Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic

Introduction by Bruce Sterling.

“South of the Border Speculation” by Robert Ontiveros @ the Austin Chronicle

Video: Alberto Chimal of Mexico City reads his story “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge.”

Book Notes @ largeheartedboy.com by the editors, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown.

This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership.

“To read these stories in translation is to experience a quite different way to tell about the fantastic; it is to experience the Mexican way of understanding the function of fantasy in present day literature.”
—Literal: Latin American Voices / La Prensa, San Antonio

“By turns creepy, self-consciously literary, and engagingly inventive, these 34 stories selected by translator-scholar Jiménez Mayo and writer-critic Brown offer some excellent and ghastly surprises. . . . These are punchy, ghoulish selections by south-of-the-border writers unafraid of the dark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing a definition of fantasy that includes the extraterrestrial, the supernatural, the macabre, and the spectral, these stories are set in unusual locales and deal with bizarre characters. All are very short (some just two pages), and most offer a surprise twist at the end, though occasionally the only reaction these endings may elicit from the reader is “Huh?” The universal scope of the themes transcends the Mexican provenance; for example, one detects an apocalyptic influence in Liliana V. Blum’s “Pink Lemonade,” and Argentine Julio Cortázar’s “Bestiary” influences Bernardo Fernández’s “Lions.” Most of the volume’s 34 authors, half of whom are women, are relatively unknown to American readers, and for many of them, publication in this anthology represents their first exposure to an English-reading audience. The translations, several of which were done by the editors, convey the individuality, if not idiosyncrasies, of these tales. VERDICT This collection will appeal mostly to fans of fantasy and sf and, to a lesser degree, those interested in contemporary Mexican literature.”
—Library Journal

“Langorous, edgy, sumptuously beautiful by turns, Three Messages expands our understanding of contemporary Mexican literary production, collapsing high-low boundaries and pre-established ideas about national identity.”
—Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Spanish Literature, Cornell University

“When one talks to Mexican science fiction writers, the subject of ‘Mexican national content’ commonly comes up. Mexican science fiction writers all know what that is, or they claim to know, anyway. They commonly proclaim that their work needs more national flavor.
“This book has got that. Plenty. The interesting part is that this ‘Mexican national content’ bears so little resemblance to content that most Americans would consider ‘Mexican.’”
—from the introduction by Bruce Sterling

Table of Contents (not final order)

Lucía Abdó, Second-Hand Pachuca
Maria Isabel Aguirre, Today, You Walk Along a Narrow Path
Ana Gloria Álvarez Pedrajo, The Mediator
Liliana V. Blum, Pink Lemonade
Agustín Cadena, Murillo Park
Ana Clavel, Warning and Three Messages in the Same Parcel
Yussel Dardón, A Pile of Bland Deserts
Óscar de la Borbolla, Wittgenstein’s Umbrellas
Beatriz Escalante, Luck Has Its Limits
Bruno Estañol, The Infamous Juan Manuel
Iliana Estañol, In Waiting
Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mónica Lavín, Trompe l’œil
Eduardo Mendoza, The Pin
Queta Navagómez, Rebellious
Amélie Olaiz, Amalgam
Donají Olmedo, The Stone
Edmée Pardo, 1965
Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, The Last Witness to Creation
Carmen Rioja, The Náhual Offering
René Roquet, Returning to Night
Guillermo Samperio, Mister Strogoff
Alberto Chimal, Variation on a Theme of Coleridge
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia
Pepe Rojo, The President without Organs
Esther M. Garcia, Mannequin
Bernardo Fernández, Lions
Horacio Sentíes Madrid, The Transformist
Karen Chacek, The Hour of the Fireflies
Hernán Lara Zavala, Hunting Iguanas
Gerardo Sifuentes, Future Perfect
Amparo Dávila, The Guest
Gabriela Damián Miravete, Nereid Future
José Luis Zárate, Wolves

About the Authors

María Isabel Aguirre was born in Mexico City. She holds a B.A. in Spanish literature and reports that she mostly writes poetry but occasionally also writes fiction.

Liliana V. Blum (Mexico, 19xx) is not one of those women who refuse to reveal their date of birth; she just likes coincidences. So that she was born the same year that Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was published, is a great one. She is a ginger gal who suffered through her Mexican childhood of pinch-the-redhead-in-the-arm-for-luck. Now she only suffers the sun. She was born in Durango (famous for its scorpions, revolutionaries and narcos) and currently lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas (famous for its crabs and narco-related violence). Despite the eight-legged creatures, the daily bread of bullets and mutilated bodies, and being the mother of a boy, a girl, a beagle and a guinea pig, she has managed to write five short-story collections; one of them, The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (Host Publications, 2007) was translated into English. Her work has been published in literary magazines in the US, Mexico, England, and Poland. One of her books will be reprinted for a reading-campaign in Mexico City, to give away for free in the subway. She is currently working on her first novel.

Agustín Cadena (Ixmiquilpan, 1963) is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a university professor of literature. He has published over twenty books in many literary genres and has collaborated on more than fifty publications in various countries. His work has been recognized with many awards. Some of his work has been anthologized in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, USA, Italy, and translated into English, Italian and Hungarian.

Karen Chacek (Mexico City, a Saturday in 1972) is an inhabitant of parallel worlds and a storyteller. She spent her childhood surrounded by comics, TV series and fables. As a teenager, she discovered novels, science fiction, music videos and film. Her fascination with the visual language drove her to study film. Today she’s a writer and a screenwriter. She has published the short story collection Parallel Days (2006) and the children’s books An Unexpected Pet (2007) and Nina Complot (2009). Her short fiction has also appeared in various anthologies of chronicle, horror, science fiction and children’s stories. She has also worked as a video post-producer and written for science, technology and travel magazines. In 2001 was invited to participate in the Mexico-Barcelona Sundance Institute workshop. She is passionate about her long walks in public parks, loves cloudy days, insects, cats, underground passages and dystopias.

Ana Clavel (Mexico City, 1961) is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Finalist of International Alfaguara Prize 1999 for Los deseos y su sombra (English translation: Desire and Its Shadow, Aliform Publishing 2006). Her novel Cuerpo náufrago (Alfaguara 2005¸ English translation: Shipwrecked Body, Aliform Publishing 2008) became Cuerpo náufrago/ ready-made multimedia para bucear en la identidad y el deseo (performance, photo exhibition, installation, web site). Las Violetas son flores del deseo (Alfaguara 2007, French translation: Éditions Métailié 2009) won the Radio France International Short Novel Juan Rulfo Prize 2005 and was the origin of a multimedia project that included sex doll exhibition, instalation, performance and website. Her most recent novel is El dibujante de sombras (Alfaguara 2009), has a video.

Alberto Chimal (Toluca, 1970) is a writer and professor of creative writing. He is the author of the critically lauded novel Los esclavos (The Slaves) (2009) and sixteen short story collections, including Grey (Flock) (2006), Cinco aventuras de Horacio Kustos / Five Adventures of Horatio Kustos (2008), La ciudad imaginada y otras historias (The Imaginary City and Other Stories) (2009) and 83 novelas (83 Novels) (2011). He has also written a collection of essays, a translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Politian (Poliziano) (2010), two plays produced in the late 1990s, the anthology Viajes celestes (Celestial Journeys) (2006) and a comic: Horacio en las ciudades (Horatio in the Cities) (2004), illustrated by Ricardo “Micro” Garcia. Mexican critics have cited his work as departing from common themes in contemporary Mexican literature to a territory closer to European and Latin American fantastic literature, merging everyday life with the extraordinary and mythical.

Gabriela Damián Miraveta (Mexico City, 1979) is an author of fiction and children’s literature, including La tradición de Judas (The Tradition of Judas) (illustrated by Cecilia Varela) (2007), which won the 2007 FILIJ de Cuento Prize. She studied Sciences and Communication at the Universidad Intercontinental and received a Masters of Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as a diploma in fantastic literature from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. Her children’s stories have appeared in the cultural supplement Pingoletras of the Chiapas Herald, and she has worked as an instructor in creative writing for the Gifted Children Program of the government of Mexico City.

Yussel Dardón (Puebla, 1982) is author of Maquetas del Universo (Models of the Universe) and Fractatus Vitae. His first book of short stories was described as “shows the brightness of a serious and nuanced work.” He has published in national and international journals and was anthologized in the Spring 2010 number dedicated to “Obsession” from the Rio Grande Review, a bilingual publication of the University of Houston. He was selected as a Young Artists Fellow of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts for 2010-11.

Amparo Dávila (Pinos, Zacatecas, 1928) is a poet and short story writer. She has punlished the poetry collections Salmos bajo la luna (1950) and Meditación a la orilla del sueño y Perfil de soledades (1954). Her fiction works include Tiempo destrozado (1959), Música concreta (1964), and Árboles petrificados (1977) (winner of the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in the same year).

Bruno Estañol was born in a little port of the Gulf of Mexico, Frontera Tabasco, Mexico. He writes mainly short novels and stories as well as essays. He is a neurologist and professor of clinical neurophysiology at the National University of Mexico.

Iliana Estañol (Mexico City, 1978) began taking pictures at the age of 11 with an old Canon camera that her father gave her. At about the same age, she started writing poetry and short stories. It didn’t take long until she started making long photography series. Telling stories with still images became her passion. But the happiness didn‘t last, she soon realized that she wanted those images to move. She studied film direction and screenwriting in Cuba, Berlin and Zurich. Since 1999 she has written and directed several movies and has continued to write short stories. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Korea, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Brasil, Cuba and of course Mexico.

Bernardo Fernández (Mexico City, 1972), aka Bef, is a novelist, comic book artist and graphic designer. He has published the novels Tiempo de alacranes (Scorpions Season, 2005), Gel azul (Blue Gel, 2006), Ladrón de sueños (The Dream Thief, 2008) and Ojos de lagarto (Snake Eyes, 2009); the short story collections ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Ciudad interfase (¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Interface City, 1998) and El llanto de los niños muertos (The Crying of the Dead Children, 2008); the children’s books Error de programación (Software Error, 1997), Cuento de hadas para conejos (Fairy Tales for Bunnies, 2007), Groar and Soy el robot (I Am the Robot, 2010); short comic book stories Pulpo cómics (Octopus Comics, 2004), Monorama (2007) and Monorama 2 (2009) and the graphic novels Perros Muertos (Dead Dogs, 2006), Espiral (Spiral, 2010) and La Calavera de Cristal (The Crystal Skull, 2011). Called by some one of the best young Mexican writers of our times, he has won several prizes, including the Mexican national novel prize Otra Vuelta de Tuerca, the Spanish Memorial Silverio Cañada prize for best first crime novel, and the Ignotus prize of the Spanish Association of Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror. His newest novel, Hielo Negro (Black Ice), a thriller about the narco culture, received the 2011 Grijalbo Novel Award, which the jury called “an authentic Mexican thriller that reflects the current problems of the country” immersed in a wave of violence linked to organized crime, achieving “a merger of the language of the graphic novel, film and literature that makes a work perfectly suited to the postmodern.” He is currently working on Uncle Bill, a graphic novel about the American writer William Burroughs and his time in Mexico.

Esther M. García (Cd. Juárez, 1987) is a writer, journalist and photographer. She holds a degree in Spanish Literature from the Autonomous University of Coahuila. She received the National Short Story Prize Criaturas de la noche in 2008, and published the poetry collection La Doncella Negra (La Regia Cartonera, 2010), and the short story collection Las Tijeras de Átropos (Colección Siglo XXI de escritores coahuilenses, UA de C, 2011). Other stories have been anthologized in Los Nuevos Románticos and México lindo y querido — Actual Reunion of Mexican poetry with cause. Her journalistic work has appeared in newspapers and magazines including Espacio 4, Palabra, Vanguardia, La i Saltillo, Día Siete, Plaza Ludens, Lóbulo temporal, palabrasmalditas.net and Pirocromo.

Claudia Guillén (Mexico City, 1963) is a writer of fiction and essays. She won the Young Creators scholarship from FONCA in the short story category and from the same institution the Abroad Residencies scholarship in Salzburg, Austria. Her short story “La cita” won the XXXV Latin-American Edmundo Valadés Short Story award. She writes for Revista de la Universidad de México and Diario Milenio. Her literary work has appeared in La insospechada María y otras mujeres (The Unexpected Mary and Other Womena) and Los otros (The Others), and the anthologies Un hombre a la medida (A Man to the Extent) (which she also edited), Con licencia para escribir (Licensed to Write), Cuentos Violentos (Violent Stories), Prohibido fumar (No Smoking), Atrapados en la escuela (Trapped in School) and Sólo cuento (Only Story). Some of her work has also been translated to English and French.

Mónica Lavín (Mexico City, 1955) has published seven short story books and seven novels. She won the 1997 Gilberto Owen National Award for her short story collection Ruby Tuesday no ha muerto (Ruby Tuesday is not Dead); the 2001 Narrativa de Colima for the best book of the year for Café cortado (Cut Coffee) and the 2010 Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska for her novel about Sor Juana, Yo, la peor (Me, The Worst, which has been reprinted several times). She is a professor at the Creative Writing Department at the Autonomous University of Mexico City; writes for the newspaper El Universal and recommends books on radio. Her short stories have been translated to English, French, Italian and are included in national and international anthologies. She lives in Mexico City and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Leo Mendoza was born in Oaxaca in 1958. He has published four short story collections. Leo has put together a few anthologies and his writing has been included and even translated in others. He has practiced many kinds of cultural journalism and years ago sold kitchen appliances. As a screenwriter he has written many TV programs and two movies: Teo’s Journey (2008) was based on his screenplay and Hidalgo/Molière, ultimately titled Hidalgo: The Untold Story (2009). Mendoza has won several awards such as the San Luis Potosí National Short Story prize and the Benemérito de América in Oaxaca. He won the National Culture and Arts Fund scholarship and in 2006 became a member of the National Creators System. In recent years he has mainly been working as a screenwriter, but somehow managed to write a collaborative novel about Pre-hispanic Mexico. Currently Mendoza’s main ambitions include reading, eating, watching movies, traveling and having sufficient time to write. In spite of his advancing age he is often astonished, although he now accepts the fact that he will never play center forward on his Atlante soccer team.

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras (Guadalajara, 1968) is a fiction writer, essayist, poet, and translator. He is the author of the short story collections Donde la piel es un tibio silencio (Where the Skin is a Silent Warmth, 1992), Páginas para una siesta húmeda (Pages for a Wet Siesta, 1992), Insomnios del otro lado (Insomnia on the Other Side, 1994), La penumbra inconveniente (Inconvenient Darkness, 2001), La piel insomne (The Sleepless Skin, 2002), and Los animales invisibles (The Invisible Animals, 2009), the poetry collections Mirando cómo arde la amarga ciudad (Watching the Bitter City Burn, 1994) and Oscuras palabras para escuchar a Satie (Dark Words for Listening to Satie, 1995), and the essay collection Terra Cognita (2007). He received the Edmundo Valadés Latin American Short Story Prize in 2000 and the Elías Nandino Poetry Prize in 1993. He has worked as editor and columnist for various journals and cultural supplements, including Letras Libres, Día Siete, and El Universal, and as Director of Publishing of the National Museum of Art in Mexico City. He was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Culture and of the Rockefeller Foundation, fulfilling a residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in 2008.

Queta Navagómez was born in Bellavista, Nayarit, in western Mexico. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Physical Education, a Diploma in Script Writing and Literary Creation from the General Society of Mexican Writers, and a Seminary in Literary Creation from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She represented her country at track and field competitions at the Central American games. She has won several literary awards for her short fiction, poetry and literary novels (Marie Claire Magazine’s Writing Contest 1995, National Poetry Award “Ali Chumacero”, 2003-2004, National Novel Award “Jose Ruben Romero”, INBA. 2008). Her fiction stories, poetry and novels has been published in journals and anthologies in the U.S.A, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Chile and Peru. She lives in Mexico City, where she participates actively in regional and national cultural activities.

Amélie Olaiz (León) is a writer and professor at Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) and Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City, where she has lived since childhood.

She studied Graphic Design at UIA, and holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Design and a Diploma in Creativity from the UIA. In 1996 she started studying Buddhist philosophy. Her literary works have appeared in Piedras de Luna (Moon Stones) (2005, republished in Spain in 2007) and Aquí está tu cielo (Here is your sky) (2007), and in the anthologies Ficticia’s Citizens (2003), Prohibido fumar (No Smoking) (2008), Infidelidades.con (Infidelities.with)(2008), Antología mínima del orgasmo (Minimal orgasm anthology) (2009), and Vampiros mundanos y transmundanos (Mundane and transmundane vampires) (2011). Her work has also appeared in the newspapers La Jornada, El Financiero, and Reforma, the journal Castálida, and in various Chilean textbooks. A participant in several writers workshops, and won three first places prizes in contests organized by the Ficiticia’s Matina workshop.

Carmen Rioja (Monterrey, 1975) is a Mexican writer and artist. She has participated in several literary workshops with writers like María Luisa Puga, Guillermo Samperio, Juan Villorio, Antonio Vilanova and Jorge Hernández among others. Rioja studied Hispanic Letters and has published the short story collection La Muerte Niña (El Hechicero Books.), which includes the story La Casa de Chayo (Chayo’s House) adapted into an IMCINE award winning short film by Guissepe Solano. Carmen has also published poetry in both magazines and periodicals; the poem Vuelo Aerostático sobre Teotihuacán (Air Balloon Flight over Teotihihuacán) is included in the anthology Corazón Prestado: El Mundo Precolombino en la Poesía de los Siglos XIX y XX (Borrowed Heart: The Pre-Columbian World in the Poetry of the 19^th & 20^th Centuries). Her work has also appeared in the newspaper El Corregidor of Querétaro, and she served as co-producer and host of the literary critique radio show Sancho Panza de Cabeza. Currently, she writes her blog Hojas al Rio (Leaves on the River). She is also a conservation artist specializing in colonial and archaeological collections, and works in cultural and art promotion. Her involvement in plastic arts includes several painting techniques and sculpture.

Pepe Rojo (Chilpancingo, 1968) has published four books and more than 200 short stories, essays, and articles dealing with fiction, media and contemporary culture, including the 2009 collection Interrupciones (Interruptions). He teaches in the Taller (e) Media program at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) in Tijuana. With Deyanira Torres and Bernardo Fernández, he co-founded Pellejo/Molleja, an indie publishing firm, where he edited Sub (sub-genre literature), Número X (media culture) and Pulpo Comics (a Mexican-sf comics anthology). With Torres, he co-produced and co-directed a series of interventions, “You Don’t Exist,” as well as the video installation series “Psicopanoramas”. He produced two interactive stories (Masq and Club Ciel) for Alteraction, and published two collections of Minibúks (Mexican SF and Counter-versions) at UABC, as well as the graphic intervention “Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana”. In April and May 2011 he produced a series of sf-based interventions and lectures at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, “You Can See the Future from Here,” with students from UABC, as well as U.S. science fiction writers including Bruce Sterling and Chris N. Brown. He lives in strange Tijuana with his strange Lacanian psychoanalyst wife Deyanira Torres and two strange kids (and by strange, he of course means “lovely in an endearing and unusual kind of way”).

Guillermo Samperio lives in Mexico City—where he was born in 1948. He has written more than twenty books including short stories, novels, essays, children’s literature, and poetry. His most recent books are: Cuentos Reunidos (Alfaguara, Mexico); Cómo se escribe un cuento 500 Tips para nuevos cuentistas del siglo XXI (Berenice, Spain); La guerra oculta, cuentos, (Lectorum, México). His work has been translated into multiple languages. He is director of the Despacho de Ingeniería Cultural, S.C., presidente de la Fundación Cultural Samperio, A.C., newspaper columnist and contributor to The Financial magazine Siempre!, Día Siete, La Jornada Semanal y Laberinto (Milenio), among others. His most recent books are Marcos, el enmascarado de estambre, (biografía no autorizada y novelada), (Editorial Lectorum, Mexico), and an anthology of short stories, prose poetry and a novel titled Maravillas malabares (Editorial Cátedra, Spain).

Dr. Horacio Sentíes Madrid was born in Mexico City in 1970. Dr. Senties is an Honorary Fellow in Internal Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and a Headache Fellow at the Headache Clinic in Houston, Texas. He has given 146 lectures and has published 117 articles, book chapters, and abstracts in medical books and journals, and is a member of the editorial committee of multiple medical journals. Dr. Sentíes is Neurology professor (Panamericana University and Superior Studies Technological Institute of Monterrey), Neurophysiology professor (postgraduate course, UNAM). He was the Secretary of the Mexican Academy of Neurology and is the coordinator of Adults Latinoamerican Commission of the International League Against Epilepsy and Vicepresident of Epilepsy Mexican Chapter. He has published cultural essays (e.g. “The Enigma of Synesthesia” in Letras Libres) and fiction. He is also a piano composer.

Gerardo Sifuentes (Tampico, 1974) is a journalist and author of short stories. He was co-founder of the pioneer Spanish-language cyberpunk zine Fractal. His work has been collected twice, in Perro de Luz (Light Dog) (1999) and Pilotos Infernales (Infernal Pilots) (2002) and appeared in various magazines and anthologies, earning the 1998 Kalpa Prize for best short story published in Mexico and the 2002 Vid International Fantasy and Science Fiction Award for the best short story collection. He is currently editorial coordinator of Muy Interesante (Very Interesting), a popular science and history magazine.

José Luis Zárate (Puebla, 1966) is one of the best known contemporary Mexican authors of science fiction, as well as having written works outside the genre. His best known novels include Xanto, noveluche libre (Santo, a wrestling novel) (1994), La ruta del hielo and sal (The Road of Ice and Salt) (1998) and Del cielo oscuro y del abismo (The Dark Sky and the Abyss) (2001), together forming the trilogy “The Phases of Myth” in which the popular culture figures Dracula, Superman, and the Mexican masked wrestler El Santo are seen from the perspective of residents of their fictional worlds. His other works include the novel Ventana 654 ¿Cuánto Falta para el Futuro? (Window 654: How Far to the Future?) (2004), the short story collections El viajero (The Traveler) (1987), Permanencia Voluntaria (Volunteer Retention) (1990), Magia (Magic) (1994), Las razas ocultas (The Hidden Races) (1999), Hyperia (1999), and Quitzä y otros sitios (Quitzä and Other Sites) (2002), and the essay collection En el principio fue el sangre (In the Beginning was the Blood) (2004). A founder of the Mexican Science Fiction Association, his works have won various national and international awards, including the 1984 Más Allá Prize, the 1992 Kalpa Prize, the 1998 MECyF Prize, and the 2000 UPC Science Fiction Prize.

Hernán Lara Zavala is a short story writer, novelist and essayist. Although he was born in Mexico City his family comes from Yucatan where many of his stories are set. He is the author of a novel, Península Península, which was awarded the Real Academia Española Award, and a number of short story collections. He lives in México City where he teaches at the University of Mexico.

About the Editors

Born in Boston and raised in San Antonio, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Hispanic literature and a doctoral degree in the humanities from a Catholic university in Madrid. He has taught undergraduate literature courses at the University of Texas in San Antonio and recently obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence from Cornell Law School. He has published translations of books by contemporary Mexican authors Bruno Estañol, Rafael Pérez Gay and José María Pérez Gay. In recent years, he has also published scholarly studies on the Spanish poet Antonio Machado and the Mexican fiction writer Bruno Estañol. Lately, he has conducted readings and lectures on the subject of literary translation at the invitation of Cornell University, New York University, The New School and the Juárez Autonomous University of Tabasco.

Chris N. Brown writes fiction and criticism from his home in Austin, Texas. His work has been variously described as “slick, post-Gibsonian, and funny as hell, like Neal Stephenson meets Hunter S. Thompson” (Cory Doctorow), “Borges in a pop culture blender” (Invisible Library), and “like a cross between Mark Leyner and William Gibson” (Boing Boing). He also contributes to the group blog No Fear of the Future.

Bruce Sterling is the author of eleven novels (including the bestselling The Difference Engine with William Gibson), six short story collections, and four nonfiction books. He also edited the genre-defining Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. He has written for Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Technology Review, and Wired. In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School and in 2005 he became “visionary in residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He lives in Turin, Italy, and blogs at Wired‘s Beyond the Beyond.

Launch Events
January 26, 7PM, Book People, Austin, TX
Chris N. Brown, Bernardo Fernández and Pepe Rojo celebrate the publication of Three Messages with an event at one of Austin’s premiere indie bookstores.

January 28, 2PM, Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005
Join Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, for an afternoon celebration of the book at one of Houston’s pre-eminent indie bookstores.

January 26, 6 – 9PM, Creativity and the Brain Conference, Texas Diabetes Institute, 701 S. Zarzamora, San Antonio, TX  78207
Featuring editor Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and three contributors, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez

Taggert can heal and hurt with just a touch. When an ex calls for help, he risks the wrath of his enigmatic master to try and save her daughter. But when Taggert realizes the daughter has more power than even he can imagine, he has to wrestle with the very nature of his skills, not to mention unmanned and uncreated gods, in order keep the girl safe. In the end, Taggert will have to use more than his power, he has to delve into his heart and soul to survive.

Read Ayize’s excellent and hilarious Book Brahmin piece for Shelf Awareness.

Read the first three chapters.

Ayize Jama-Everett reading from ‘The Liminal People,’ backed by Fenyang Smith.

The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith.

“You’ll be sucked into a fast-paced story about superpowered people struggling for control of the underground cultures they inhabit…. The novel is a damn good read. It’s a smart actioner that will entertain you while also enticing you to think about matters beyond the physical realm.”
—Annalee Newitz, io9

“For all the grit, character and poetry on display here, Everett’s own super power appears to be plotting and set-pieces. Readers will find a quick immersion in the opening scene, and then some secret world-building. Once the plot kicks in, readers had best be prepared to finish the book in one sitting, while experiencing better special effects than you will find in any movie. Indeed, Everett’s prose is cinematic in the best sense; when he puts us in a scene of action, his descriptions take on a hyper-clarity that is better than telepathy. The plot arc is cunning and enjoyably surprising, and the revelations have the shock of the new but the old-school satisfaction of well-woven espionage plots. ‘The Liminal People’ is seriously well-written, but also seriously fun to read. It’s a secret world that deserves the elegant exposition of this engaging novel — and a sequel, sooner rather than later.”
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

“Ayize Jama-Everett has brewed a voodoo cauldron of Sci-Fi, Romance, Crime, and Superhero Comic, to provide us with a true gestalt of understanding, offering us both a new definition of “family” and a world view on the universality of human conduct. The Liminal People—as obviously intended—will draw different reactions from different readers. But none of them will stop reading until its cataclysmic ending.”
—Andrew Vachss

“Ayize’s imagination will mess with yours, and the world won’t ever look quite the same again.”
—Nalo Hopkinson

“The Liminal People has the pleasures of classic sf while being astonishingly contemporary and savvy.”
—Maureen F. McHugh

“Fast and sleek and powerful—a skillful and unique mix of supernatural adventure and lived-in, persuasive, often moving noir.”
—Felix Gilman, author of The Half-Made World

Author Events: Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA; Atlanta, GA; Boston, MA; New York, NY

Check out theliminalpeople.com.

Cover by Adam S. Doyle.

Ayize Jama-Everett was born in 1974 and raised in Harlem, New York. Since then he has traveled extensively in Northern Africa, New Hampshire, and Northern California. He holds a Master’s in Clinical Psychology and a Master’s in Divinity. He teaches religion and psychology at Starr King School for the Ministry when he’s not working as a school therapist at the College Preparatory School. When not educating, studying, or beating himself up for not writing enough, he’s usually enjoying aged rums and practicing his aim.

Standard Edition, 134 pages:
— order the print edition ($13.95)
— ebook: Weightless ($3.99) /  Lulu ($3.99)

Almanac Edition which includes all the prompts, exercises, reading lists, and articles from the two previous editions, 182 pages:
— order the print edition ($15.95)
— ebook Weightless ($4.99) / Lulu ebook ($5.99)

A Working Writer’s Daily Planner is the perfect place to keep everything writing-related: whether it’s the minutia of deadlines and word counts, the writing ideas and inspirations that insist on being jotted down, or the most private hopes and dreams. There’s nothing like having this planner in hand to show how much time, effort, thought, and love a writer puts into writing.

Our redesigned third annual Daily Planner is the perfect gift for anyone interested in writing from teenager to grandparent. Cover and interior art by Kathleen Jennings.

Praise for previous editions:

“I know some writers who have spent many, many hours trying to figure out the ins and outs of residency programs, grant applications and even MFA programs in creative writing. A lot of that work is done for you here, with those deadlines detailed and looming some time before their due dates.”
—Jacket Copy, Los Angeles Times

“Like many writers, I have a thing for shiny new planners, dreams of organization and a complete lack of follow-through after March. No more, my friends! A gift from a fellow writer will keep my bad thang on track—at least until June. A Working Writer’s Daily Planner from Small Beer Press is a practical planner for those of us who are distracted by bright and shiny things (like Facebook, admit it). Spiral bound, good quality paper to take the ink and chock-full of goodies such as writing exercises, paper dolls and workshop information (plus much more), it’s already been marked up with deadlines and dog-eared.”
—Momgadget.com

“An incredible gift for your favorite writer, or yourself.”
—Kelli Russell

“What I just pulled out of the shipping box is a solid little book of 144 pages of text printed on a good stock of 6×9-inch paper and spiral bound to lay flat. The spiral, by the way, is made of a heavy wire and bent in at the ends, so it should both stay on the book and make it through the year.”
—Women of Mystery

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How to Format a Manuscript
“A Mayan Apocalypse Primer for the WorkingWriter,” Michael J. DeLuca
“Ladies, Please!,” Sarah Rees Brennan
State Arts Grants
“What I Know About Literary Agents,” Geoffrey Goodwin
“Rewriting,” Kelley Eskridge
“A Short 2012 Reading List,”Su-Yee Lin
Future Planning
Further Resources
Contest and Award Fees
CLMP Contest Code of Ethics
“A (Mostly) Contemporary British Reading List,” Rebecca Isherwood
Fifty First Sentences
Residency Spotlight
Submission Tracker
“111 Contradictory Writing Suggestions,” Geoffrey Goodwin
Science Fiction Spotlight
A Reading List of  Favorite Romances,” Kelly Link
“Bestsellers: Do They Last?”

2010 & 2011 EXTRAS (Almanac Edition only)

Book Festivals
Writing Exercise: A Reality Show Story
“The Editorial Assistant,” Rebecca Isherwood
“How to Find a Writing Group,” Ben Francisco
Six Reading Lists
An Even Dozen Writing Prompts
Debut Author Interview: Kelly Link interviews N.K. Jemisin
Writing Exercise: A Play on Words
“Story Idea Generation,” Kelly Link
“What I Know About Writing,” Geoffrey Goodwin
Writing Exercise: Genre Musical Chairs
“Reading as a Writer,” Kelly Link
“How to End a Story,” Nick Mamatas
Writing Exercise: The Cliché Trainwreck
Where to Find Out About MFA Programs
April is National Poetry Month: Spotlight on Poetry
Writing Exercise: Truth or Fiction
“Beyond Competent and Accomplished: A Call to Action for Workshoppers,” Kelly Link
“Trivia Vs. Writing Real Stories,” Kate Wilhelm
Persevere
Writing Exercise: Dialogue
Online Writing Workshop Spotlight
Writing Exercise: Soundtrack First
Photo and Illustration Credits

A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2012 Sample

Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011

• A new interview with Delia Sherman on Fantasy Matters.
• Delia Sherman Week @ Fantasy Matters: reviewed, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Freedom Maze,” and “The Fantastic in the Fine Arts: The Work of Kathleen Jennings.”
• Delia writes about the Big Idea behind the novel: “Eighteen years ago, I was stuck.”
• Delia’s guest post on Diversity in YA: “When I began writing The Freedom Maze, back in 1987, I didn’t intend to write a book about race.”
• Listen to an interview with Delia Sherman and a reading from The Freedom Maze.
• Download the first chapter. [PDF link]
• Launch party photos.

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

“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

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2011
io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011
Philip K. Dick Award finalist

The apocalypse was yesterday. These stories are today.

Following up on her first collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh explores the catastrophes, small and large, of twenty-first century life—and what follows after. What happens after the bird flu pandemic? Are our computers smarter than we are? What does the global economy mean for two young girls in China? Are we really who we say we are? And how will we survive the coming zombie apocalypse?

“The stories in After the Apocalypse will catch many readers off-guard; they’re suspenseful, but they never quite go where you expect them to. The end of the world as we know it will never be the same again.”
—Salon

“Superb. . . . Against backdrops of sheer terror, Ms. McHugh’s characters insist on investing themselves in flirtations, friendships and jobs. They keep their innocent curiosity for the world even as it falls to pieces.”
—Wall Street Journal

Read a story: “The Naturalist” · “The Kingdom of the Blind”

Interviews: Jessa Crispin, Kirkus Reviews · David Moles &  Maureen F. McHugh in conversation.

“McHugh brings a subtle grittiness to the end of days. There is no post-apocalyptic glamour in these post-apocalyptic tales.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“These nine stories take place in a world that has been ravaged by prion diseases and economic collapse, even as it enters a new age of artificial intelligence and green biotech. You won’t be able to forget the people you meet there.”
—io9

“McHugh’s approach to the apocalypse is oblique, a concern with the personal, the individual or family unit, rather than the devastation that surrounds them…. [T]here are perhaps half a dozen stories that are as powerful as anything you are likely to read this year.”
—Strange Horizons

“The best stories in this mesmerizing collection from the L.A. writer are the ones that elude categorization—the struggles of a troubled doll maker in “Useless Things,” the fantasies of an impulsive man in “Going to France.” It’s the ordinary and everyday that we should be afraid of, not the prospect of big explosions and world-ending catastrophes. This is a pro stretching a genre to its limits—subverting, inverting, perverting, disturbing.”
—Los Angeles Magazine

“If you haven’t discovered McHugh yet, After the Apocalypse is a must-have.”
—Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker

“You aren’t ready for tomorrow until you’ve seen it through McHugh’s observant gaze.”
—io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011

“Intriguing. . . . If the stories here are anything to go by, author Maureen McHugh thinks we should be very afraid of the future. What awaits us is desolation, meaninglessness, and an abnegation of all progressive values…. These stories are about the life that continues when everything is over.”
—The Future Fire

“Hugo-winner McHugh (Mothers & Other Monsters) puts a human face on global disaster in nine fierce, wry, stark, beautiful stories. . . . As McHugh’s entirely ordinary characters begin to understand how their lives have been transformed by events far beyond their control, some shrink in horror while others are “matter of fact as a heart attack,” but there is no suicidal drama, and the overall effect is optimistic: we may wreck our planet, our economies, and our bodies, but every apocalypse will have an “after” in which people find their own peculiar ways of getting by.”
—Publishers Weekly (*starred review*)

“Like George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996), McHugh displays an uncanny ability to hook into our prevailing end-of-the-world paranoia and feed it back to us in refreshingly original and frequently funny stories. In these nine apocalyptic tales, people facing catastrophes, from a zombie plague to a fatal illness contracted from eating chicken nuggets, do their best to cope. In “Useless Things,” perhaps the most affecting story in the collection, a resourceful sculptor, worried about drought and money in a time of high unemployment and increasing lawlessness, turns her exquisite crafstmanship to fashioning sex toys and selling them on the Internet with the hope of making enough money to pay her property taxes. In “Honeymoon,” a participant in a medical trial that goes horribly wrong watches in horror as six men are hospitalzed in critical condition; she uses her payment to take a vacation because, when all was said and done, she “wanted to dance. It didn’t seem like a bad choice.” That survival instinct is what makes McHugh’s collection a surprisingly sunny read in spite of the global disasters that threaten at every turn. An imaginative homage to the human ability to endure.”
—Booklist (*starred review*)

“All our worst dystopian fears are realized.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Interview: Publishers Weekly

Audio rights sold to Recorded Books.

Table of Contents

The Naturalist
Special Economics
Useless Things
The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large
The Kingdom of the Blind
Going to France
Honeymoon
The Effect of Centrifugal Forces
After the Apocalypse

Praise for Maureen F. McHugh:

“Gorgeously crafted stories.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR

“Hauntingly beautiful.”—Booklist

“Unpredictable and poetic work.”—The Plain Dealer

“Poignant and sometimes heartwrenching.”—Publishers Weekly

Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor’s choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse: Stories

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)

“A thoughtful and thought-provoking beginning to a new fantasy series. The Cape Cod woods, wildlife, and beaches are depicted with loving detail, and the dark forces arrayed against the young protagonists are at once tantalizingly mystifying and alarmingly timely.”
—Patricia McKillip

“Lydia Millet knows the sea like a selkie. The Fires Beneath the Sea smells of salt and tastes of mist, and that beauty speaks as strongly as its story of peril and hope for the future of our fragile world.”
—Kathe Koja, author of Talk

The Fires Beneath the Sea by Lydia Millet

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of six previous novels, including My Happy Life, which won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In his second bibliomystery, Boston bookhound Henry Sullivan has a new girlfriend, a new apartment, and a shelfload of troubles.

Chaucer said “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.” Henry Sullivan, bookhound, is ready to be that sleeping dog: to settle down in his new apartment and enjoy life with his new girlfriend.

But the underside of the literary world won’t let him go. A bookscout sells Henry a book—and is murdered later that night. An old friend asks him to investigate a case of possible plagiarism involving a local bestselling author. To make matters worse, his violinist neighbor seems to have a stalker. And wherever Henry goes, there’s a cop watching him.

Henry can read the signs: to save those he loves he has to save himself.

“In 22 years of bookselling I find that readers remain endlessly fascinated with an insider look at the book business—an oxymoron right there.
Vincent McCaffrey offers a real insider’s view in A Slepyng Hound to Wake—a quote from Chaucer—the sequel to the splendid hit, Hound. I’d call them “biblio-noirs” rather than bibliomysteries: the deeds are dark even though bookhound Henry Sullivan becomes involved in what first seem academic rather than criminal matters. How likely is it that the possible ripping-off (OK, plagiarism) of a bestselling author could lead to murder? Dark, too, is Henry’s outlook on his professional world where centuries of tradition are daily eroded by digital publishing and internet bookselling. This gloom carries over into his relationships, freighting them in a classic noir fashion. Still, Henry is a character cut from Raymond Chandler: a modern knight on a mission to save those, and what, he loves.”
—Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen

“McCaffrey makes good use of his Boston setting. . . . Slepyng Hound provides an easy, intelligent read.”
—Gumshoe Reviews

“In McCaffrey’s compelling second mystery to feature Boston book dealer Henry Sullivan (after 2009′s Hound), Henry is unsettled by the murder of a fellow “book hound” down on his luck, Eddy Perry, who just sold Henry a rare volume of Lovecraft horror stories. Later, former girlfriend Barbara Krause, the owner of Alcott & Poe, an independent bookstore, asks Henry’s help in investigating a plagiarism case. Sharon Greene, one of Barbara’s employees, has accused a local literary heavyweight, George Duggan, of stealing from the work of the late James Frankowski, a little-known writer with whom Sharon lived for years. Meanwhile, Barbara struggles to keep Alcott & Poe afloat in an era of recession and e-commerce. A longtime bookstore owner himself, McCaffrey places less emphasis on crime solving than on the larger question of the printed word’s place in today’s world. Evocative prose and characterizations will remind many of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels.”
—Publishers Weekly

“There’s a Woody Allen tone to this one, and you’ll enjoy sharing it with bibliophiles or anyone who appreciates quirky characters. The plotting and weaving of story lines hide a clever puzzle, but most readers will forget they’re reading a mystery until all the pieces fall into place at the very end. Lisa Lutz fans could like this.”
—Library Journal

“Henry’s second (Hound, 2009) is not for those who require a fast and furious story line. The strong mystery is woven into a slow-paced, philosophical discussion of the painful demise of those special bookstores whose nooks and crannies once yielded fabulous finds.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Start reading:

Chapter One

The books were like corpses, the ink of lost dreams dried in their veins. On a bad day, Henry Sullivan felt like a mortician salvaging the moldering flesh of small decaying bodies to be preserved for a proper burial. But, on a good day, though there seemed to be fewer of those of late, he might save something which left him giddy.

Henry pulled the second box free from a mat of cat hair and dust beneath the bed, and peeked beneath the lid.

“Yes!”

The foul odor of the mattress too close to his face, made him swallow the word along with the impulse to gag.
A month before, after lifting the spoiled leaves of disbound volumes abandoned in a basement beneath the seep of a ruined foundation, he had uncovered loose pages sheltered by a collapsed box of empty Croft Ale bottles. Separating the layers until the fetor of mold had made him dizzy, he had salvaged a bundle six inches thick of cream colored rag paper broadsides, announcements, and advertisements, all in French. They had been discarded by a print collector interested only in the engravings originally meant to illustrate the words. And in the heart of that, Henry had found a first printing of ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.’

Those rare sheets were sold now to the highest bidder, but they were a part of the romance Henry imagined about himself. It was still his belief that long before Foucault and Derrida, when words still offered a common meaning, the world could be changed by the content of a few fragile pages. And this was why Henry Sullivan loved his job.

And this happened every once in awhile, more often to him than others he thought, because he had a nose for it.

Henry pushed a broom hand into the depths of the crevice below the bed frame. Again he heard the hollow strike on a box. . . .

Praise for Hound:

“There’s something charismatic and timeless about the way the story builds and McCaffrey opens Henry’s life to the reader . . . McCaffrey is . . . just telling a compelling, old-school yarn, the kind of story a man who knows his literature tells.”
—Time Out Chicago

“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love.”
—The Hippo

Cover by Tom Canty.

Vincent McCaffrey’s novel Hound was chosen as a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. He has owned the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years. He has been paid to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. A Slepying Hound to Wake is his second novel and he is hard at work on the next novel featuring Henry Sullivan.

“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

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.

“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.