicking around names, most of which were pretty stupid. Then Small Beer Press asked me to do a collection and I realized the name of the collection was Mothers & Other Monsters, and everything just sort of jelled around that.

Q. What is it that makes mothers such rich territory in fiction?

A. Nobody much writes about them. There are some great stories about mothers, but for the most part, motherhood is a very rigid role. A Hollywood actor observed recently that she had reached the point where she had two choices in roles, Good Mommy and Psycho Mommy. (Shirley MacLaine specializes in the grandmother version of these roles — but Psycho Grandmothers also Dispense Wisdom and Allow Children To Be Themselves.) I’m a different mother than any of my kid’s friend’s mothers. And they’re all different from each other in ways a good deal more complicated than Good Mother and Bad Mother.

There are some really good things written about motherhood. Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing” is one. Lorrie Moore’s harrowing “People Like That Are the Only People Here” is another wonderful short story. But for the most part, we can explore the relationships between lovers and between fathers and sons, but we’re nervous about talking about mothers and children.

Q. You are also able to focus closely on the experiences of children and teenagers in such stories as “Interview: On Any Given Day” and “Laika Comes Back Safe.” What are the difficulties involved in capturing the voices of these younger characters?

A. Language. My language for teenagers is inevitably a bit lame. My son helped me a bit. I told myself that even if their language was dead on, in five years it would sound preposterous, and just wrote it anyway. I’m also oddly protective of my teenagers. I work really hard not to embarrass them. My memories of being an adolescent usually involve one humiliating moral or social failure after another. I tend to shy away from doing that to them.

But I’m really comfortable with coming-of-age stories. I think my generation has never believed we were adults.

The Story PrizeQ. It seems as if literary fiction is finally returning to a broader, more inclusive spectrum than the realism that has been predominant for so long. Your stories often work with speculative elements. How do you view the role of realism in fiction?

A. You know, I always get this question asked from the other direction — how do I view speculative elements. This is a great question. I was drawn to science fiction for the ways in which it allowed me to skip parts of real life I hated. I liked SF that made life more romantic. I liked Andre Norton’s protagonists finding out they weren’t ordinary. I wanted to be a mutant, an escapee from a different reality where I was special.

I studied writing for years. Some of that was formal — I have a masters degree from New York University that would be an MFA in creative writing if I got it today. Some of it was the more traditional way to become of writer. Write a lot, most of it bad, find people who can tell you it’s bad. Learn to get better. I found power in realism. I liked psychological realism when I read it. Those details — the moments we have all experienced but maybe never seen written down — work like a kind of electric jolt in a good story. In the Lorrie Moore story I mentioned, her two-year-old son has cancer. She describes being in the office of the pediatric oncologist and her son is doing that thing toddlers do so joyously, flicking on and off the light switch, while the pediatric oncologist explains what the cancer means and what they’ll do. How many times have I seen a toddler entranced with a switch — a flashlight, a vacuum cleaner, anything. And juxtaposed against the patient doctor explaining the moment is almost unbearable.

Q. How do you think working with fantastic or science fictional elements enriches your work?

A. It’s like a lens. It takes the story and throws the elements of relationship in high relief. In “Frankenstein’s Daughter,” the situation is not so uncommon. The daughter has chronic health problems that will potentially be fatal. The mother pays very little attention to her son because her daughter is so often in a life-or-death situation. The fact that the daughter is a clone of her dead daughter just heightens the situation. It justifies the very common feeling ‘this is my fault’ because she chose her daughter’s existence. And it startles the story in some way. I like that the daughter’s physiological problems come right out of the scientific literature on cloning. But I also like that, as I wrote the story, I found that the family was very much like a lot of other families.

Q. Your stories have been recognized both inside and outside the SF genre. Do you feel more at home as a writer in either field?

A. Both and neither, I guess. Science fiction has been really good to me, but I am conscious of having disappointed a lot of readers. People complain that I write boring stories. Depressing stories. That my stories could be about today if you took the speculative element out. Some of my stories, like “Laika Comes Back Safe,” may not even have a speculative element. (Although just because I think that doesn’t mean it’s true.)

But outside the field, I think I’m seen as a little precious. I write science fictional stories about moms. Kind of a niche. The way feminist writing is seen as a niche. I feel that for years my stories weren’t read outside the field. So inside the field I was seen as not science fictional enough and outside the field I was too science fictional.

This is a little like stepparenting/parenting issues. The non-genre writers I know also have difficulties with the ways in which their work is visibly shaped for the market. Any time a book or story is in the world, it’s in some place in a book store, in some specific magazine that means some people see it and others don’t. Often there are people who don’t see it who might very much like it, and people who do see it who feel misled by the packaging.

Q. Your stories often deal with the domestic, although usually in bold, original settings. Do you feel fiction that focuses on older women or domestic life is treated differently?

A. Sometimes. For one thing, I get asked about the fathers a lot. Where are the fathers? But mostly no. I’ve been really well received, and I’ve gotten extraordinary attention from my peers. I’d say that my fiction has been treated very well by people from workshops like Sycamore Hill and Rio Hondo, and by the East Side Writers and the local SF writer’s group. They grappled directly with it, called me to account on it, and in large part let me become the writer I am today. Editors have always published my work, they haven’t marginalized it.

Q. Several of the stories in the collection — most notably “Oversite” and “Presence” — feature characters dealing with the fallout of Alzheimer’s or dementia in their lives. What are you exploring in these stories?

A. Alzheimer’s, like other brain disorders, calls into question the very nature of self. What is self? Who are we? I think we are our physical selves, particularly our brains. I have a particular fear of dementia and of loss of self. More so, I would say, than a fear of death. The irony of that is that now my mother has dementia, so for the past few years I have been privy to a close-up look of the way in which her ‘self’ is dissolving. The ‘self,’ I must say, is very persistent. Even as my mother loses aspects of language and some of her personality changes, there is a stubborn core of something that, at this point at least, is still recognizably connected to the historic ‘her.’

Q. Consciousness and identity emerge as two strong themes within the collection. What did you want to say in dealing with these?

A. I don’t know that I wanted to say anything. I think I don’t understand consciousness or identity. There’s a saying in fiction, ‘Write what you know.’ I think better fiction comes out of writing about the things that are important to me, but that I’m fundamentally uncertain about. That doesn’t mean I sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a story about identity.’ I always think I’m writing a story about a girl who thinks her best friend is a werewolf. It just happens that I circle back to those issues of identity.

As a writer, I have a couple of itches that I scratch, things I return to again and again. I tend to be drawn to motherhood because I’m trying to find a way to convince myself that I wasn’t a monster. I’ll get an idea for a story and think, I know, I’ll make the mother have Alzheimer’s. Not thinking about the connection between a teenager finding her way and an old woman losing her way and a mother helpless in the middle to ease either passage. I find out about all those things years later. I put them there, because those things are by default interesting to me. But it’s not conscious.

Q. Did you learn anything new about these stories in the process of choosing and ordering them for the book?

A. I find it difficult to reread my own fiction. It was nice to see that a lot of it had held up. And I was surprised at how much the same things kept coming up, again and again. The mother in “The Lincoln Train,” for example, has some form of dementia.

Q. How are these stories different from your novels, if at all? How does your writing process differ between the two?

A. I often write short stories to a deadline. Often, anymore, a workshop. They are more likely to be ideas that I’m not at all sure will work out. I can take more risks because most of the time I know that in a couple of months I’ll at least have a draft.

Two of my novels have come out of short stories, so at some level, there is some overlap. But when I intentionally start a novel, I’m thinking it will have more ingredients than a short story. More loose ends. More questions and more stuff.

Q. You’ve talked in the past about workshopping with other writers being an important part of your writing life. What do you take from those experiences?

A. As I get older, I think I get better at reading and understanding stories, and some of that is from workshopping.

Mostly it’s been very rare for someone not to tell me something that didn’t show me a way to read the story I’d written. A lot of times it wasn’t the way I wanted the story read. And a lot of times it said stuff about the story and about my writing that I wasn’t very good at hearing.

But it’s the only way I know to get better.

Q. Who are some writers you admire or who have influenced your work?

A. At any given time, anyone I’m reading who strikes me is going to have a pretty strong affect on me.

When I was in my twenties I was really taken by the work of Samuel R. Delany and the novels of Joan Didion. I think I was drawn to the romanticism of Delany. I was also really taken with the way so much of Didion’s stories happened off the page. I was also strongly drawn to a little book by Marguerite Yourcenar called Coup de Grâce. I reread it a couple of years ago and saw all sorts of aspects of it that distress me now that I’m in my forties but it affected me powerfully when I was younger.

A few years ago I found myself utterly charmed by the sheer artificialness of Raymond Carver’s stories. I had always thought of them as very psychologically realistic. Minimal. All that. But what I like about them now is how artificial they are. Perfect little setups that spring shut at conclusion. Lately I’ve been reading the short fiction of Joy Williams. It’s really astonishing.

I like the work of Kelly Link a lot.

I like the Harry Potter novels. Great escapism.

When I was younger, I expected what I thought of as a rigorous kind of lack of sentimentality in novels. Anything else struck me as cheating. Lately I have been drawn more and more to certain kinds of sentiment. Books like I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Q. What can we expect to see from you next?

A. I’m working on a novel. I’ve been working on it for six or seven years. But this time, I swear I’m going to finish it.

Interview by Gwenda Bond.

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