one of our catalogs bounced back to us. The surprising thing here is it isn’t the new one, it’s one mailed on June 20, 2007. Rebecca Malgeri, if you’re out there and want a catalog, drop us an email.
There were lots of bills in the mail, not as many checks. Doh.
I’m reading a book called Opera Offstage by Milton Brener (Walker & Co NY 1996) which is about the stories behind, around and among the great operas: love affairs and other things which led to their composition; extraordinary stories about premieres, the shadowy and sometimes shady characters who moved through the 18th and 19th C. opera worlds.
For instance: the Paris premier of Tannhauser (1861) by Wagner; the biggest fiasco in Paris music history until Le Sacre du Printemps by Stravinsky (1913), was all because Wagner wouldn’t put an act-opening ballet in the second act.
Why, you ask?
Well, when being told he had to have one, Wagner said logically, that it made no sense dramatically, especially after the bacchanal in Venusberg in Act I. It doesn’t matter, said everyone, there must be a second act opening ballet. “No,” said Wagner. “Well, the Jockey Club won’t like that!” they said.
The Jockey Club was a bunch of aristos and upper-middle-class ne’er-do-wells who slept all day, lolled around, dined late and showed up at the opera in time for the second-act opening ballet, danced by, usually, their and their buddies’ girlfriends and mistresses. Anyway, they showed up to see lots of leg, the one place they could do that in a semi-cultured setting in 1861.
Well, Wagner didn’t put in a ballet. Opening night, the Jockey Club poured itself in after the first act with their police whistles and cowbells. The second act opened up on some guy center-stage singing. Out come the whistles, cowbells and catcalls. You couldn’t hear jack shit out there onstage but them.
The rest of the audience tried to yell them down. That added to the problem. The Jockey Club would quiet, the music would start again, the singer stepped forward and Clanga-danga-danga-wheet! they’d be off again. So it went.
Not only opening night, but for the next three performances. Fists flew around like cake at an Irish wedding.
Wagner withdrew the opera and left (as usual) in a cloud of debt.
Similarly with Puccini and the opening night of Madame Butterfly—not, this time, noise and scandal, but silence. I mean dead.
It was from a one-act play by David Belasco. Puccini and his co-librettists turned this into a (against convention) two-act opera (the second act being more than 90 minutes long). Before, Puccini had always had opening-night jitters; he knew Madame Butterfly was his best, so he wasn’t worried at all. He expected another triumph. He brought his whole family, which he’d never done before. The cast, orchestra and technical people were the best. (The stagehands had cried during rehearsals, so moved were they by the singing and the story.)
Here’s what happened to Puccini: hubris. And the sound of hubris, like in a Daffy Duck cartoon, is the sound of crickets chirping in the back of a packed theater . . .
The book’s full of stories, not just about disasters, but about snookered librettists, plagiarism suits, blackmail, censorship (for reasons you’d not guess in a million years, in some cases . . .) and sharp practices.
It’s a neat book, whether you know anything about opera or not.
But all this is prologue. I want to tell you about the time I performed with the New York Met in 1996.
But, Howard, you cry. The only thing you can play is the radio. You only know two tunes, like General Grant said; one’s the drum solo from “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the other’s not. What are you doing with the Met?
Well, one of my minors was in Drama at UT-Arlington (I’d been Nick Burns in A Thousand Clowns that semester, the Barry Gordon kid’s part). I was the only one who could do the Peter Lorre voice called for in Act I. I was a pretty normal-sized sophomore playing a supposedly 12-year-old kid. In one of the most surrealistically-performed plays in American college theater history, they used the simple expedient of casting giants in the grown-up roles. I was (and am) 5′ 6″. The Jason Robards Jr role was by a 6′ 7″er. The other 3 guy roles were between 6′ 1″ and 6′ 3″. The leading lady (the Barbara Harris role) was 6′ even.
Somehow it worked.
Anyway, the drama teacher told us The Met was coming to Dallas and they needed people. They were doing 3 operas in two nights and a matinee. The deal: you worked in one; you got a little pay and tickets for the other two. The call was going out to all the drama departments in all the colleges in the DFW area.
The three operas were, I think, Turandot, Otello, and Falstaff.
A bunch of us decided to do the Sunday matinee, Turandot.
We drove over to Dallas (@ 20 miles) in a couple cars on a blazing hot May afternoon. Where we were going was to the Texas State Fairgrounds, next to the Cotton Bowl, which had all been built for the 1936 Texas Centennial, 30 years before. The operas were in the Texas State Music Hall, a great Pennsylvania Dutch-looking 6-story barn, the kind with two balconies which actually had seats with pillars in front of them (you could hear but you couldn’t see). It had the acoustics of a 6 story kazoo.
Anyway, it’s an hour till showtime. They call about 30 of us out back. “In a minute, you’ll go in and get costumed,” said an assistant stage manager, who had on a suit, in a heat wave, in May, in Dallas.
“After that, we’ll give you some spears and flags and stuff. You’ll march in from each side, turn, go through the gate, and go up the two stairs and line up on top of the wall. There’ll be a guy already there in the middle—try not to bump into him when you line up. He’ll sing a lot of crap for a long time, then he’ll yell something that sounds like “HiYA!” when he runs out of wind. Turn to your left and march off the wall.”
It was the most succinct stage directions I ever got in my career.
Well, by the time they got us dressed and slapped some Oriental #3 makeup on us, it was time for us to go on.
What I’m dressed as is a Mongol @ 1300 A.D. I am in a goatskin vest and tunic. I have on a helmet, 1/2 authentic Mongol and 1/2 picklehaube, like the Hun wore in the Great War. We line up on both sides of the stage, march in, meet, turn toward the upstage gate, go through it, and climb the stairs in back of the wall. There’s a guy up there in the middle and we don’t bump into him much when we line up. Then he sings a lot of crap for a really long time.
I told you it was a heatwave in May. Out in the audience of the Music Hall it’s about 95°F. On stage, on the wall, under the Fresnels and Leicos, it’s like 147°F. I’m dressed in goatskins. I can feel the heat rash coming up all over me like Jiffy-Pop® on a stove.
I manage not to fall off the wall in a dead swoon.
The guy in the middle runs down after awhile and says “HiYa!” We turn to our lefts and march off down the stairs.
Intermission: the assistant stage manager meets us.
“Next part’s easy,” he said. “You march from stage left to stage right across downstage, run around quietly behind the set, and march across again. If you had a spear the first time across, trade out with someone with a flag. Do it till the guy with the fancy costume climbs the steps and the music changes. If you’re onstage when that happens, try to act interested in what he’s singing. Also try not to scratch your butts. When he’s through, march off stage right. Meet me out back after you get out of costume and make-up.”
Well, we do that. It’s hotter onstage than a recently-fornicated waterfowl. As soon as we march off the last time and take off for the dressing rooms, I grab my helmet by the earpiece and whip it off, forgetting about the spike.
“Yowwwch!” yells someone behind me, a real Met person, “careful with that thing, hombré.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Sonofabitch was cooking my brains.”
They ran us into the dressing room; they pulled off our goatskins and slapped cold cream over the Oriental #3 on our faces and arms and toweled it off and we dressed and they pushed us out, and we went out back.
We met the assistant stage manager out there, where it was at least 10° cooler.
He handed us $5 cash each and tickets to the two other shows and thanked us.
I think we gave him a round of applause.
So, that was my day with the Met on tour.
In a May heatwave, in Dallas TX, in a goatskin and boiling helmet, carrying a spear or a limp flag.
over here where they have neat stuff. Yes, it’s Strange Horizons and their yearly fund drive. We were late to the party sending them prizes but they should be added this week. Looks like this year there are even more ways to get prizes: bonus prizes as certain totals are reached, prizes for blogs who link to it (come on LA Times, you know you want the 5 CD Escape Pod set too!), and, you know, for sending money.
If you’d like an advance reading copy of Ben Rosenbaum’s debut collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, or Kelly’s new collection, Pretty Monsters, or would like the chocolate-bar LCRW subscription, go donate and maybe these prizes will become yourn.
Sun 1 Jun 2008 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
There are 60 pages in this zine. It was put together on a couple of MacBooks and an iMac using InDesign. No CEOs were fired during the production of this zine. At least, not here. One copy was printed on gold leaves and buried in a blatant attempt to copy The King’s Last Song. This web page was written using an Old copy of DreamWeaver. One of these days we’ll update the software and the website. One of these days. In the meantime we keep producing high-quality low-cost paper zine in part because 1) we’ll keep doing this until the subscribers stop subscribing and the writers stop sending us good weird shit and 2) if we can do it, so can you.
masthead
Made in the May of 2008 by:
Gavin J. Grant · Kelly Link
Jedediah Berry · Michael Deluca · Katharine Duckett · Margaret Kinney · Sara Majka · Julia Botero
Fiction
William Alexander, “Away”
Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”
Becca De La Rosa, “Vinegar and Brown Paper”
Kristine Dikeman, “Dearest Cecily”
Carol Emshwiller, “Self Story”
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Snowdrops”
Maureen F. McHugh, “Going to France”
Jeremie McKnight, “The Camera & the Octopus”
Mark Rigney, “Portfolio”
David J. Schwartz, “Mike’s Place”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “The Honeymoon Suite”
Caleb Wilson, “American Dreamers”
Cara Spindler, “Escape”
Miriam Allred, “To a Child Who Is Still a FAQ”
Poetry
Eileen Gunn, “To the Moon Alice”
Nonfiction
Gwenda Bond, Dear Aunt Gwenda
Comics
Abby Denson, “Snake Slayer”
Michael DeLuca, “The Freddie Mercury Challenge”
William Alexander lives in Minneapolis with spouse and cat. His stories have appeared in Zahir, Weird Tales, and Postscripts, and one will be reprinted in Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008. He contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books. In the summer of ’06 he attended the Clarion Workshop. It was fun.
Miriam Allred has a BA in Comparative Literature and French from Brigham Young University and an MA in English from Cleveland State University. She lives in Salt Lake City, near many supportive friends and family members, where she earns a living writing about routers and wireless networks. She also writes stories.
Gwenda Bond is writing young adult novels on a tin machine that has no internet access.
Becca De La Rosa has recently had fiction published in Strange Horizons and the Fantasy Magazine anthology, among other places. She is currently studying English at an art college in Ireland.
Abby Denson is a cartoonist and rock’n’roller in NYC. She is the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, Dolltopia, and Night Club, among others. She has scripted Powerpuff Girls and comics for Nickelodeon. She has webcomics on gurl.com and a dessert comic column, “The City Sweet Tooth†(citysweettooth.com) in The L Magazine. abbycomix.com
Kristine Dikeman lives in NYC. Her work has appeared in The Many Faces of Van Helsing, The Book of Final Flesh, Sybil’s Garage, and All Hallows. She is working on a novel, Eating Manhattan, a lighthearted romp through New York, with zombies.
Carol Emshwiller‘s most recent books are a novel, The Secret City, a young adult novel, Mr. Boots, and a collection, I Live with You. Small Beer published her novel The Mount and her collection, Report to the Men’s Club as well as reprinting her first novel, Carmen Dog.Recent awards include a couple of Nebulas for short stories, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. She lives in New York City.
Alex Dally MacFarlane has been writing ever since the discovery of computer games made her think that if stories could be found on a 32-bit cartridge, why not in the mind of an 11-year-old girl? Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and a few other places. Her longer fiction is still being kick-polished.
Maureen F. McHugh‘s most recent book is a collection of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters. She writes novels and Alternate Reality Games. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Jeremie McKnight was born under the restless skies of Ohio farm-country where he began his storytelling at an early age. By high school he was a published and award-winning author. And then he stopped. He now lives in Pittsburgh PA., and this is his first story in over a decade. It has made him very happy.
Mark Rigney is the author of Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical. His short fiction has appeared in Shadow Regions, Talebones, The Bellevue Literary Review, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, &c. His plays for the stage have won national contests and been performed in six states. Having worked as a zookeeper, he is now proud to be a stay-at-home father.
David J. Schwartz is all around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship. His first novel, Superpowers, is in stores as you are reading this. He is allergic to midichlorians.
Cara Spindler likes apples, broccoli, and eel, but hates ham and cantaloupe. She likes strolling, running, swimming—but hates to sit. And she still has five continents to visit before she dies.
Jodi Lynn Villers has her MFA from North Carolina State University. She lives in downtown Raleigh with a beagle named Turtle and has written a novella about a rehabilitation camp for girls who have killed their parents. Her short-shorts have also appeared in Staccato and Quick Fiction.
John Kessel just finished a round of readings in North Carolina with Greg Frost. His next reading is at KGB Bar in New York in July, then he’ll be at Readercon. Here’s a few perspectives on John Kessel’s The Baum Plan on the web and in the papers this week:
Updated with this possibly contentious line from Seattle’s The Stranger: “A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction.”
Strange Horizons: “It is a testament to Kessel’s skill that my criticism is so specific and, really, not an indictment so much as a statement of preference.”
The Fix: “Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous.”
And just posted tonight, Time Out Chicago: “Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head.”
We’re off traveling — with lots of exciting things in hand (will try and post pics!) — for a couple of weeks.
The zine is at the printer—Paradise Copies here in Northampton who are in the middle of moving into a great new building and yet are managing to keep juggling all the jobs thrown at them.
However, if you want to read LCRW now, you can download it from Lulu—and soon on Fictionwise—or order the nice perfectbound version. Preview it here. (By the way, everything on Fictionwise is on sale).
We’ll be picking up the zine tomorrow then flying out at some godawful early time on Thursday to Wiscon where we’ll be celebrating Maureen F. McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp, dancing, drinking, wandering the farmer’s market, and going to see some readings and even an occasional panel.
Subscribers will get their copies in June—after our Book Expo extravaganza. More on that sooner to it—jus, if you’re going, stop by our booth to get a key to many exclusive freebies from many cool presses!
Thanks to Angus MacAbre (Scotland’s Funniest Zombie Comedian!) this will no doubt be the place to visit during WisCon.
Sadly they do not seem to have haggis on the menu. But we trust the chef can put one together. Best part of the menu is the beer list: all the usual suspects (with a complete lack of Scottish beer, but, they do have their own Tilted Kilt lager!) as well as the well-loved Franchise Options 1 to 4. Mmm!
Here’s a relaxed and mellow seven-minute cartoony version (with title cards) of Kelly’s story “The Specialist’s Hat” made by a team of student artists for “ENC1142 final project at FSU”:
John Kessel and Greg Frost are on the road this week (no this isn’t an APB) reading at three great North Carolina bookshops (damn, wish we were there! but they’ll be up here are Readercon which will come soon enough):
Washington DC is rightly excited to have a new bike rental program up and running. But if you live in or visit Lexington, Kentucky, for the second year in a row you take part in the program for a mere $10 (or free if you paid your $10 last year). Rumors that Christopher Rowe takes part in this just to ladies wearing little black dresses and heels “pedaling one down Main Street” are unsubstantiated and would not be repeated in any journal worthy of the public trust.
Shake Girl, a collaborative graphic novel based on real life experiences of Cambodian women attacked with acid.
Jacob MacMurray not only posted his annual Clarion West poster, but also—and this is wild (although it would be even better if VW were making a new hybrid/greaserunning van)—pics of his design for a VW van. (So now we will go buy Pacifico beer because any company that does this kind of thing has to make good beer.)
Interested in how one art intersects and inspires another? This week the Interstitial Arts Foundation, celebrating the one-year anniversary of publishing the anthology Interfictions, begins an auction of jewelry inspired by the stories in the anthology. And it’s beautiful stuff.
There is a new piece going up every couple of days (auctions only last 4-7 days, so keep checking in) and the prices begin at all of $10. These are all donations to the IAF and any monies raised go to funding the recently-announced next anthology.
Participants include artists Elise Matheson, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Mia Nutick, Kris McDermott, and many more. And, most remarkably, some of the authors themselves have created unique pieces based on their own work! Keep an eye on IAFAuctions.com to see wearable interpretations of their own work by Interfictions authors Leslie What, Rachel Pollack, and K. Tempest Bradford.
What we are doing: a new catalog, galleys of 2 books for BookExpo, a game for BookExpo, a zine, a chapbook for BookExpo, Sales Conference this weekend, sending forth review copies of The Ant King, enjoying the reviews of John Kessel’s book and sending that out further, the Phil. Book Festival next weekend. Maybe other stuff? Who knows.
Coming soonish on a website, a bike, a firecracker near you: the zine known as LCRW. And what will be in it? Pomegranates! Of course. Also, mostly fiction. This will go to the printers devils in a week or two. Here’s what’s it is:
William Alexander, “Away”
Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”
Becca De La Rosa, “Vinegar and Brown Paper”
Kristine Dikeman, “Dearest Cecily:
Carol Emshwiller, “Self Story”
Eileen Gunn, “To the Moon Alice” (poem)
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Snowdrops”
Maureen F. McHugh, “Going to France”
Jeremie McKnight, “The Camera & the Octopus”
Mark Rigney, “Portfolio”
David J. Schwartz, “Mike’s Place”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “The Honeymoon Suite”
Caleb Wilson, “American Dreamers”
Cara Spindler, “Escape”
Miriam Allred, “To a Child Who Is Still a FAQ”
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Abby Denson, Comic
Tickle your ears today with the sound of “The Ant King”—the title story of Ben Rosenbuam’s upcoming collection—the fifth in the new fantasy-flavored PodCastle (a castle in a pod: how science fictional!):
Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
Rated PG. Contains surrealism, involuntary cohabitation, strong language and characters with unconventional genders. Also, an extremely large number of geek culture easter eggs.
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
No free books this week! Making more books, LCRW (hey, we still put out a zine!), a catalog, und, yes, so weiter, is getting in the way. Also: we are planning a fun thing for BookExpo, hee hee. Cough. (Sounds look weird in WordPress. May need to add sound.)
ARCs of Ben Rosenbaum’s collection are on their way to the secret masters of the universe who will declare it a bestseller. Yes, they are in touch with the public’s unending appetite for short story collections.
Kelly is reading next week at the South Street Seaport in NYC as part of the NYRSF reading series with Jennifer Stevenson whose sexy new novel The Brass Bed is about to about to about to arrive.
Hey, in February we sold a couple of books on the Kindle. Who knew! Asked Amazon if they would send us a Kindle to see what the reading experience was like. They demurred. People should always feel free to send us expensive gifts. We are not public servants. (Neither are we savants.) We do not fear the gifting. We are just very bad at the return part.
Just a note that our distributor is running out of the hardcover of John Kessel’s collection. We have some in stock for conventions and so on but if you want one from a store, sooner is better than later.
If you’d like a signed copy, John’s got some more signings coming up.
And: here’s a pic of Jed in LA just before the book festival madness began!
Jedediah Berry will be manning the Small Beer booth at the LA Times Book Fest this weekend so if you’re in the area go say hello (and congratulate the man!) at Booth # 1023 in Zone: J – Moore Hall Grass, UCLA campus.
Small Beer are splitting a table with the wonderful Coffee House Press. Drop by and say hi to some of their authors, and meet other local stars such as Cecil Castellucci and more authors than a forest could shake sticks at. Admission to the Festival of Books is free. Parking is $8.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, that forest will not be shaking sticks at Kelly Link who will not be there after all. Maybe next year.
Do they deliver to Massachusetts? How about to Edinburgh, since we’re there in August?
If you are after mung beans and carrot sticks, look away now. Amanda Powley, Terre à Terre’s creative force, does not believe vegetarianism has to mean abstinence. “For me our food is all about indulgence”, she tells me. “It’s not about sacrificing anything, it’s about gaining something.”
This has nothing to do with Trickster gods (excepting The Coyote Road, which has lots to so with it). Instead it is just a tricky headline to make you wonder what we’re on about now. It’s Locusfinalist celebration day—thanks to John K. for the heads-up!
The finalist list is a reminder that 2007 was a strong year, especially for men writing in this genre. That’s not snarky, look back at the list. Congratulations to Elizabeth Bear (“Tideline,” Asimov’s Apr/May 2007) and Connie Willis (“All Seated on the Ground,” Asimov’s Dec 2007;The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Subterranean), the only women in short fiction. SF novels are all men, then Fantasy, YA, and Debuts are all pretty mixed—and all are very strong categories (below the cut). Too much work to look at more except perhaps there should be a PR campaign by any women artists in the genre?
It will be fun to see who wins but the real winners, said without cheesiness—especially after serving on award juries—are readers who use this as a reading list to see what’s good out there at the moment.
Here comes the lunch truck? Nope. The boat? Nope. Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection? Ping! We have a winner!
Ben doesn’t know this yet (because we are evil, or, maybe because we’ve been busy giving away free books?) but we just received the advance reading copies of his debut collection, The Ant King and Other Stories. So today (besides cursing the errors—they’ll be gone by August) we’ll be sending it out to reviewers and maybe sending a few to Ben over there in Switzerland.
How does it look? Who cares? Does it go well with beer? You decide.
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.
When we asked Maureen if she was interested in releasing her collection this way she took a moment out from working on Top Secret Gaming Things to say go for it. It is awesome to work with authors like Maureen and John who are so enthusiastic about this.
The thirteen stories in McHugh’s “gorgeously crafted” (Nancy Pearl, NPR, Morning Edition) collection include her her Hugo Award winner “The Lincoln Train” as well as a reading group guide. Mothers & Other Monsters was a Story Prize finalist and a Book Sense Notable Book.
Although we think our paper editions are of course prettier than these downloads, please pass the word along. The further out these CC-licensed books go (especially from our site where we can count them) the higher chance there is of persuading other authors of doing the same with their books.
Mothers & Other Monsters is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them. The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats.
The paper edition is much nicer, although not free:
As far as we know he’ll be back in the office later this week. Or, could it be true that he is right this moment partaking of a well-earned vacation on a sunny island in Indonesia? Who can say, without consulting The Manual of Detection!
Update: approaching 5,000 downloads of John Kessel’s collection. More good news on the Creative Commons front here next Tuesday. Ladies, Fish, and Gentlemen, could this be a regular thing?! Publishers Weekly notes John’s book here. There are a couple of new download options to add (you people are Awesome!).
John did his first reading for The Baum Plan at Quail Ridge in Raleigh and about 100 people turned out: Yay!
We are just sending off LCRW-with-green-eyeshadow, the most inventive subscription request we’ve received yet.
Will has a great post on findings at a recent library sale (and also a call to action for New Yorkers). Will’s blog is a must-read.
Alan DeNiro’s review of The New Space Opera at Rain Taxi is the basis for a conversation on SF Signal. Then it got picked up by io9. Then a huge spaceship appeared over the Twin Cities and uploaded Alan, Kristin, and Rain Taxi. Good luck out there!
Somehow completely missed that there was an online discussion of Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle which included Sean. Sean’s new book, Cathy’s Key: If Found, Call (650) 266-8202, is hitting stores right about Now.
Congratulations to Sarah Hall for the Tiptree Award for The Carhullan Army. (published in the US as Daughters of the North.) It’s an excellent book and Gavin hopes there will be something that good this year as he is one of the judges!
We mentioned the other day that Interfictions was on the Honor List and we are incredibly proud and happy to note that Laurie J. Marks‘s novel Water Logic was also on the Honor List: pick up the book from us, by mail order, or Powells, BookSense.com, or on Fictionwise.
It’s been fun to see the reaction to the question “are awards worthwhile?” over the last week. How about: it depends? (The answer to everything!) It depends on: whether you trust the jury for some awards; if you follow the will of the populace (online or otherwise); whether you think a self-limited interest group of some sort will produce an interesting list of books. The Tiptree Award seems worthwhile in that the jury redefines the definition every year and produces some great reading lists—as well as the occasional head scratcher.
Laurie’s book—and the rest of the Honor List—is a book which, besides being a dark, thoughtful , entertaining pageturner, makes people think. It’s a noisy world and anything that encourages people to stop and think is excellent.
It’s been almost a year since the Publication Day of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s first anthologyInterfictions: how about an update?
Yesterday it was announced that the book was one of 9 on the Tiptree AwardHonor List, which is great news and retrospectively seems very fitting that an anthology intent on ignoring all kinds of borders would be recognized by an award that seeks to expand our understanding of gender. (Read “expand our understanding” as “blow your mind.”)
And then on Friday Christopher Barzak announced that he and Delia Sherman will be editing the second Interfictions. The editors will be reading this October and November and the book will be published some time in 2009. Get ye to your thinking chair or get out your pencils and papers (or whatever your tools of interstitial fiction production are) and get to it.
It’s been almost a year since the Publication Day of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s first anthologyInterfictions: how about an update?
Yesterday it was announced that the book was one of 9 on the Tiptree AwardHonor List, which is great news and retrospectively seems very fitting that an anthology intent on ignoring all kinds of borders would be recognized by an award that seeks to expand our understanding of gender. (Read “expand our understanding” as “blow your mind.”)
And then on Friday Christopher Barzak announced that he and Delia Sherman will be editing the second Interfictions. The editors will be reading this October and November and the book will be published some time in 2009. Get ye to your thinking chair or get out your pencils and papers (or whatever your tools of interstitial fiction production are) and get to it.
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.
