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Celebrating
Forthcoming
Small Beer Press + Big Mouth House receiving the World Fantasy Award!
John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus” receiving the Shirley Jackson Award.
Redemption in Indigo
Preorder
Karen Lord June 2010:
In this funny, fresh fable, a villager leaves her husband and finds she can manipulate chaos.
A Life on Paper: Stories
Preorder
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud May 2010
A major French fabulist translated into English for the first time.
A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2011
Preorder
August 2010
Bigger, better, fuller, smarter, and … timelier!
Organize your writing schedule, track deadlines, and learn about grants, contests, and workshop programs. Deadlines are built right in, along with spotlights on writing markets and helpful online resources.
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
413-203-1636
info@smallbeerpress.com
We occasionally post pieces from LCRW and other places up here on the web.
Would you like to read some? Decide: All the Free Stuff | Short Stories | Novel Excerpts | Reviews | Etc.
Second Line: The Value of X, Chapter 1
by Poppy Z. Brite
Leave a CommentFrom Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite.
The Value of X
“Awright,” said Mrs. Reilly to her eleventh-grade algebra class, “if Y equals thirty-six, who can tell me what X equals?”
Surveying the class slumped in their desks, she could not blame them for their apathy. Though it was only April, the weather was already hinting at another brutal New Orleans summer. For public schools to be without air conditioning in 1990 was a disgrace, but such things were usual in this little corner of the United States that might be more properly called part of the Third World. Mrs. Reilly suddenly felt hopeless and decided to call on her one dependable student. “Gary?”
But this time there was no answer.
“Gary Stubbs? Are you paying attention?”
Hound, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2
by Vincent McCaffrey
2 CommentsFrom Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey.
Chapter One
Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.
The books he sold were most often the recent property of people who had died. Book lovers never gave up the good ones without cause. But then, the books which people sold willingly were not the ones Henry really wanted. The monthly public library sales were stacked high with those—the usual titles for a dollar apiece, yesterday’s best sellers, last year’s hot topics.
But not always. Occasionally, some relative—often the child who never cared much for Dad’s preoccupation with medieval history or Mom’s obsession with old cookbooks—would drop the burden their parents had so selfishly placed upon them by dying, and there they would be, in great careless mounds on the folding tables in the library basement or conference room. Always dumped too quickly by a “volunteer” from the “friends” committee, with the old dust jackets tearing one against the other.
Like encounters with sin, Henry had occasions of luck at yard sales, though not often enough to waste a weekend which might better be spent at home reading. His favorite haunts were the estate auctions, and the best of these were the ones held at the very house where the old geezer had kicked the bucket. And there was always that thin network of friends who knew Henry was a bookman—who heard of book lots being sold and passed the word on. Albert, of course, had been a regular source for this, simply because his trash-removal business so often involved houses being sold where the books had accumulated over the years and the dead were recently departed.
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The King’s Last Song – Chapter 1
by Geoff Ryman
“Oh you who are wise, may you come more and more to consider all meritorious acts as your own.”
Sanskrit inscription on the temple of Pre Rup,
translated by Kamaleswar Bhattacharya
“As wealthy as Cambodia.”
Traditional Chinese saying
Awakening
You could very easily meet William.
Maybe you’ve just got off the boat from Phnom Penh and nobody from your hotel is there to meet you. It’s miles from the dock to Siem Reap.
William strides up and pretends to be the free driver to your hotel. Not only that but he organizes a second motorbike to wobble its way round the ruts with your suitcases.
Generation Loss – Chapter One
by Elizabeth Hand
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There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.
But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I’d blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?
Travel Light – Chapters One and Two
by Naomi Mitchison
Leave a CommentChapter 1
The Bears
It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself into a black bear then and there and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King’s hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already near the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.
Storyteller Excerpt: Can Writing Be Taught?
by Kate Wilhelm
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One of the questions Damon and I returned to often was simply: can writing be taught? There are many writers who say emphatically that the answer is no. I see their point. High school and college creative writing classes are too often a joke, taught by non-writers without a clue about the real world of publishing and what makes for a publishable story in contemporary markets. For most writers struggling alone, the learning curve from the first attempt to write to becoming an accomplished writer is very long; years in many cases. And all the while they are being taught by rejection slips, by trial and error; they are learning what works for them and what doesn’t. Even after they have published a few stories, often they can’t see why one story was accepted and not another.
The Faery Handbag
by Kelly Link
2 Comments"The Faery Handbag" was originally published in the anthology The Faery Reel.
I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. "Guess what color this is."
Carmen Dog – Chapter One
by Carol Emshwiller
Chapter 1: Outlandish Changes
There is more matter in the universe than we at first thought.
–CBS newscaster
“The beast changes to a woman or the woman changes to a beast,” the doctor says. “In her case it is certainly the latter since she has been, on the whole, quite passable as a human being up to the present moment. There may be hundreds of these creatures already among us. No way to tell for sure how many.”
The husband feigns surprise. Actually he’s seen more than he’s telling, and right in his own home.
Home and Security
by Gavin J. Grant
Homeland Security
Gavin J. Grant
With thousands of like-minded others, I went to the big peace rally in New York City on February 15th, 2003. It was a cold day, and my wife and I walked up Third Avenue from 32nd to 68th Street before we could cut over to First Avenue and join the rally. Which was really a slow march, but since the city government wouldn’t give us a permit to march, let’s call it a rally.
What do we want?
So many things.
When do want them?
It doesn’t seem possible, but now, please.
…March 5th, 2003, Local News: Writer and editor Gavin J. Grant, 33, (picture) of Northampton, Mass., is believed to be one of hundreds of detainees held after police and other government agencies moved in to calm a noisy and potentially-violent peace rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park….
The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
by Christopher Rowe
Trampoline: Stories
The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.
Eight Legged Story
by Maureen F. McHugh
Leave a CommentI. Naturalistic Narrative
Cheap pens. My marriage is not going to survive this. Not the pens — I bought the pens because no pen is safe when Mark is around; his backpack is a black hole for pens — so I bought this package of cheap pens, one of which doesn’t work (although rather than throw it away, I stuck it back in the pen jar, which is stupid), and two of them don’t click right when you try to make the point come out and then go back. It’s good to have them, though, because I’m manning the phone. Tim, my husband, is out combing the Buckeye Trail in the National Park with volunteers, looking for my nine-year-old stepson, Mark. Mark has been missing for twenty-two hours. One minute he was with them, the next minute he wasn’t. I am worried about Mark. I am sure that if he is dead, I will feel terrible. I wish I liked him better. I wish I’d let him take some of these pens. Not that Tim will ever find out that I told Mark he couldn’t have any of these pens.
Trampoline: Stories
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Trampoline: Stories
20 stories: 140,000 words. But are they any good?
Decide for yourself:
Stories:
O
Sally Harpe
by Christopher Rowe
Leave a CommentThey tell this one in those tobacco towns along the Green River.
One day Roy Barlowe and his dad walked up the hill to Townie Harpe’s old place. Townie’s widow, Miss Erskine, was sitting on a cane bottom chair on the porch, fooling with some clothes.
Roy didn’t know whether she was sewing or quilting or doing some kind of mending. He never paid much attention to that kind of work. Still, if the mother knew those ways then it followed that the daughter would.
Ash City Stomp
by Richard Butner
Leave a CommentDownload a 44MB mp3 audio file of Richard Butner reading “Ash City Stomp.”
She had dated Secrest for six weeks before she asked for the Big Favor. The Big Favor sounded like, “I need to get to Asheville to check out the art therapy program in their psychology grad school,” but in reality she had hard drugs that needed to be transported to an old boyfriend of hers in the mountains, and the engine in her 1982 Ford Escort had caught fire on the expressway earlier that spring.
Vanilla Sky Redux
by Jack Cheng
Leave a CommentVanilla Sky is told from the point of view of David Aames, a good looking (hey, he’s Tom Cruise!), millionaire (his father published TV Guide!), playboy (Cameron Diaz swallowed his cum — that means something!) who is not without his dark moments (his parents killed by a drunk driver!). Instead of a bat flying through his window to give direction to his life, this Bruce Wayne meets the batty Sofia Serrano, played by Penelope Cruz, and everything changes.
This is not a film review. The point of this essay is to trash the movie to explain how it could have (should have!) been better. So consider that your spoiler warning, combined with my opinion that this movie isn’t really worth watching in its current form anyway.
Foreigners
by Mark Rich
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Release came not as I expected — burdened with fines, restrictions, armed guard, and list of warnings longer than my conscience. Instead I walked away entirely free. The doctors, inquisitors, and officials did not visit my cell in the morning as they usually did. Only the middle-aged woman named Ardis entered the cell, without a guard. She arrived with the breakfast tray consisting of nothing out of the ordinary with its simple roll, butter, dab of marmalade, and small red pot of black tea. I stared at the tray trying to assess what was different. Had the commissary taken a second longer in arranging the items across the yellow plastic? Had the usual disarray of items proved unsatisfactory this day? The normally skewed angles of napkin, butter knife, and spoon — had they demanded straightening today? In my brief look at the tray I could see the kitchen help had thought to cut into a fresh lemon for the tea saucer, instead of reaching for a slice remaining from the day before. Or perhaps Ardis personally had overseen the assembly of this breakfast, even stopping to straighten its contents as she stood in the hall outside my cell. As she placed it on the immovable round table near the bed, she did so with greater care than usual.
“After you finish your breakfast you are free to go,” she said. “You can go.”