Cloud (& Ashes Lit)Drifts Free

Fri 9 Oct 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Following last week’s Hound (hope you enjoy it, James DeBruicker!) this week’s freebie at LitDrift is Greer Gilman’s intense and magical Cloud & Ashes. Email them or leave a comment to enter.


LCRW hits 25, isn’t out

Tue 6 Oct 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount Cover2 LCRW things (make that 4) about the next LCRW which is apparently number 25. Which, if we were numerically inclined would be yet another reason to celebrate. But we are too busy cutting lead type (um, no, not really) and then these:

  1. We are collecting questions for Dear Aunt Gwenda. Please send us yours!
  2. We just bought a couple of stories and if we are lucky we will have a translation (of an award winning story!) in the next issue and, separately, maybe more from a different country in the future.
  3. We are catching up a little with submissions but in the pile there are even yet and still some submissions from at least as far back as February and March of this year. Darn.
  4. I just read former LCRW contributor Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s debut novel, The Choir Boats, (Indiebound/Powell’s) a huge, inventive fantasy about 19th century London and Yount, another place,  and hope to post an interview here with him soon.

Another Hound freed

Fri 2 Oct 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Over at LitDrift.com they’ll be giving away one of our books a week all month and they’ve started things off with Hound.


Paige M. Gutenborg

Tue 29 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Today we took a wander over the river to Cambridge to see the new instant book machine at the Harvard Book Store (which has been named the Gutenborg!). Various publishing luminaries were there including our own Greer Gilman—who described her post-Harvard Library job search as looking for an iPod job in a PC world . . .—and we listened to them try and persuade us that this is the future. Well, part of it. Being historically minded, the first book they printed was the Bay Psalm Book, which was the first book printed in English on this continent,  in 1640 in Cambridge, no less.

It was at once fun and anti-climatic as the machine ran off the book in the promised four minutes and . . . that was it. Other bookshops with these machines report that they do a bang-up business, more with local authors than with out of print books. After all, why buy some scanned copy of Sense and Sensibility for $8 when you can get a decently edited one for, er, maybe about the same. Hmm. Well, luckily the Harvard Book Store has a good used section downstairs.

Our books are available on Google Books (with various levels of access) who have a deal with the manufacturer On Demand Books so at some point our books will hopefully be part of the instantprint experience.

As with everyone else who came by to see the machine in action, we’ll wait and see what happens.


Release the Hound!

Tue 29 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

It’s Publication Day for Vincent McCaffrey‘s debut novel Hound today — everyone send him flowers! We have signed copies for sale — as does the Brookline Booksmith. This Friday he’ll be in Hartford at the NEIBA trade show (along with other fave authors such as Joe Hill and Shaun Tan!) at the Author Reception and then on Oct. 9th he’ll be at Jamaicaway Books in Jamaica Plain for a reading.

And here’s a quick interview from the hitherto famously loquacious McCaffrey:

SBP: When did you start writing HOUND?

Vincent McCaffrey: 2002. Frustrated with the progress of several other projects (including the science fiction novel and a play) I started fleshing out some background ideas.

How much of Henry Sullivan is made of up bookhounds you knew?

Pretty much all of Henry is made up of book people I know–including myself, of course.

What is a bookhound?

A person who searches for books–not technically a seller, but Henry does both and the part he relishes is searching for good books.

Henry loves books (and beer, mmm) and is worried about their historical moment having passed. What do you think? Is the technical wonder that is the book dead or is there life in the old dog yet?

No, it is not dead yet. It is in danger. That is more of the point. For all the reasons I have addressed in various pieces, but mostly because of a false sense of security with ephemeral technology and a political need to quiet the book.

What made you pick the mystery form to discuss the book as object?

Because I imagined the death of the book as a political act (first degree murder) as much as a technological mistake (manslaughter). Because I carried this into a future set 250 years from now and wrote a science fiction novel based around it. Then went back to see if I could explain where it started.

Henry’s coming back next year in A Slepying Hound to Wake. Can you tell us a bit about that book?

Henry has fallen in love, and this begins to give him a purpose outside of himself and his own small world.

Do you have a routine with writing? Any superstitions?

I write for three hours every morning. I cannot reveal my superstitions otherwise I might disappear.

Did being a bookseller for 30+ years affect your writing habits?

It greatly discouraged me for the longest time. All those books. All that crap! Most of thelessons were negative until I finally took my own advice and stopped giving a damn about what other people wanted from me. Then the positive aspects such as a good sense of literature in general and what I loved about it, plus a  Calvinist work ethic about showing up on time and getting the work done proved instrumental.


printer

Mon 28 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

We have 3 books at the printer(s): Second Line, Interfictions 2, and a new ARC of The Poison Eaters to go out to bookshops next month — got to get the word out!

This post exists because I just noticed the QuickPress option in WordPress — could be trouble!


Would you like some Poison?

Fri 25 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

We have five advance copies of Holly Black’s new collection, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, to go out to readers and bloggers (in the US + Canada, as we don’t have international rights to the book) who will post something about it before it comes out — all the long way away in the future of February 2010.

Interested? Tell us your favorite poison (and why) and we’ll send out five copies to the five shiveriest and scariest!


It’s Not About the Burrito

Thu 24 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Awesome story: social media meets the burrito and Broadway Books lives.

More good book news: from now on the San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller list is the Indie Bestseller list.

We like indie bookshops, too!Buy local


Three Free Hounds

Thu 24 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

We did a member giveaway on LibraryThing and these three lucky readers will be receiving a free copy of Hound for reading and reviewing:

Betty in Smithers, BC (readerbynight)
Yesenia in Elmhurst NY (jesi813)
Belinda in Grand Bay, AL (sadi2forever)

Vincent McCaffrey by you.Kelly and I went to Vincent’s first reading the other night at the Brookline Booksmith in Boston and it was great fun—Vincent turns out to be a great reader and good with a Q&A (lucky for us).

He has a few more readings lined up—and there are some nice reviews coming, so yay for the Hound!

Anyone going to Booksmith readings (for, say, Lorrie Moore!) should note that for afterwards there’s a J.P. Licks just down the street, mmm!


Burn, feed, and boil

Mon 21 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

and now this part of our site has an updated FeedBurner thing, which I don’t really understand the benefit of but it is apparently important. You can subscribe to it on the site or here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmallBeerPressNotAJournal


Hound, Brookline, tonight

Mon 21 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

and don’t forget, the very first reading from Hound, Vincent McCaffrey’s debut novel at the Brookline Booksmith (279 Harvard St. Brookline MA 02446 (617) 566-6660) tonight!


Pretty Monsters UK

Mon 21 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

A nice guy called Robert Burdock posted a beautiful pic of the U.K. edition of Pretty Monsters that Canongate are putting out in a couple of weeks and since it’s better than any pic we’d be able to take (well, unless Michael were here), here’s his. We just received copies of the book and it is an art object. If you have the US edition (which won’t be in pb until Next June, sigh) it will be familiar but there are added touches: no dustjacket, new endpapers, sprinkled with monster blood:

Pretty Monsters. Pretty Book by Robert Burdock.


LCRW slipping into the fictionets

Thu 17 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 24 is available at last on Fictionwise.

Which also means it available on Barnes & Noble. Funny. Except, on bn.com it hasn’t quite appeared yet. You can get many old issues (LCRW 15, anyone?) so maybe #24 will pop up there one of these days.

Neither is it available on the Kindle.

Happily, it is still available on paper.


Is small beer obscure?

Thu 17 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Fun, if perhaps rather small beer, conversation (with all the usual hallmarks of a net discussion) on the relative obscurity of the phrase small beer. I am always surprised that it isn’t a better known phrase. One of these days.


A cold beer in summer, hot tea in winter, good books all year round.

Wed 16 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Rotating Cleverness| Posted by: Michael

A cold beer in summer, hot tea in winter, good books all year round.


Spruce Beer, or, A Beer to Ward Off Scurvy

Mon 14 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Michael

Further exploits in my quest to brew surprising, delicious, unhopped beer like it was 1799. Or 999. See more about my anti-hop crusade at The Beer of Alchemists and Witches.

The idea for this beer came from Benjamin Franklin. More directly, it came from Yards Brewing Company’s Poor Richard’s Ale, itself an attempt at a modern recreation of a recipe Franklin penned in French while stationed overseas, which, translated, reads as follows.

“Way of Making Beer with Essence of Spruce:

For a Cask containing 80 bottles, take one pot of Essence and 13 Pounds of Molases. – or the same amount of unrefined Loaf Sugar; mix them well together in 20 pints of hot Water: Stir together until they make a Foam, then pour it into the Cask you will then fill with Water: add a Pint of good Yeast, stir it well together and let it stand 2 or 3 Days to ferment, after which close the Cask, and after a few days it will be ready to be put into Bottles, that must be tightly corked. Leave them 10 or 12 Days in a cool Cellar, after which the Beer will be good to drink.”

Read more


Hound – Reviews

Tue 8 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Authors, , , | Posted by: Gavin

Reviews of Hound
by Vincent McCaffrey

“If you favor a leisurely but still intriguing mystery with amiable characters and a devotion to the printed word, Hound will provide a pleasant diversion. As much about books — and love and knowledge and family — as about murder, Hound is the first in McCaffrey’s projected trilogy, and book lovers will eagerly await Henry’s next outing.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“One of the strengths of this book is McCaffrey’s droll description throughout…. As quick as McCaffrey’s wit is, so is his un-saccharine sentimentality…. In the end, that careful attention is what makes Hound evoke such a Jimmy Stewart-movie atmosphere. It wraps up completely like a, yes, package—but an honest one, skillfully wrapped and artfully offered.”
—Rain Taxi

“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love. McCaffrey peppers his prose with all kinds of allusions and references to books and literature, new and old, classic and arcane, as well as multiple passages of verse. Clearly, as a career bookseller, McCaffrey knows his books.
—The Hippo, NH

“Henry Sullivan is just squeaking by as a “book hound,” a wholesale rare book dealer. He scrounges yard and estate sales picking up the odd bibliographic treasure here and there. He thinks he might be onto a second shot at happiness when an ex-girlfriend asks him to appraise a collection of first editions left by her late husband. But when this former love is murdered, Sullivan turns from reading Raymond Chandler to trying to solve the crime himself. With a faster pace tempered by real emotional resonance, Hound is different from John Dunning’s “Bookman” series, yet there is enough behind the scenes information about the rare book trade to appeal to Cliff Janeway fans. (McCaffrey ran an independent bookstore for 30 years, so he knows what he’s talking about.) The tale is packed with references not only to mystery writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, but a variety of others from Charles Dickens to Nevil Shute. McCaffrey even name checks Harlan Ellison as an example of “The good ones are all difficult.” Set in a beautifully-evoked contemporary Boston, the old town soon provides a wealth of other mysteries for Sullivan, like a hidden stash of letters belonging to a flapper adventuress of the 1920s. As with all good books about books (even novels), this one will send you out looking for the other writers discussed.”
—Author Magazine


Hound

Tue 8 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Michael

September 8, 2009 · 280pp · 9781931520591 · trade cloth · $24 | ebook · $9.95
June 7, 2011, trade paper 9781931520256 · $16 · New cover by Tom Canty.

“Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.”

“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.”
—A Must-Read Book from the Massachusetts Book Awards (pdf link)

“A hell of a tale. A murder and the trail to catching him leads through the world of book collectors (Bookhounds) and the things they love. Fans of Dunning will enjoy this.”
—Crimespree Magazine

“If bibliophilia is an illness, then Henry Sullivan is terminal! Books are his work, his life and his love. . . . Filled with anecdotes and asides on bookselling and the love of reading, Vincent McCaffrey’s love for books absolutely drips from the pages. If you share that obsession, then you will be touched and moved by his words. Vincent McCaffrey is obviously a man so well read that he seems to have gleaned a deep understanding of human nature from his studies. His characters are appealing and sympathetic and his story well plotted. I look forward to his next novel after what was a most enjoyable debut.”
—Gumshoe Review

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. Vincent McCaffrey read in Boston, Amherst, Portsmouth, New York City, and more.

On the web:

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.

Catalog

HOUND, by Vincent McCaffrey. 2009, Small Beer Press, Northampton, MA.
Octavo, 8 ½” tall, 285 pages, green quarter-cloth over tan boards. A fine, clean, neat hard cover first edition with little shelf wear, hinges and binding tight, paper cream white. In a fine, lightly worn dust jacket with the original price.

Henry Sullivan, by himself. 1963, Boston.
6’ tall, 170 pounds, brown hair and pale skin. A clean, neat, hard-headed book hound, released in a single edition, in very good condition overall, with minor wear, hinges cracked but secure. In blue jeans and a brown flannel shirt.

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.


Read some Hound

Thu 3 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Just added the first two chapters of Hound to the site — the book has a great first line:

Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.

And the rest is pretty good, too.

Publication day is 9/29 and events are being added: Sunday October 25th at the Mysterious Bookshop in NYC (which will be a big event, more info TK on that) and also that month at RiverRun up in New Hampshire.

You can check out all we have to read on the site in a couple of different categories: everything, novel excerpts,  short stories, and, er, the thus far empty container, reviews (those still have to be portaged over from the old site). And we’ll be adding more as time goes by. But in the meantime, Hound!


Hound, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2

Thu 3 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Novel Excerpts, , | Posted by: Gavin

From 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.
Read more


Uncle Wes’s new book

Sun 30 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kelly’s Uncle Wes, who long-time LCRW readers may remember as the author of an oatmeal cookie recipe a while back, just had has his first book published and even though it’s full of great stories it’s in a very different section of the bookstore than Kelly’s books!

Wes’s book is Cure Constipation Now: A Doctor’s Fiber Therapy to Cleanse and Heal (for Kelly this sort of like a real-life version of Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist) and it just came out in paperback from Berkley. I’m very glad they chose to use a typographical cover instead of something illustrative.

Dr. Wesley Jones, to give him his full title, believes most people in the USA (and Western world) eat too much refined food and need more fiber. Here’s his bio:

He is the founder and senior partner of the Cape Fear Center for Digestive Diseases in Pennsylvania. He is chair of Curamericas Global, Inc., which provides healthcare to Central America, South America, and west African communities. He was awarded the FACP and AGAF awards for his work in the field.

Read more


Hounding around

Mon 24 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Having trouble posting the final cover of Vincent McCaffrey’s debut novel, Hound, which is at the printer now. Dur. Will do it later. In the meantime, Vince will be getting out from Avenue Victor Hugo Books for a couple of readings soon. A few more may yet be lined up as this bookselling mystery gets more and more love from the bookselling brethren. Stop in and say hi here:

* Also at the NEIBA author reception:

Amir Aczel, Uranium Wars, Palgrave Macmillan
Michael Buckley, Nerds, Abrams
Crispina ffrench, Sweater Chop Shop, Storey
Ethan Gilsdorf, Fantasy Freaks And Gaming Geeks, The Lyons Press
Joe Hill, Horns, Harper
Katherine Howe, Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Hyperion
Maryalice Huggins, Aesop’s Mirror, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
E. Lockhart, The Treasure Map Of Boys, Delacorte
Loren Long, Otis, Philomel
C. Marina Marchese, Honeybee, Black Dog and Leventhal
Peter McCarty, Jeremy Draws a Monster, Macmillan
Jill McCorkle, Going Away Shoes, Algonquin Books
Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling, St. Martins


Videos, Ask, masquerading

Wed 19 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Remember those videos we posted with Alan DeNiro* and Elizabeth Hand? If you missed them before now you can catch them to IndieBound. Here’s Alan’s interview and Liz’s.

IndieBound is working the social web more and more. They have a new feature on Twitter:

Ask Indie Booksellers on Twitter anything you want to know! Go to AskIndies and the #AskIndies hashtag and a link to your book will be added for you automatically.”

* Alan’s first novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less, is out coming out later this year and it’s a mind-blowing experience. In some way it’s part of the whole post-apocalyptic group of books which sometimes seems like an admission that the author can’t imagine the future and has written a pre-historical novel masquerading as a post-historical novel; except this way they don’t have to research the past, either. But with Total Oblivion, while the past has invaded the present, this is in no way the past: it’s a lightly-outlined changed world where a teenage girl and her family embark on one of the ur-American stories: a trip down the Mississippi. More on it later — and it has a great cover which isn’t showing there yet — but add it to your wishlist now.


Boston apartment

Mon 17 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Ursula at homeKelly and I are looking for an apartment in Boston and we’re throwing it out here in case anyone knows anyone who knows anyone who can help. We have a couple of very specific criteria:

  • must have air conditioning
  • must be on the ground floor or have an elevator
  • wood floors
  • 2 bedrooms (can be tiny as long as living room is big)

We are looking to move in on September 1st and expect to be here for a year or two.

Our dream neighborhoods are Coolidge Corner, Fenway, and Jamaica Plain, but mostly it is important to be near or nearish to Children’s Hospital. (Small Beer Press will stay in Easthampton, though.)

We’re looking on Craigslist and are wandering around but, hey, aren’t questions like this what the internet is best at? Thanks for any help you can give!


Geektastic Rift in Wrong Grave shows Troll’s Eye View?

Thu 13 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd Cover

Kelly’s latest story, “Secret Identity,” can be found in Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci’s excellent new anthology Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. For bonus points, see if you can spot Kelly (and some of the other writers) on the cover.

There’s nothing else coming out for a bit, but there are a lot of single stories floating around. Previous to Geektastic, “The Cinderella Game” came out this spring in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales—which was just picked as a read of the month, or some such thing, on Salon.

A couple of other stories just came out in paperback: “The Wrong Grave” in Deborah Noyes’s The Restless Dead, “The Surfer” in Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift, and “Louise’s Ghost” in Peter Straub’s Poe’s Children. In hardcover “Stone Animals” is in another Peter Straub anthology, the fantastic looking 2-volume Library of America irresistible American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s Until Now, which comes out in September and looks ripe to be the Halloween present of the season.

Over in the UK, Canongate have a different idea of the perfect Halloween read: they are buying UK rights to Pretty Monsters and will publish it in paperback on October 15, just in time for those who might want to read “Monster” or “The Wrong Grave” on the scariest night of the year. Canongate put out some really wonderful books — such as Ali Smith’s Boy Meets Girl and (maybe, not read it yet) Michel Faber’s The Fire Gospel —  and Kelly is thrilled. Yay! Some readers no doubt read the US edition (which won’t be out in paperback until June 2010) but for a lot of readers this will be the first time they’ve seen the excellent cover to the right there.

Francis Bickmore, senior editor at Canongate, has acquired UK rights to Link’s Pretty Monsters for an undisclosed sum…. Bickmore said: “I’m over the moon that we have lured the maverick literary genius that is Kelly Link to our list, just in time for Hallowe’en. She is one of the best kept secrets of modern writing.”

Also in the UK, a little while ago Sarah Waters had a piece in the Graniaud about ghosts and writing her latest novel and gave us a thrill by including one of Kelly’s stories in her list of ten best ghost stories — along with some of Kelly’s own favorite ghost stories, “The Woman in Black,” “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and so on.

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link
All of Link’s stories are wonderfully odd and original. Some are also quite scary – and this, from her collection Stranger Things Happen, is very scary indeed. It’s the story of 10-year-old twin girls in a haunted American mansion, being instructed by an enigmatic babysitter just what it means to be “dead”.

Meanwhile in Australia, Text are splitting Pretty Monsters into 2 paperbacks and we just got copies of the first one, The Wrong Grave, and it is beautiful. The cover is marbled with silhouettes of crows and beetles and a stag — and they are carried over into the front matter. The second volume comes out later. It’s very exciting to think that it will be piled up in some of the great bookshops we visited in 2006 when Kelly taught at Clarion South: Pulp Fiction and Infinitas in Brisbane and Galaxy in Sydney.

Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales Cover

The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural Cover

The Starry Rift Cover

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now Cover


Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead – Reviews

Mon 10 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Alan DeNiro, Authors| Posted by: Michael

Reviews

“Deeply weird, sometimes challenging, but always smart and affecting.”
— Locus (Notable Books)

“Endlessly imaginative.”
— Venus

“Deniro’s greatest gifts are those of a poet, and his prose is filled with stunning images and incantatory rhythms. Debuts often come along with press releases touting them as “assured,” and sure enough, Deniro’s was no different. But with talent as deep as his, it’s no wonder Deniro is confident in touring us around his strange worlds.”
–Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“Thoughtful, ambitious writing and truly transformative reading.”
— Small Spiral Notebook

“Maybe the future of sf is Alan DeNiro. The title story here, set in twenty-third-century Pennsylvania, is its nameless-till-the-last-sentence narrator’s university-application essay, numbered footnotes and all, which explains why not to expect him on campus anytime soon; he is in love and considering getting gills. Maybe DeNiro is the future of alternate history: in “Our Byzantium,” a college town is invaded by horse-and-chariot-led soldiers who demolish cars, wheelchairs, and other machines; reestablish Greek as the lingua franca; and otherwise conquer. He could be fantasy’s tomorrow, too, if the offhandedness of the impossible transformations in “The Cuttlefish,” “The Centaur,” “The Excavation,” and “If I Leap” catches on. In “The Fourth” and “A Keeper,” DeNiro is one of the most powerful, least partisan prophets of consumerist totalitarianism. “Salting the Map” confounds the distinction between artifice and reality as deftly and daftly as Andrew Crumey’s Pfitz (1997) and Zoran Zivkovic’s Impossible Stories (2006). The long closer, “Home of the,” about Erie, Pennsylvania, now and then, is as laconic and associative as its title is elliptic. Refreshing, imaginative, funny-scary stuff.”
— Ray Olson, Booklist

“A commitment to experimental structure and oddball elements provides this debut collection’s consistency…. The collection argues for DeNiro as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Many of these stories unfold like dreams, startling in their detail but elusive in their meaning. Yet, the prosaic as well as the poetic features in these stories as characters attempt to create a detailed but incomplete record, like a dream book of their own histories. Objects such as a college entrance essay, maps, postcards, outdated computer disks, the provenance of a chess set, all become documents which convey the fragility of histories”
— Greenman Review

Advance Readers say:

“Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is a thrill ride. Men jump from buildings and walk away, Assassins are hired to murder novels, Byzantines spring from the hills and sack college towns. On each page Alan DeNiro performs feats of acrobatic skill, holding the edge with remarkable control. He has created a brand new world, and I believe every word of it.”
— Hannah Tinti (Animal Crackers)

“I’m not ordinarily an editor, so finding stories for the first six issues of Fence magazine was a guilty pleasure, and the subsequent work by formerly unknown Fence writers like Kelly Link and Julia Slavin has made me look like a prognosticator, or maybe an annoying drunk guy on a streak at a casino. Now here’s Alan DeNiro, whose “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” was always my favorite. I’m thrilled to see him in bookstores at last.”
— Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude)

“Alan DeNiro’s stories move in unexpected ways into unexpected places — up in the air, under the water, out of this world. He has a gift for precise language and poetic logic, his own unique sort of circus realism. Sharp, smart, and completely original, this is a lively, lovely collection from a memorable talent.”
— Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

“Reading Alan DeNiro’s new collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, made me feel like a dog that twists its head a bit to the side on hearing a whistle too high for humans to hear. The dog is perplexed and intrigued by the sound — it knows where it’s coming from but not really. Familiar enough, but maybe not. So too with these strong, out of kilter stories. DeNiro blows his own distinctly different sounding whistle and once you’ve heard it, you can’t help but stop and take real notice.”
— Jonathan Carroll (Glass Soup)

“The wholly original, carefully crafted tales that comprise Alan Deniro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are like colorful pinatas full of live scorpions — playful, unexpected, and deadly serious.”
— Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)


Bearfest

Sun 9 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Easthampton Bear FestEasthampton is having an artbear invasion and it is really cheery to look down from the 11.05 morning zeppelin ride into the office (can’t quite get there for elevensies) and see all the people taking their pictures, reading the signs, sitting on their knees, and so on. They’re really well done—although don’t think we will get one for the office at the auction. Who’d a thunk they’d be so popular?


Generation Loss – Reviews

Fri 7 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Michael


Generation LossReviews + Quotes for Generation Loss

“Thirty years ago, Cassandra Neary’s grim photos of punks and corpses briefly made her the toast of the downtown art scene. Now an alcoholic wage slave, Neary accepts a magazine assignment to interview one of her reclusive photographer heroes on a Maine island, where a rash of missing-teenager cases and an off-kilter populace grab her attention. It takes time to warm to the self-destructive, sour-tempered protagonist –she drives drunk, pops Adderall and Percocet, and generally tries to not stick out her neck. Luckily, Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B)
— Entertainment Weekly

“Although Generation Loss moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound.”
— Graham Joyce, Washington Post Book World

“This novel disturbs like Cass’s photos of dead junkies and squalid club scenes. While in some ways she’s just another self-destructive person, Cass’s intelligence and talent make her an appealing mess. Hand propels this oddly appealing character through an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with stirring results. In the end, Generation Loss is a conventional story of sin and redemption. With darkly inventive polish, Hand reveals a character so deeply disordered, she’s both unlikable and compelling.”
—Time Out Chicago

“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.”
— Los Angeles Times

“This smart, dark, literary thriller will keep you up at night. A photographer who has been drinking, doing drugs, and alienating everyone around her since the ’70s goes to Maine to interview a legendary photographer and gets caught up in the case of a missing girl.”
— Megan Sullivan’s Pick of the Week at the Boston Globe

“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking…. [Graham Sleight]'”
— Locus Notable Books

“Just as lives that are only momentarily brilliant deserve celebration and respect, though, so do such novels, because life is dark enough that we need whatever illumination we can get, and there’s plenty to be had in Generation Loss.”
— Strange Horizons

“A formerly famous punk photographer attracted to the dead and damaged stumbles on a serial killer case when she takes a job inteviewing a famous reclusive photographer in this dark thriller of art and damaged souls, and despite only a hint of the supernatural, ‘…something of a departure for the author, but fully as elegant and significant as her overtly fantastic works. There is grave beauty her, and great thematic power.’ [Nick Gevers]”
— Valley Advocate

“Hand (Mortal Love, Black Light) expertly ratchets up the suspense until it’s at the level of a high-pitched scream near novel’s end.”
— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

* “Hand (Mortal Love) explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Cass Neary, Elizabeth Hand’s unlikely heroine in her latest novel Generation Loss, may be hard to like, but I found her story is easy to love.”
— Feminist Review

“A dark, literate mystery that’s easy to appreciate and hard to put down.”
— The Olympian

“The novel crackles with energy: it is alive.”
— Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)

“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.”
— George Pelecanos

“Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book.”
— Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain

Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s previous novels:

” A literary page-turner . . . deeply pleasurable. . . . A delightful waking dream.”
— People (****)

“One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time.”
—Peter Straub

*”[Hand’s] language has an incantatory beauty.”
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)


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