Things to Come
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A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2011
August 2010
The perfect supplement to any writer’s life, this new edition of A Working Writer’s Daily Planner is even better than before, packed with more of the information writers need to organize their work schedules, track upcoming deadlines, and learn about grant opportunities, contests, and workshop programs. For 2011 we turned to those who know best what writers want—writers themselves—and asked them what resources they’d find most useful. The result is a unique and indispensable tool that makes it easy for writers to keep track of the practical, business end of writing, leaving more time for them to actually spend writing.
If you’re a writer, you’ll immediately see the advantage of gathering so much information into one spiral-bound compendium: application deadlines are built right into the calendar, along with spotlights on writing markets and helpful online resources. You’ll also find information on writing conferences, advice on formatting manuscripts, suggested readings, and the dos and don’ts of submitting your work to journals, magazines, and literary agents. If there’s a writer in your life, this calendar will make the perfect gift.
And because every professional writer needs distractions, we’ll sneak in peculiar tales of the writing life, plenty of inspiring art and photos, writing prompts, and, as always, a few surprises too.
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A Life on Paper: Stories Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
May 25, 2010
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.
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is the author of eight novels and almost one hundred short stories, and he is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle. His work has been translated into twelve languages.
Edward Gauvin has published Châteaureynaud’s work in AGNI Online, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Words Without Borders, The Café Irreal, and The Brooklyn Rail. The recipient of a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, he translates graphic novels for Tokyopop, First Second Books, and Archaia Studios Press.
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Meeks Julia Holmes
July 20, 2010
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)
“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’ 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!)
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Redemption in Indigo Karen Lord
June 22, 2010:
9781931520669 · Trade paper · 180 pp
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.
“The impish love child of Tutuola and Garcia Marquez. Utterly delightful.”
—Nalo Hopkinson
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Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers Alasdair Gray
April 20, 2010:
9781931520690 · Trade cloth · 6 x 9 · 312 pp
Small Beer Press are delighted to announce that they will 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.
“Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts.”—The Times (London)
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