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Small Beer Press
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Easthampton, MA 01027
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Tyrannia and Other Renditions
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Alan DeNiro trade paper · 9781618730718 | ebook: 9781618730725 In these 11 stories—and the weird spaces in between—people of all kinds struggle to free themselves from conventions and constraints both personal and political. Places ranging from the farthest reaches of outer space to the creepy abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere become battlegrounds for change and growth—sometimes [...]
Horse of a Different Color
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Howard Waldrop September 2013 · 9781618730732 · trade cloth and ebook Howard Waldrop’s stories are keys to the secret world of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps stories between the known stories. From “The Wolfman of Alcatraz” to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew” to the Vancean richness of a [...]
Death of a Unicorn
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Peter Dickinson May 2013 · trade paper · $16 · 9781618730404 | ebook · $9.95 · 9781618730411 For bestselling author Lady Margaret, the past is no longer a pleasant memory. Her first lover’s mysterious death and the seeming inevitability of her inheriting the family’s stately home are cast in new light by secrets unwillingly revisited in Dickinson’s [...]
Spider in a Tree · Preorder
by Susan Stinson
Leave a CommentOctober 2013 · 9781618730695 · trade paper · 336pp | 9781618730701 · ebook
Jonathan Edwards is considered America’s most brilliant theologian. He was also a slave owner. This is the story of the years he spent preaching in eighteenth century Northampton, Massachusetts.
In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Mr. Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards’s young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards’ wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale.
Friday, April 19, 2013: Susan Stinson’s op-ed in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, “Boston Library Once Again at Pivotal Location in City’s History”
Launch party/reading: October 2, 7 pm, Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.
Tyrannia and Other Renditions · Preorder
by Alan DeNiro
Leave a Commenttrade paper · 9781618730718 | ebook: 9781618730725
In these 11 stories—and the weird spaces in between—people of all kinds struggle to free themselves from conventions and constraints both personal and political. Places ranging from the farthest reaches of outer space to the creepy abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere become battlegrounds for change and growth—sometimes at a massive cost.
Tyranny takes many forms, some more subtle than others, and it is up to the reader to travel along with the characters, who improvise and create their own renditions of freedom.
Horse of a Different Color · Preorder
by Howard Waldrop
Leave a CommentSeptember 2013 · 9781618730732 · trade cloth and ebook
Howard Waldrop’s stories are keys to the secret world of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps stories between the known stories. From “The Wolfman of Alcatraz” to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew” to the Vancean richness of a “Frogskin Cap,” this new collection is a wunderkammer of strangeness.
Emma Tupper’s Diary · Preorder
by Peter Dickinson
Leave a CommentMay 2013 · trade paper · $12 · 978-1-61873-063-3 | ebook · $9.95 · 978-1-61873-064-0
Emma is spending the summer with her Scottish cousins—who are wonderful material for her attempt to win the School Prize for most interesting holiday diary. The cousins, lofty Andy, reserved Fiona, and fierce Roddy, are experimenting with their grandfather’s dilapidated old mini-submarine to see if they can find a monster in the family loch.
Emma Tupper’s Diary is a sometimes terrifying, sometimes broadly hilarious adventure novel in the spirit of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and I Capture the Castle.
The Poison Oracle · Preorder
by Peter Dickinson
Leave a CommentJuly 2013 · trade paper · $16 · 978-1-61873-065-7 | ebook · $9.95 · 978-1-61873-066-4
“I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.”
—Sara Paretsky, author of Breakdown
Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom’s educational facilities, include a somewhat reserved English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in the person of Dinah: a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols.
When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to discover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that uses the everyday language people use to expose humanity’s thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth.
Includes an author interview carried out by Sara Paretsky.
North American Lake Monsters · Preorder
by Nathan Ballingrud
Leave a CommentJuly 2013
trade cloth · 9781618730596 | trade paper · 9781618730602 | ebook · 9781618730619
“It’s Raymond Carver territory, beautifully written and right on target for today: construction work, waitressing, tattoos, and white supremacists. And shattering each story is the luminous, the terrifying, the Lovecraftian otherness that reveals what it really feels like to be alive in this moment in time. Ballingrud’s fantastical werewolves and human skins and Antarctic staircases evoke the truth of our own fears about life.”
—Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse)
These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.
Readings
July
11 – 14, Readercon, Boston, MA
17, 7 pm, KGB Bar, NYC
28 – Aug. 3, Shared Worlds, Wofford College, SC
August
28, 7 pm, Malaprop’s, Asheville, NC
Death of a Unicorn · Preorder
by Peter Dickinson
Leave a CommentMay 2013 · trade paper · $16 · 9781618730404 | ebook · $9.95 · 9781618730411
For bestselling author Lady Margaret, the past is no longer a pleasant memory. Her first lover’s mysterious death and the seeming inevitability of her inheriting the family’s stately home are cast in new light by secrets unwillingly revisited in Dickinson’s wonderful novel of family and friends, work and duty, and above all, love.
Reading Group Questions included.
“Mr. Dickinson has a nice dry wit and a talent for deft characterization.”
—New York Times
“Everything here is exactly right.”
—New Yorker
“Peter Dickinson is my own chosen demigod in the pantheon of crime fiction.”
—Laurie R. King
“The Tolkien of the crime novel.”—H.R.F.Keating
Death of a Unicorn is the first in a series of reprints of Peter Dickinson’s mysteries from Small Beer Press. This classic British mystery will win fans currently engrossed in Downton Abbey.
Was · Preorder
by Geoff Ryman
Leave a CommentTrade paper · 9781931520737 | ebook · 9781931520386 · 320 pp · New Reader Group Guide · Ebook available. Print edition due June 2013.
“A mythic meditation on the enduring power of fantasy and art and on the loss of innocence, both the innocence of childhood lost to the cruel realities of the grown-up world and the innocence of a nation lost to the cruelties of history. . . . A moving lament for lost childhoods and an eloquent tribute to the enduring power of art.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
