An August 2010 Indie Next Notable Book

New: Read excerpts from Meeks at The Collagist, BenMarcus.net, and Conjunctions.

“The satire here has plenty of bite, but instead of winking at the reader, Holmes evokes her world with luminous prose.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A highly imaginative debut finds a stark Darwinian logic in a rigidly hierarchical society. . . . Holmes has fashioned a terrifying and utterly convincing world in which the perfect human being is one stripped of all illusions.”
—Publishers Weekly

No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor’s suit . . . and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, he’s just discovered that his mother is dead and that his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn’t enough, he must now find a wife, or he’ll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city’s oppressive factories.

Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he’s a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks’s survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain—but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration?

A dark satire rendered with all the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film, Julia Holmes’s debut novel evokes the strange charm of a Haruki Murakami novel in a dystopic setting reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Meeks portrays a world at once hilarious and disquieting, in which frustrated revolutionaries and hopeful youths suffer alongside the lost and the condemned, just for a chance at the permanent bliss of marriage and a slice of sugar-frosted Independence Day cake.

Early Reader Reaction:

“Meeks is a feat of desolating literary spellcraft, irresistible for its bleak hilarity and the sere brilliance of Julia Holmes’s prose.”
—Wells Tower (author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned)

“The world of Meeks is cruel, cold, and weird, suffocating in laws so strange they very nearly resemble our own.  Julia Holmes is that rare artist who, with invention and mythology, reveals nothing less than the most secret inner workings of the real world we overlook every day. A masterful debut by a writer of the most forceful originality.”
—Ben Marcus (author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String)

“Oh bachelors, poor bachelors, pining for their pale suits—these needy men, so poignant in their search for wives, will break your heart in twain. Splendid and limping, hilarious and painful, a quiet perfection in its idiosyncrasy, the powerful alternate reality of Meeks is also an unforgettable truth. You’ll never see marriage the same way again.”
—Lydia Millet (author of How the Dead Dream and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)

“The life of a bachelor is always hard, but in Meeks it’s truly desperate: if you don’t have the right suit then it’s either the Brothers of Mercy or the factories. Julia Holmes’s lucid prose tightens the noose of this curious world around your readerly neck before you even know what’s hit you. An invisible enemy, a pageant, a fashion system whose signification would stymie Roland Barthes, and a society that demands everyone rush quickly to fill their odd social slot, makes Meeks a unique (and uniquely imaginative) nightmare and a severely engrossing read.”
—Brian Evenson (author of  Fugue State and The Open Curtain)

“Pity the young gentleman set loose in this world of cruel tailors, perpetual war, large-scale civic pastry and the untold rivalries of the Bachelor House! With her uncommonly assured first novel, Julia Holmes channels the surreal paranoia of Poe and the dark-comic melodrama of a lost Guy Maddin script. The strangest, most compelling debut you’ll read this year.”
—Mark Binelli (author of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!)

Cover art © Robyn O’Neil.

New: Read the Introduction and first chapter on Tor.com.

Karen writes about Paama’s origins for Scalzi’s Big Idea.

Karen blogs for one of our favorite bookstores, Powell’s.com: Listening to stories. Making a book trailer. Cake! Authenticity. The Muse.

In this clever and entrancing debut novel—which won the Frank Collymore Award—Paama frees herself from a troublesome and capricious husband, only to become the unwitting heroine in a fantastic struggle to reconcile the supernatural forces of fate with humanity’s free will.

“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

“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

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

Events Calendar

Sept. 9: Reading with Julia Holmes
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street, New York, NY

Sept. 12: Karen will be a panelist at the Brooklyn Book Festival,
Brooklyn Borough Hall
209 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

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

Check back for more readings, a launch party in Barbados, and more!

Beautifully designed by the author and printed in two colors: you have to handle this book to believe how beautiful it is. You can see the title page and first couple of chapters here.

Small Beer Press are delighted to publish the first US edition (updated with the author’s corrections from the UK edition) of Alasdair Gray’s latest novel, Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers, a unique melding of humor and metafiction that at once hearkens back to Laurence Sterne yet sits beside today’s literary mash-ups with equal comfort. Old Men in Love is smart, down-to-earth, funny, bawdy, politically inspired, dark, multi-layered, and filled with the kind of intertextual play that Gray delights in.

As with Gray’s previous novel Poor Things, several partial narratives are presented together. Here the conceit is that they were all discovered in the papers of the late John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow teacher who started a number of novels in settings as varied as Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset, and Britain under New Labour. Fifty percent is fact and the rest is possible, but it must be read to be believed.

Old Men in Love on Omnivoracious: First, Jeff VanderMeer interviews Alasdair Gray, then Will Self’s Appreciation from the dustjacket, and finally an excerpt from the Introduction by Lady Sara Sim-Jaeger.

Also: a wonderful recent interview with Alasdair Gray by Ari Messer on The Rumpus.

Reviews

“God bless visionary eccentrics. . . . In today’s case, I am lavishing thanks not only for the existence of Alasdair Gray, our present-day reigning literary eccentric, but also for his marvelous invention, John Tunnock:  crabby and crabbed, quintessentially Scottish misanthrope, unsung and deceased novelist, surname-sharer with a teacake, “hero,” if I may be so bold, of Old Men in Love.”
—Paul Di Filippo, Barnes and Noble Review

“Like the best of Gray’s work, Old Men in Love is funny and profane, but with a shuddering anger to the politics. Despite its swinging widely through time and space to portray men in power, their vulnerabilities and the perils of unchecked desire, perhaps the novel’s best section is its most mundane and personal: Gray’s portrayal of John Tunnock as a young boy trying to find his (lonely) place in working-class Glasgow. With a dead mother and a father he never knew, he’s left to two plucky maiden aunts. His coming of age includes sherry, comic book superheroines in very tight costumes, his discovery of pornography and being discovered with pornography by his schoolmaster.”
—Jessa Crispin, NPR (Read a short excerpt on NPR)

“What makes reading Alasdair Gray worthwhile is that, though he may not always be a successful literary stylist, he repeatedly manages to articulate our innate need to be creative and the despair that comes with the inability to successfully express ourselves. He also reminds us that often our ideals exceed our actions and abilities. More than once, he’s introduced his novels with the exhortation, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation,” and it’s this optimism, in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds, that keeps me coming back to this author.”
—Gerry Donaghy, Powells.com

About the Author

Alasdair Gray, born 1934, is a painter certificated by Glasgow Art School. Unable to live by one art he became jack of several and Old Men in Love is his 19th book. In The Dublin Independent Lawrence Sterne says it will swim down the gutter of time with the legation of Moses and A Tale of A Tub. Says Urquhart of Cromarty in The Scots Magazine, Relish the cheese-like brain that feeds you with these trifling jollities. Dr Samuel Johnson in The Rambler writes, Never has penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment been so happily disguised. Sidney Workman in the Epilogue says This book should not be read. In this blurb Alasdair Gray writes, Old Men in Love is bound to sell well because everyone now feels old after 25 so all youngsters are interested in what comes next.

Reactions to the British edition:

“Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts.”—The Times (London)

“The culmination of a lifetime spent honing his unique ideas and approach.”
—New Statesman

“That very rare bird among contemporary British writers—a genuine experimentalist. The influence of James Joyce, and Lauren Sterne, is very evident, but Gray does not seem merely derivative from these masters. He is very much his own man.”
—David Lodge

“This is one of Alasdair Gray’s best novels. (…) A preoccupation with the true meaning of democratic accountability is one of several themes uniting these linked stories. Freedom, including artistic freedom, is at the core of Old Men in Love. Gray is sly and witty, but also, and more impressively, he writes with stylish honesty. Presented as a schoolteacher’s book, Old Men in Love has a didactic tone at times, but gets away with it. (…) Postmodern it may be, but this is clearly a work by a lover of Dickens, Scott, James Hogg and John Galt. Its rewardingly readable narratives owe as much to the narrative quirkiness of the great age of 19th-century fiction as to today’s tricksiness. Old Men in Love shows Gray’s old strengths confidently renascent.”
—Robert Crawford, The Independent

“Waywardness is central to this novel’s artistic vision; waywardness, rather than rebellion in the Romantic style. (…) Once again, in this ingenious, engaging novel, Alasdair Gray has struck a blow for an altogether more meaningful sort of freedom.”
—Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gray, Alasdair.
Old men in love : John Tunnock’s posthumous papers / introduced by Lady Sara Sim-Jaeger ; edited, decorated by Alasdair Gray. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-931520-69-0 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PR6057.R3264O43 2010
823′.914–dc22
2010005876

• Book Notes for A Life on Paper from Gauvin and Châteaureynaud at largehearted boy: “Bold, fabulous tales filled with palpable tension, a wonderful introduction to a talented writer.”
• Read “The Excursion” on Joyland

“As weird as they are elegant, as delicious as they are unsettling, these fables place Châteaureynaud in the secret brotherhood that has only exemplars, no definition: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Nathanael West, Aimee Bender. We are lucky indeed to have them, in a very skilled translation.”
—John Crowley (Little, Big)

“Châteaureynaud’s stories are disorienting, bizarre, mythical. The stories don’t end with epiphanies or a tidy wrapping-up. Some of the endings are abrupt, even unsatisfying; they feel more like a beginning. So what? A Life on Paper is fantastic in both meanings: it’s fantastic, as in strange, unreal, weird, imaginary; and it’s fantastic, as in absolutely fucking awesome. People will call A Life on Paper magical realism. A few will call it irrealism. I don’t care what you call it. I just want you to read it.”
—Bookslut

“Both classic and modern, strange and simple, Châteaureynaud’s stories remind not only of Vonnegut but of Gogol and Kafka. What’s endearing about the stories is the amount of tenderness running through them. Even in stories about bizarre cruelty (the title story tells of a father who had his daughter photographed a dozen times a day for her entire life), affection provides the glue.”
—Time Out Chicago

“A Life on Paper is a brief selection from more than thirty years of fiction. Châteaureynaud has a backlist for American readers that this book makes enticingly tangible, almost real. His own work is such that it might be subject of one of his stories. This might be all there is, the rest pure fabrication. The unreal, awaiting translation.”
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

“These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Châteaureynaud’s work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories.”
—Publishers Weekly

The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection—the first to be translated into English—introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Châteaureynaud is France’s own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic.

A Life on Paper presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in “Icarus Saved from the Skies,” even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father’s obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Châteaureynaud’s stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious.

“Châteaureynaud’s dance steps are so nimble that he seems, without effort, to show us what is best in others.”
—Brooklyn Rail

Table of Contents

Foreword by Brian Evenson
A Citizen Speaks
A Life on Paper
Come Out, Come Out
Icarus Saved from the Skies
The Only Mortal
The Peacocks
Unlivable
A Room on the Abyss
The Gulf of the Years
The Dolceola Player
The Pest
Delaunay the Broker
The Excursion
La Tête
The Styx
The Beautiful Coalwoman
A City of Museums — author reading (in French)
The Guardicci Masterpiece
Écorcheville
Sweet Street
The Bronze Schoolboy
The Pavilion and the Linden
Another Story

Printed on recycled paper by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan.
Text set in Centaur 12 pt.

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is the author of nine novels, two young adult novels, and over one hundred short stories. Despite a lifelong fear of flying, he has been to Peru—his only time on a plane—and lived to pen a travel memoir about the experience. He is the recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle (for short stories), Prix Giono, Prix Valéry Larbaud, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. His work has been translated into fourteen languages.

Born in Paris in 1947, Châteaureynaud was a solitary child who became a voracious and unprejudiced reader, ingesting Treasure Island as avidly as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He studied English at the Sorbonne, discovering Stevenson, Shelley, Stoker, and Wells, and later took a degree in library science from the École Nationale Supérieure des Bibliothèques. In 1968, he embarked on a series of odd jobs—including antiques dealer and auto assembly line laborer—that comprised, in his words, an “apprenticeship in human nature,” cementing his sympathy for the marginal, outcast figures who would become his luckless, well-meaning, Everyman heroes and narrators. Grasset published his first collection in 1973, Le fou dans la chaloupe.

With novelist Hubert Haddad, and fellow Goncourt winners Frédéric Tristan and sinologist Jean Lévi, Châteaureynaud is a founding member of the contemporary movement La Nouvelle Fiction: “New” because it rose up against the prevailingly minimalist and confessional tendencies (autofiction) of recent French writing, seeking to rouse it from what critic Jean-Luc Moreau called “the slumber of psychological realism,” and to restore myth, fable, and fairy tale to a place of primacy in fiction.

In 1983 and 1990, Châteaureynaud was a representative of the Foreign Services Ministry to Quebec and then to Greece. He has been consistently involved with the Centre National du Livre and the SGDL (Société des Gens de Lettres de France). He plays an active part in fostering new talent, serving on the juries of such diverse prizes as the Fondation BNP-Paribas Young Writers Award, the international Prix Prométhée de la nouvelle, the Prix Renaudot, and the Prix Renaissance. Châteaureynaud sees his enthusiastic participation in these institutions as a way of repaying the literary community that has allowed him the luxury of dedication to his craft. An Officier des Arts et Lettres of France, he is currently the editorial director of foreign literature at Editions Dumerchez. In 2006, he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Edward Gauvin has published Châteaureynaud’s work in AGNI Online, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Words Without Borders, LCRW, Postscripts, Epiphany, The Café Irreal, Eleven Eleven, Sentence, and The Brooklyn Rail. A graduate of the Iowa Workshop, he has received a Fulbright grant as well as fellowships from the Centre National du Livre, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the Clarion Foundation and residencies from the Maison des Écritures Midi-Pyrénées, Ledig House, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Other translations of his have been featured or are forthcoming in PEN America, Tin House, Interfictions 2, Subtropics, Silk Road, Two Lines, and Absinthe. A consulting editor for graphic literature at Words Without Borders, he translates comics for Archaia, First Second, and Tokyopop. He has lived in Austin, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, New York, Taipei, and Amiens, France.

Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d’un programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires éstrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

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

Read a story now: “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown”

* “Black’s first story collection assures her place as a modern fantasy master…. Sly humor, vivid characters, each word perfectly chosen: These stories deserve reading again and again.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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. These stories have been published in anthologies such as 21 Proms, The Faery Reel, and The Restless Dead, and 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.

“Black (the Good Neighbors series) proves equally adept at urban fantasy and more traditional fairy tales, and her stories often feature the edgy sexuality and angst that have become her trademarks.”
—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Holly Black’s books:

“Black’s series [is] considered to have kick-started the fairy trend in young adult fantasy.”
—NY Times Book Review

“Gritty, grim, and fabulous—Holly is a master of dark magic and dark reality!”
—Tamora Pierce (author of Bloodhound)

“Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition.”
—Ellen Kushner (author of The Privilege of the Sword)

“Simply put, Holly Black is one of our best writers. Enchanting and edgy, yes, but it’s the big heart in her stories that brings me back to her writing, time and again. Reading a new book by Holly is like meeting up with an old friend. They might be a little messed up from the last time you saw them, they might have some serious drama going on in their lives, but the connection is immediate, and when they’re packing up to head off again, you don’t want to let them go.”
—Charles de Lint (author of The Blue Girl)

“Dark, edgy, beautifully written, and compulsively readable, this is sure to be a word-of-mouth hit with teens.”
—Booklist

“An unusually powerful YA contemporary fantasy, and an outstanding first novel.”
—Locus

“Debauchery, despair, deceit, and grisly death–what more could you ask from a fairy tale?”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Dark, edgy fantasy.”
—School Library Journal

Table of Contents

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

Holly Black is the author of Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults) and two related novels, Valiant (Norton Award winner, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, CCBC Choices) and Ironside, as well as a new novel, White Cat. She and Tony DiTerlizzi created the best-selling Spiderwick Chronicles. She is working on a graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors, with artist Ted Naifeh. She and her husband, Theo, live in Massachusetts.

Previously: March 11, 2010, a Boston event with Kelly Link and Cassandra Clare raised more than $800 for Franciscan Hospital for Children.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Black, Holly.
The poison eaters and other stories / Holly Black. — 1st ed.
v. cm.
Contents: The coldest girl in Coldtown — A reversal of fortune — The boy who cried wolf — The night market — The dog king — Virgin — In vodka veritas — The coat of stars — Paper cuts scissors — Going Ironside — The land of heart’s desire — The poison eaters.
ISBN 978-1-931520-63-8 (alk. paper)
1.  Children’s stories, American. [1. Fantasy. 2. Short stories.]  I. Title.
PZ7.B52878Po 2010
[Fic]–dc22

“I am ticking off the days until I can get my Working Writer’s Daily Planner. All work is at a complete stop until its arrival.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2010 is made by writers for writers—all kinds of writers. Whether you’re published or not, a poet, a bestselling novelist, retired, in school, an academic, a short story writer, or you are researching your nonfiction magnum opus, you’ll find that this calendar is a powerful motivational tool which easily integrates into the workday. You’ll find inspiration in the stimulating exercises  along with the daily and weekly structure you need to get the work done.

Download a Free Sample: March 2010 | Scribd.

Every week has its own page with  a handy list of upcoming deadlines, writing contests, information on where to apply for residencies, as well as inspiring quotations or writing prompts and exercises and suggestions, Federal Holidays (extra writing time!), and, at least once a month, a suggestion for a magazine (or other market) to submit your work to.

A Working Writer’s Daily Planner is first and foremost a practical resource: Each deadline or residency application is accompanied by a website address so that you can go straight to the source for more information. However, most listings also have all the information you need to apply or to send in your submission as well as a simple code so that you can tell immediately if a program, award, or market is appropriate.

Each month has a page for notes which you can use to plan ahead and at the back, you will find a handy Submissions Tracker to keep track of where and when you sent your work out, as well as many other features for you to use and enjoy throughout the year.

And, courtesy of our friend Abby Denson, for that time when you just need a total break from it all: there are paper dolls!

A Quick Index to A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2010

Finding an MFA Program
Kelly Link, “Beyond Competent and Accomplished: A Call to Action for Workshoppers”
How to Format a Manuscript
Kate Wilhelm, “Trivia Vs. Writing Real Stories”
Persevere
Contest and Award Fees
Goal Planner
Further Resources
CLMP Contest Code of Ethics
Paper Dolls
Submission Tracker
Photo and illustration credits

Reading Lists
Early Spring, Late Spring, Summer, Late Summer, Winter

Writing Exercises
Quick, Truth Or . . .?, Fifty First Sentences, Clichés, Soundtrack First

Writing Prompts

Spotlights
Grants, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Poetry, Independent Magazines, State Arts Focus, Younger Writers, Residencies, Online Writing Classes

Inclusion of events, workshops, conventions, conferences, magazines, contests, websites, and anything else in this calendar in no way constitutes an endorsement by Small Beer Press who shall not be held accountable for any ­­­changes since the date of publication or reliance upon this information by readers. Please check the websites listed for full information on residencies, journals, grants, and so on. Small Beer Press received no payment or consideration in any form for any information included in this calendar. This is a work in progress and will be updated for 2011. We love to hear from readers so if there is something you would like to see included in next year’s calendar, please contact us at the address below.

A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2010 is available at a discount to workshops, groups, companies, or for use as a premium. Please contact us for more information, thank you.

“Each week is given a full page with enough space to jot down interview times, for example, or to make note of those awful looming deadlines…. But there’s much more in here than the birth dates of writers who are far more famous than most of us will ever be. The facing pages are packed with information about writers’ residencies, writing prizes and awards in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, writing fellowships, writing prompts and exercises, practical tips on formatting manuscripts and links to writing blogs and other online resources—and words of inspiration.”
—The Daily Hampshire Gazette

Instant Discounts (includes Media Mail shipping in the USA):

2 copies: $9

3 copies: $13

4 copies: $15

5 copies: $18!

Made by Small Beer Press in 2009.
Printed on 100# Boydon Gloss by United Graphics, Inc. of Maltoon, IL.
Text set in Cochin.

Q. Where do I find a book like Interfictions 2 in my local bookshop if this is a book that slips between the crevices?
A. Good questions! It depends, as always, on your local booksellers. They might have chosen to shelve it in Fiction/Anthologies or Science Fiction/Anthologies. If they don’t have it, they can of course order it for you!

New: Interfictions 2 Study Guide by Delia Sherman, Christopher Barzak, and Carlos Hernandez. PDF: Interfictions 2 Study Guide (91) or on Scribd.

“Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing performs the paradoxical feat of containing what does not want to be contained: a collection of inventive, genre-flouting stories that unnerve as much as they delight.”
—New Pages

Direct from the globe-spanning hive mind of the Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF) comes the second wide-ranging, mind-melding anthology of short fiction: Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing .

Delving deeper into the genre-spanning territory explored in the first Interfictions, this anthology showcases 21 original and innovative writers. Features work by Jeffrey Ford, Brian Francis Slattery, Nin Andrews, and M. Rickert. With an introduction by Henry Jenkins and an afterword/editor interview by Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray.

The IAF posted new, extra-delicious fiction in their annex and there are author interviews, BBC podcasts, a jewelry auction, interstitial salons and events.

Henry Jenkins interviews:

• the authors
• Delia Sherman

Those interested in teaching Interfictions 2 can request an exam or desk copy here.

Reviews

* Selected by Amazon.com as one of the Best Books of 2009.

“This anthology celebrates its cross-genre concept as much as its content, with a lengthy introduction, contributor notes, and afterword. Will Ludwigsen’s lovely, melancholy “Remembrance is Something Like a House” combines paranormal and true crime elements. Alaya Dawn Johnson’s dystopian “The Score” reads like a post-9/11 Twilight Zone episode. A scientist tries to prevent a world war in Elizabeth Ziemska’s winsome “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken.” Stephanie Shaw’s strong and earthy writing grounds her story of dragons and a four-headed obstetrician in “Afterbirth.” … Fans of the first Interfictions anthology will dig it.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Some of the most experimental and formally daring genre fiction of the year.”
—Locus

Bibliophile Stalker | SF Signal | Strange Horizons | Black Gate | MC Reviews | Fantasy Magazine |

Table of Contents

Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: On the Pleasures of  Not Belonging”
Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” [interview]
M. Rickert, “Beautiful Feast”
Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance Is Something Like a House”
Cecil Castellucci, “The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory” [interview]
Alaya Dawn Johnson, “The Score” [interview]
Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me” [interview]
Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria”
Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes”
Brian Francis Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution”
Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken”
Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography”
Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse”
Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital”
William Alexander, “After Verona”
Shira Lipkin, “Valentines”
Alan DeNiro, “(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-) : The Warp and the Woof”
Nin Andrews, “The Marriage”
Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars”
Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close”
Stephanie Shaw, “Afterbirth”
David J. Schwartz, “The 121″
Colleen Mondor, Christopher Barzak, and Delia Sherman, “Afterwords: An Interstitial Interview”

Read a new interview with Poppy Brite in Gambit magazine.

Second Line: Two Short Novels of Love and Cooking in New Orleans starring lovable chefs Rickey and G-man from the incomparable Poppy Z. Brite. Includes: The Value of X and D*U*C*K and a new afterword by the author.

“Seeing love and passion bloom in the hearts of what seem like the most unlikely of subjects is, to me, quite a remarkable feat.  Simply put, Second Line was an excellent read that deepened my understanding of Rickey & G-Man’s relationship and left me hungry for more from this dynamic couple.  I dare you to give Second Line a try and see if you don’t become a Brite fan like me!”
—NewOrleans.com

“Fun foodie fiction, and readers will scarf it down.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Poppy Z. Brite lives in New Orleans, which is perhaps the best setting in the world for two novels about the chaotic world of the restaurant kitchen. The first, “The Value of X,” introduces Rickey and G-man, two chefs who love food and each other. Against the backdrop of some fabulous meals, the two must navigate the end of childhood, questions of sexuality, the challenges of family and separation, and their divergent ambitions. In “D*U*C*K,” the two have become owners and co-chefs of Liquor, one of the Big Easy’s most popular restaurants.”
—The Daily Hampshire Gazette

“The Value of X should be particularly noteworthy for teens, as it is the coming out and coming-of-age stories of two of Brite’s long time characters, future chefs (and restaurant owners) Rickey and G-Man….. Brite’s books and stories about New Orleans are some of my all time favorite comfort reading and fans of southern writing and food should not let this collection pass them by. Great stuff, for sure.”
—Guys Lit Wire

Read an excerpt from The Value of X.

Read an excerpt from D*U*C*K at BSCreview.

These two short novels bookend Poppy Z. Brite’s cheerfully chaotic series starring two chefs in New Orleans. The Value of X introduces G-man and Rickey, who grew up in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and who are slowly realizing there are only two important things in life: cooking and each other. Rickey’s parents aren’t quite so taken with the boy’s plans and get him an impossible-to-resist place at the Culinary Institute of America.

In D*U*C*K, Rickey and G-man’s restaurant, Liquor, is doing well but there are the usual complications of running a kitchen: egos get bruised, people get fired . . . and then Rickey is jumped in an alley by one of their ex-waiters.

On the mend, Rickey takes a side job to cater the annual Ducks Unlimited banquet, where every course must, of course, include the ducks the hunters have bagged. Rickey’s crew are ready to meet the challenge, but Rickey’s not sure he can do it all and deal with the guest of honor—his childhood hero, former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert.

Originally published in limited hardcover editions by Subterranean Press, these two novels are full of the pure joy of love, hard work, and great food and are a tremendous extension (or introduction) to Brite’s series.

Poppy Z. Brite’s fiction set in the New Orleans restaurant world includes Prime, Liquor, and Soul Kitchen. She has also published five other novels and three short story collections. She lives with her husband Chris, a chef, in New Orleans.

High praise for Poppy Z. Brite’s previous books:

“A high-end restaurant is—for any competent novelist—a gift that keeps on giving. The heat, the bickerings and intrigue, the pursuit of perfection, the dodgy money keeping it all afloat: the setting spawns plots . . . Can the [Liquor] franchise sustain itself? The answer is yes.”
—New York Times

“Rickey and G-man’s venture makes for a funny, surprisingly suspenseful story informed by Brite’s sure, sympathetic eye and her in-depth understanding of the arcane subculture she describes.”
—The Washington Post

“Henry Sullivan, book dealer & bibliophile, has his life thrown into turmoil when his Beacon Hill landlady dies and a former lover is found murdered. A debut novel by the owner of Boston’s beloved Victor Hugo Bookshop.”
—Recommended Reading from the 10th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards (pdf link)

A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He’s in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband’s books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results.

Hound is the first of a series of novels featuring Henry Sullivan, and the debut novel of a long-time Boston bookseller, Vincent McCaffrey. It is a paean to books, bookselling, and the transformative power of the printed word. Even as it evolves into a gripping murder mystery, it is also a reminder that there are still quiet corners of the world where the rhythms of life are calmer, where there’s still time for reading, time for getting out for a beer with friends, time to investigate the odd details of lives lived on the edges of the book world.

As the true story unfolds, its mysteries are also of the everyday sort: love found and love lost, life given and life taken away. At the center is Henry himself, with his troubled relationships and his love of old books. There’s his landlady Mrs. Prowder whose death unsettles Henry’s life and begins the sequence of events that overturns it. There’s the secret room his friend Albert discovers while doing refuse removal, a room that reveals the story of a woman who lived and loved a century ago.

And throughout the novel are those of us whose lives revolve around books: the readers, writers, bookstore people, and agents—as well as Henry, the bookhound, always searching for the great find, but usually just getting by, happy enough to be in the pursuit.

Read the first two chapters of Hound.

Hound was chosen for two First Mystery Bookclubs and was on the Select 70 at Harvard Book Store (which means 20% off). Vincent McCaffrey read in Boston, Amherst, Portsmouth, New York City, and more. See our calendar or Booktour. He’ll be going on the road again in June 2011 when the next book in the series, A Slepying Hound to Wake comes out.

On the web:

• Vincent McCaffrey
• ISFDB | Wikipedia | Library Thing | Goodreads
• Find Hound in a library near you.

Reviews

“Ingenious and refreshingly irreverent, Hound is not only a mystery on many levels, but also an intelligent—and often funny—tour-de-force of the perils and follies of human relationships. McCaffrey has a gift for crafting quirky characters and original dialogue, and the path of our hero, Henry, is always wonderfully unpredictable. I came away from this ‘book noir’ with a sense of catharsis, but also with a sudden desire to reread and rethink all the great classics to which McCaffrey alludes in his terrific novel.”
—Anne Fortier, Juliet

“McCaffrey, the owner of Boston’s legendary Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, succeeds in conveying his love of books in his intriguing debut.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Hound is billed as a mystery, and it’s a good one, but its fuse is long and its pace befitting an old bookshop. That’s a good thing. There’s something charismatic and timeless about the way the story builds and McCaffrey opens Henry’s life to the reader. It wasn’t until the action started to heat up about 100 or so pages in that we remembered we were reading a mystery at all. And while we’re a little tired of books about books and the people who love them—which often come off more as marketing initiatives—McCaffrey is never cloying or playing to demographic. He’s just telling a compelling, old-school yarn, the kind of story a man who knows his literature tells.”
—Time Out Chicago

Early Reader Reaction:

“Vincent McCaffrey’s debut mystery is crammed with stories, with likable, eccentric characters, much like his marvelous Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop—of all the bookstores in the world, the one I still miss most of all. Like all good mysteries, Hound concerns more than murder: it’s rich in detail and knowledgeable asides about bookselling, the world of publishing, and life lived in the pubs, shabby apartments, penthouses, and strange corners of the city of Boston.”
—Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters

“McCaffrey’s bookseller, Henry Sullivan, is as endearing, frustrating, and compelling a character I’ve come across in some time. Hound is more than Henry’s show, however.  It’s a slow burn murder mystery, a sharp character study, a detailed exploration of Boston, and a mediation on the secrets of history—both personal and universal. But I’m wasting our precious time trying to pigeonhole his wonderful first novel. Hound is, quite simply, a great book.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep.

Credits

Cover photo: David Fokos.
Download cover for print.

Author photo courtesy of Thais Coburn.

Vincent McCaffrey has owned and operated the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years, first in Boston, and now online from Abington, Massachusetts. He has been paid by others to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has since chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. He can still remember the first time he sold books for money in 1963—and what most of those books were. Hound is his first novel.

Follow him on Twitter.

In the eighteen years since her IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing. Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: “Jack Daw’s Pack” (Nebula Award finalist), “A Crowd of Bone” (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and the new third part, a whole novel, “Unleaving.” Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.

Listen to Greer Gilman reading from Cloud & Ashes at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Greer is introduced by Faye Ringel and after the reading, Sonya Taafe sings Lal and Mike Waterson’s song “The Scarecrow”—one of the keys to the mythos of Cloud. Download/listen to the (large) MP3 here.

July 2010: Greer has added a recording of a reading from the Boskone convention in Boston in February 2010.

Reviews

“A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origins. Seasons, weather, lust, pain, sacrifice … the stuff of old ballads becomes intensely real, with the natural contradictions of a cold wind that both chafes and dances…. And the payoff is immense. I finished Cloud & Ashes almost tempted to write a thesis that compares it favorably to what James Joyce did in Ulysses and tried in Finnegan’s Wake, yet feeling like I’d lived through it all.”
—Locus

“Cloud & Ashes is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It’s also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.) There might seem to be a contradiction in those words, and there might well be, were every human to read. But to my, mind reading is an effort that exists outside its own exercise; that is when we read, it may feel like an internal, unshared, indeed unsharable experience. But that is not, I think the case. When we read, we go to the place where writing comes from, and in so doing, I think we leave something of ourselves behind as readers. Greer Gilman found whatever it is that is left behind, she has captured it in her net of words and managed to write it down and get it published. That is a herculean feat. It may only happen once in her lifetime or in ours. But it’s happened here and now. What you do with it is up to you. For eternity, as it happens.”
—Rick Kleffel

“A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
—Paul Kincaid, SF Site

“Gilman’s ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“‘Green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk’: Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back, well back, in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language, riddled with bones and iron, sodden with witches’ blood.”
—Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels

“Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant, heart-rending triptych, a mosaic of folklore, intellectual pyrotechnics, and marvelous, motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster.”—Catherynne M. Valente, author of In the Night Garden

“No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers, in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do, the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve, read Cloud & Ashes.”
—Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting

Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. and Mythopoeic awards She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Praise for Greer Gilman’s writing:

“Greer Gilman is a writer like no one else. Many try to employ the matter of myth and folktale, but their tongues are inadaquate—Gilman can employ words as the bards of Ireland did, to make realities . . . Moonwise doesn’t resemble a work of the past age—it is the past age come back new, in its clothes and its language and its dark riddling heart. Moonwise simply has no peers.”
—John Crowley

“Greer Gilman’s diamond of a novella . . . might reward a lifetime of re-reading. A question like ‘What is it about?’ is as useful applied to Gilman’s novella as asked of a snow leopard. Both simply are.”
—Locus

“Moving, engaging, mysterious, glorious…In her flying pastiche of words and images Gilman does in the fantasy vernacular what Joyce aimed for.”
—Tangent

Contents

“Jack Daw’s Pack”
(Nebula finalist, 2001)
He is met at a crossroads on a windy night, the moon in tatters and the mist unclothing stars, the way from Ask to Owlerdale: a man in black, whiteheaded, with a three-string fiddle in his pack.

“A Crowd of Bone”
(World Fantasy Award winner, 2004)
Margaret, do you see the leaves? They flutter, falling. See, they light about you, red and yellow. I am spelling this in leaves.

“Unleaving” (A new novel-length story.)
When a star falls, we do say: the Nine are weaving. Look! The Road’s their skein, that endlong from the old moon’s spindle is unreeled. Their swift’s the sky. O look! says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes. Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy’s coat.

• Greer Gilman · Livejournal
• ISFDB | Wikipedia | Library Thing | Goodreads
• Greer Gilman was Guest of Honor at Readercon 20, July 2009, in Boston.
• Locus interview.
• Trampoline interview | Bio
• Find Cloud & Ashes in a library near you.

Credits

Cover art Kathleen Jennings.

Author photo courtesy of Liza Groen Trombi/Locus Publications.

Readers who ordered Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes before December 31, 2008, have their names printed on the inside of the dustjacket.