Interfictions – Bios
Wed 5 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
About the Editors
Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are The Porcelain Doveand The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers, Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia.
About the Contributors
Karen Jordan Allen spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Century, A Nightmare’s Dozen, Bruce Coville’s Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Christopher Barzak spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in August 2007.
K. Tempest Bradford is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.
Matthew Cheney’s work has appeared in One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual Best American Fantasyanthology from Prime Books.
Michael J. DeLuca would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead.
Adrián Ferrero was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include Verse, a collection of short stories, and Cantares, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing Diagonautas.
Colin Greenland is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include Finding Helen and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning Take Back Plenty. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle’s works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.
Joy Marchand lives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she’s shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she’s currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. .
Holly Phillips is the author of the award-winning story collection In the Palace of Repose. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.
Rachel Pollack is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels Unquenchable Fire and Godmother Night. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online and offline in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Veronica Schanoes is a writer and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio, and Jabberwocky.
Léa Silhol was born in Africa and grew up in Europe, but considers herself a “citizen of the world.” She is considered one of the leading writers in fantasy in the French language, with four short stories collections and a novel, La Sève et le Givre, which won the Fantasy Merlin Award in 2003.
Jon Singer grew up in Brooklyn, NY, wanting to be a scientist. That didn’t work out, but he is now semi-officially a Mad Scientist, which may even be better. You can find some of his work here.
Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer born and raised in New Delhi. She lives in the Boston area, where she also teaches college physics and has published a children’s book:Younguncle Comes to Town (Viking 2006).
Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &, and her novel,Spotted Lily, are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her website is Anna Tambour and Others and she blogs at medlarcomfits.blogspot.com.
Mikal Trimm has sold works of speculative fiction and poetry to a number of venues in the past few years. Recent or upcoming stories may be found in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Postscripts, Polyphony 6, and Shadowed Realms. He maintains a web presence (for no apparent reason) here.
Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth,Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards as well as the Pushcart Prize. She was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs.
Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author who writes short stories, essays, and novels. Visit Whatworld.
- Interview with the editors
- Interfictions blog
- Interstitial Arts Foundation
One day one day
Wed 5 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Pop| Posted by: Gavin
Gillian Welch will release another CD and we will get the drinks in and crank up the music player (pre-apocalyse: some kind of electronic music machine; post-apocalypse: add some time for winding up the Victrola).
Until that long awaited day—and, hey, Gillian, if records and CDs and so on are no longer your thing, no worries!—NPR have posted a recording of her set at the Newport Folk Festival. No cover of “Black Star” this time, but enough to keep us happy. Besides, at the other end of the spectrum, the cover of “White Rabbit” is pretty decent.
Also available on that site: a whole lot of good stuff (surrounded by many so-so’s. No doubt YMMV).
Neko Case, aw. Also: Mavis Staples, Iron and Wine, Sonic Youth, Metric, many more.
Kelly Link Bio
Wed 5 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Authors, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
a short biography of Ms. Kelly Link
Kelly Link’s debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, was a Firecracker nominee, a Village Voice Favorite Book and a Salon Book of the Year — Salon called the collection “…an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards.
Her second collection, Magic for Beginners, was a Book Sense pick (and a Best of Book Sense pick); and selected for best of the year lists byTime Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. It was published in paperback by Harcourt.
Kelly is an editor for the Online Writing Workshop and has been a reader and judge for various literary awards. With Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow she edits The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press). She also edited the anthology, Trampoline.
Kelly has visited a number of schools and workshops including Stonecoast in Maine, Washington University, Yale, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Brookdale Community College, Brookdale, NJ, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC, the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University, New England Institute of Art & Communications, Brookline, MA, Clarion East at Michigan State University, Clarion West in Seattle, WA, and Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia.
Kelly lives in Northampton, MA. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kelly and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, publish a twice-yearly zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet — as well as books — as Small Beer Press.
Low resolution (for web use only) author photos. Links below are for high-resolution print-ready versions.(T-shirt — always — Gama-Go.)
Credit: Courtesy of the author.
Click here for hi-res download
Click here for hi-res download
Click here for hi-res download
Kelly Link is represented by:
Renee Zuckerbrot
Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency
115 West 29th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 967-0072
(212) 967-0073
renee@rzagency.com
Foreign Rights:
Jenny Meyer
Jenny Meyer Literary Agency, Inc.
115 West 29th St., 10th Flr
NY, NY 10001
(212) 564-9898
Asia:
Whitney Lee
The Fielding Agency, LLC.
269 South Beverly Drive, #341
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
310.276.7517
Film rights:
Sarah Self
The Gersh Agency
41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor
New York, NY 10010
Kelly and friend pose at a Japanese subway stop (1998)
Award Season: World Fantasy nominees
Tue 4 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., 51%, John Kessel, Kelly Link, LCRW, Small Beer Press, Year's Best Fantasy & Horror| Posted by: Gavin
Hey, lovely news today from the World Fantasy Award people. John Kessel’s terrific mashup “Pride and Prometheus” from the January 2008 issue of F&SF and reprinted in his collection, The Baum Plan, picked up another award nomination, as did the last volume of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and Kelly & Gavin were nominated for Small Beer & Big Mouth (what a pairing!).
Congratulations to all the nominees! It is an honor to be nominated. Before posting the whole list, here’s a quick gender breakdown to follow up on previous award posts:
- 26 men
- 21 women
Novel
The House of the Stag, Kage Baker (Tor)
The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow)
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury)
Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
Novella
“Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel”, Peter S. Beagle (Strange Roads)
“If Angels Fight”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)
“The Overseer”, Albert Cowdrey (F&SF 3/08)
“Odd and the Frost Giants”, Neil Gaiman (Bloomsbury; HarperCollins)
“Good Boy”, Nisi Shawl (Filter House)
Short Story
“Caverns of Mystery”, Kage Baker (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy)
“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)
“Pride and Prometheus”, John Kessel (F&SF 1/08)
“Our Man in the Sudan”, Sarah Pinborough (The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories)
“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”, Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld 5/08)
Anthology
The Living Dead, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books)
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Del Rey)
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection, Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, & Gavin J. Grant, eds. (St. Martin’s)
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)
Steampunk, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Tachyon Publications)
Collection
Strange Roads, Peter S. Beagle (DreamHaven Books)
The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)
Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link (Viking)
Filter House, Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct Press)
Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin; Scholastic ’09)
Artist
Kinuko Y. Craft
Janet Chui
Stephan Martinière
John Picacio
Shaun Tan
Special Award—Professional
Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)
Farah Mendlesohn (for The Rhetorics of Fantasy)
Stephen H. Segal & Ann VanderMeer (for Weird Tales)
Jerad Walters (for A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft)
Jacob Weisman (for Tachyon Publications)
Special Award—Non-professional
Edith L. Crowe (for her work with The Mythopoeic Society)
John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)
Elise Matthesen (for setting out to inspire and for serving as inspiration for works of poetry, fantasy, and SF over the last decade through her jewelry-making and her “artist’s challenges.”)
Sean Wallace, Neil Clarke, & Nick Mamatas (for Clarkesworld)
Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)
LCRW & Chuao Special
Tue 4 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., chocolate, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
We just mailed out the last of the subscriber‘s copies of LCRW 24 (thanks to the amazing intern team of: Michael, Paul, Felice, Kristen, and Abram!) and subscribers did not in fact get the Spicy Maya bar we promised: instead we sent out the Firecracker because it is at once fantastic and also weird and wonderful. It’s a dark chocolate bar with chipotle (mm), salt (mmm), and popping candy. What?! Yes. Feeling the popping candy go off in the middle of the deep dark chocolate is like eating the stars at night.
We have one bar left then new subscribers will get something else. And sharp-eyed readers will note that in the pic to the right there is a coupon from Chuao Chocolatiers especially for LCRW subscribers for 20% off online purchases: LCRW and the unexpected extra chocolatey goodness bonus! We recommend moving phasers to Stock Up.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 24
Mon 3 Aug 2009 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
stapled · 8.5 x 7 · 60pp
This zine was made in the spring and summer of 2009 by Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Michael J. DeLuca, Sara Majka, Paul Bozzo, Kristen Evans, and Faune Albert, and put back from June to July by the best reason Gavin & Kelly have ever had: Ursula Annabel Link Grant, born February 23rd, 2009. Our deepest thanks go to everyone at Baystate Medical Center and the Ronald McDonald House in Springfield, Mass.
Fiction
Alexander Lamb, “Eleven Orchid Street”
Liz Williams, “Dusking”
Jasmine Hammer, “Tornado Juice”
J. W. M. Morgan, “Superfather”
Dicky Murphy, “The Magician’s Umbrella”
Alissa Nutting, “Leave the Dead to the Living”
Eve Tushnet, “A Story Like Mine”
Dennis Danvers, “The Broken Dream Factory”
Anya Groner, “The Magician’s Keeper”
Nonfiction
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Poetry
Neile Graham, “Machrie Moore”
Marina Rubin, “Bordeaux, And Other Mysteries”
Comics
Abby Denson, “Heady’s Crush”
Cover
Matthew Kirby
Reviews: SF Revu. Ray Garraty/Endless Falls Up (from Russia).
“I’ve only recently become something of a fan of LCRW; it’s a literary magazine with beautiful production values; impeccable layout and the guts of the thing are good too: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, a comic by Abby Denson, and quirky spot illos by Anna Sears. It’s made me want to start reading new short fiction again, and I’m always really excited when it appears in my mailbox because it’s never hit a wrong note with me. Lovely as ever (and congrats to Gavin & Kelly on their best reason to miss a deadline!)”
—Xerography Debt
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.24, July 2009 . ISSN 1544-7782. Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996, LCRW has usually appeared in June and November from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · info@smallbeerpress.com · https://smallbeerpress.com/category/lcrw
Subscriptions: $5 per single issue or $20/4. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library and institutional subscriptions available through EBSCO.
Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.
Thanks for reading.
Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 4)
Mon 3 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Quoting Mr. Denton:
Dear Ben,
Which was just a quick way of saying:
The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.
— Bradley Denton
Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 3)
Mon 3 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Quoting Mr. Denton:
Dear Ben,
Unfortunately, I’m an atheist, so someone might accuse me of dishonest deity interjection (thus casting a cloud of doubt over the entire sentence). Another problem is that “My God, these are beautiful” is quite short . . . and a proper blurb, particularly for stories as fine as those in Other Cities, should be long enough to be quoted with ellipses . . . like so . . . thus suggesting that the blurber had so many good things to say that they wouldn’t all fit . . . and that some of the best ones had to be left out.
On the other hand, “My God, these are beautiful,” although blasphemous and short, is true and concise. It’s also an improvement over my first draft:
“Holy shit!”
— Bradley Denton
Order here or send a check or a money order using this form.
Broken Mirrors Press
Mon 3 Aug 2009 - Filed under: smallbeer, Non SBP Pages| Posted by: Gavin
In the 1990s the world was blessed by the appearance of a damn fine magazine named Crank! Due to the usual reasons — ruinous distribution, incredibly high editorial and production standards, a serious lack of personal inherited wealth — it all came to an end with issue no. 8.
We managed to get our hands on some back issues and they are $6 a pop.We’ll occasionally bring them to sell at book fairs or conventions, if that’s your thing.
~ Prices include first class or media mail shipping. ~
|
No. 1 $6 A.A. Attanasio Michael Blumlein Robert Devereaux Gwyneth Jones Garry Kilworth Jonathan Lethem Rosaleen Love Carter Scholz |
|
|
|
|
No. 2 $6 David R. Bunch Carol Emshwiller Jonathan Lethem Gerald B. Stephenson Gene Wolfe |
||
 |
No. 3
$6 Brian Aldiss Chan Davis Ursula K. Le Guin Jonathan Lethem Katherine MacLean |
||
 |
No. 4
$6 Terry Bisson R.A. Lafferty Lisa Tuttle A.A. Attanasio David R. Bunch Jonathan Lethem |
||
|
No. 6
$6 James Blaylock Karen Joy Fowler Michael Kandel Jonathan Lethem Carter Scholz |
||
|
No. 7
$6 James Blaylock A.M. Dellamonica Eliot Fintushel R.A. Lafferty |
||
 |
No. 8
$6 James Blaylock Eliot Fintushel Carol Emshwiller |
The Magic Spectacles: a novel by
James Blaylock. Appears in three parts in Crank! 6, 7, & 8. |
Limited Editions
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Small Beer Press limited editions
Available from this website and a few select bookshops.
+++++++++
July 2005
Kelly Link
Magic for Beginners
illustrated by Shelley Jackson
edition of 150
Magic for Beginners is the highly anticipated second collection by Kelly Link, the author of the cult favorite collection Stranger Things Happen. As the title suggests, this is an engaging, funny, and magical selection of stories about haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, superheroes, marriages, and cannons, and includes several stories original to the collection. Stories from Magic for Beginners have previously been published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Conjunctions, and The Dark.
Hand-numbered and signed by the author and illustrator and includes two tipped-in plates: an enlargement of the title story illustration and a color reproduction of the trade dustjacket painting by Shelley Jackson which is based on “Lady with an Ermine” by Leonardo da Vinci held in The Czartoryskich Museum in Krakow. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, MI, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Oatmeal Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Cobalt Blue Pearl Linen Cloth, with a ribbon to keep your place.
Accompanied by a deck of poker cards backed with the cover illustration and illustrated with Shelley Jackson’s interior illustrations.
Maureen F. McHugh is the author of four acclaimed novels. Her genre-expanding short fiction has won the Hugo and Locus Awards and has frequently been included in Best of the Year anthologies. Since 1988 she has attracted a broad readership in publications such as Asimov’s, Scifiction, Starlight, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Now, in her long-awaited first collection, McHugh’s subtle talents illuminate the relationship between parents and children from angles that everyone — mother or father, daughter or son — can relate to. These are beautiful stories about the ways in which social and technological shifts impact family dynamics.
Signed and hand-numbered by the author includes five poems not in the trade edition. This edition also includes a tipped-in print of Judith Anderson photographed in the role of Medea by Erwin Blumenfeld. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Red Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Pearl Linen Cloth. We have included a ribbon to keep your place.
$100
+++++++++
Order Both
$175
+++++++++
Prices include shipping.
Stranger Things Happen – Reviews
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
stranger things happen by Kelly Link
2001 Year’s Best Lists:
Salon The Village Voice San Francisco Chronicle
Fantastic Metropolis: Cory Doctorow, Jeffrey Ford, L.Timmel Duchamp, Luis Rodrigues
Locus Best Book of 2001 | Locus Recommended Reading List: John Clute, Gardner Dozois, Charles N. Brown, Faren Miller
Also, noted in: Publishers Weekly
Awards:
Salon Book of the Year | “Louise’s Ghost” — Nebula Award | “The Specialist’s Hat” — World Fantasy Award | “Travels with the Snow Queen” — Tiptree Award | World Fantasy Award Nominee | Firecracker Alternative Book Award Nominee
reviews
“my favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
— Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered, June 2003
China Mieville’s list of books to read
Philadelphia City Paper, Sept. 26, 2002
New York Magazine, February 11, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday November 18, 2001
New York Times Book Review, Sunday November 11, 2001
Washington Post
Science Fiction Weekly
Ink19
A review in Hebrew — any translations?
Strange Horizons
Tangentonline
Gadfly Online
Locus
Science Fiction Chronicle
F&SF
Montreal Mirror
one in Finnish!
Eclectica Review, 7/05
[Link’s] stories go in places you never thought of, never imagined. Her talent is clear and obvious but her stories are often mysterious and even frightening…. [Stranger Things Happen] is a collection that defies genre assignment and stereotyping, that insists instead that it simply be read and enjoyed.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, $16) by Kelly Link is a delightful collection of short stories set in a familiar-seeming world.These stories have a dreamy quality, and like traditional fairy tales, Link’s often end with a Grimm little twist.
“Shoe and Marriage” borrows more than a bit from the story of Cinderella, and “Travels With the Snow Queen” and “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” play on fairy-tale titles and content. There is also a recurring character, the Girl Detective, who is a lot like a twentysomething Nancy Drew.
Link’s stories include lots of fairy-tale staples like ghosts, stepmothers and talking ravens. Still, her characters’ fears more often involve parents, careers, relationships and being left than things that make noises in the night.
We are still afraid of poisoned needles, strangers who offer candy to children, and what a mirror might say when we look into it.
But the things that haunt Link’s characters are more subtle; they are the kinds of things that really do keep people awake at night and leave them hungry for a comforting word.
And no matter how odd the events in her stories may seem, as this book’s title says, stranger things happen.
The Miami Herald, May 25, 2002
Sinister. Dreamy. Supernatural. Link’s stories dazzle even as they unsettle. It’s hard to imagine anything stranger than a multi-legged beauty contestant, a noseless, nimble-fingered father with a collection of metal and wood prosthetics or a deceased man mailing letters to his widow from a netherworld bordered by a nappy ocean with teeth. And that’s for starters. The bizarre atmospherics within these stories are driven as much by what is left unexplained, as in The Specialist’s Hat, where two identical 10-year-olds move to a dark mausoleum of a house with their father after their mother’s death. The first sentence spotlights the Samantha twin while she speculates that ”when you’re Dead, you don’t have to brush your teeth.” The Claire twin chimes in with ”when you’re Dead, you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” In this fashion, the twins’ fates are foreshadowed but never quite delineated, as their transformation, of sorts, takes place off the page. Link blends myths, ghosts and alien landscapes with a healthy ladle of modern life for stories that at first confound but eventually order themselves into a titillating weirdness.
Rain Taxi
Link’s stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling.
Asimov’s
[H]er writing belongs in the same camp as Jonathan Carroll’s: spooky, indeterminate, a kind of exemplar of literary Heisenbergism. The more you push on any one dimension of her eerie, funny tales, seeking to know the unknowables she deftly sketches, the less you know about other slippery aspects of the text. Link is a fantasist in the grand tradition of Carol Emshwiller, John Crowley, and Robert Coover, blurring the lines between dreams, myths, and reality in exciting new ways. All this talent is on display in Stranger Things Happen, an astonishingly good collection — which gathers her World Fantasy Award winner “The Specialist’s Hat,” plus two stories new to the world, as well as eight others — into an assemblage of awesome proportions. From its campy retro Nancy Drew-style cover to its closing credits, this is a postmodern fairy-tale landmark.
Booklist
Link offers strange and tantalizing stories — contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience — that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party’s descent into cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus’ many illegitimate sons, and June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life.
Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” a naïve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover’s physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in “Travels with the Snow Queen” reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clichés of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws the readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way, In the books’s most effective tale, “Vanishing Act,” a young girl’s efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. “The Specialist’s Hat” features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father’s parental neglect as their mother’s death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward exercises on the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.
Kirkus Reviews
Eleven stories showcase a dexterous use of language and a startling, if frequently elusive, imagination as ghosts, aliens, and the living dead invade the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Newcomer Link references fairy tales, mythology, and bits of our common contemporary cultural experience, not to offer commentary but to take off on her own original riffs. So in “Shoe and Marriage” we meet a dictator’s widow, unavoidably reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, living in a museum that displays the shoes she took from her husband’s murder victims. The story, which also describes a bizarre beauty pageant, plays verbally with shoe metaphors from Cinderella’s slippers to Dorothy’s ruby reds, but what touches you is not the author’s verbal acrobatics but the widow’s deep sense of sorrow and horror. Like many of the pieces here, “Shoe and Marriage” joins disparate parts that don’t always fit together, but linear connections are not the aim. When she depends too much on pure cleverness, Link ends up sounding derivative and brittle. “Survivor’s Ball, or The Donner Party,” in which two travelers come to an inn where a creepy if lavish shindig is in full swing, reminds you too insistently of Poe. “Flying Lessons,” about a girl’s love for a boy whose desire to fly ends tragically (hint, hint), and “Travels With the Snow Queen,” in which the fairy tale is revamped to read cute, come across as writing-school literary. But at her best, Link produces oddly moving imagery. In “Louise’s Ghost,” two friends named Louise have overlapping affairs. The shared name at first seems like another joke, but the tale gradually digs deep into the emotionally charged waters of loss and redemption. Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.
Staff recommendation by someone nice at Cody’s.
Kelly Link’s collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores.
— Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine
“Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy.”
— Washington Post Book World
“quirky and exuberantly imagined….the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds,
illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
“Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“It is the tradition of the dust-jacket “blurb” to exaggerate the excellences of a book in hopes of enticing readers between its covers. But I do not follow that custom when I say that Stranger Things Happen is one of the very best books I have ever read. These stories will amaze, provoke, and intrigue. Best of all, they will delight. Kelly Link is terrific!“This is not blurbese. It is the living truth.”
— Fred Chappell, author of Family Gathering
“Finally, Kelly Link’s wonderful stories have been collected. My only complaint is the brevity of her oeuvre to date; as an avid reader of her work , I want her to continue to create more gems for me to read. I predict that “The Specialist’s Hat,” winner of the World Fantasy Award, will become part of the canon of classic supernatural tales.”
— Ellen Datlow, fiction editor, Scifiction.com
“I’ve been impatiently awaiting a collection of Kelly Link’s stories. Now that it’s here, it will sit in my library on that very short shelf of books I read again and again. For those who think Fantasy tired, Stranger Things Happen is a wake-up call.”
— Jeffrey Ford, author of The Beyond
“A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they’re not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don’t happen.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of Sister Noon
“Link’s writing is gorgeous, mischievous, sexy and unsettling. Unexpected images burst on your brain like soap bubbles on a dog’s tongue. I’ve been trying to imitate her since I first read one of her stories. It’s impossible. Instead I find myself curling up with a satisfied sigh and enjoying once more.”
— Nalo Hopkinson, author of Midnight Robber
“Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.”
— Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
“Kelly Link is a brilliant writer. Her stories seem to come right out of your own dreams, the nice ones and the nightmares both. These stories will burrow right into your subconscious and stay with you forever.”
— Tim Powers, author of Declare
“Of all the books you’ll read this year, this is the one you’ll remember. Kelly Link’s stories are like gorgeous tattoos; they get under your skin and stay forever and change your life. Buy this book, read it, read it again, congratulate yourself, and then start buying Stranger Things Happen for your friends.”
— Sarah Smith, author of A Citizen of the Country
“Kelly Link makes spells, not stories. She is the carrier of an eerie, tender sorcery; each enchantment takes you like a curse, leaving you dizzy, wounded, and elated at once. Her vision is always compassionate, and frequently very funny–but don’t let that fool you. This book, like all real magic, is terribly dangerous. You open it at your peril.”
— Sean Stewart, author of Galveston
“If Kelly Link is not the “future of horror,” a ridiculous phrase, she ought to be. To have a future at all, horror in general, by which I might as well mean fiction in general, requires precisely her freshness, courage, intelligence, and resistance to received forms and values. Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. Story by story, she is creating new worlds, new frameworks for perception, right in front of our eyes. I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.”
— Peter Straub, author of Magic Terror
The Baum Plan – Reviews
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel
Reviews
“In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In “Pride and Prometheus,” Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while “A Lunar Quartet” introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel’s wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you’ll ever read (“The Red Phone”).” A-
—Entertainment Weekly
“Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories.”
—Charlotte Observer
“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.”
—Time Out Chicago
“Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please — or to defy prediction.”
— Metro Magazine
“Kessel’s blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing.”
— Booklist
“One of the best collections of the year.”
— Locus
“These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless.”
— — SciFi.com
“Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous.”
—The Fix
“A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction.”
—The Stranger
Mothers & Other Monsters – Talking Points
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Talking Points for Maureen F. McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters
from the Reading Group Guide (PDF Download)
Some things to talk about. There are no right answers.
1. What is your take on the title of this collection — Mothers & Other Monsters? Is it that mothers are monstrous? How about the mothers in this collection? Who are the Other Monsters?
2. Science-fiction stories may be set in places real or imaginary, in real or imaginary times. Even so, they are usually about the here and now. Do you feel McHugh is able to address contemporary issues in a more — or a less — effective way through the use of her imaginary settings? What contemporary issues seem to interest her most?
3. Advances in technology allow parents to monitor their children in ways that were impossible a generation ago. What along these lines has already changed since you were a teenager? Would you prefer to be a teenager now? Would you prefer to have been a parent then?
4. How much oversight is too much?
5. Does McHugh’s treatment of stepmothers seem accurate? What are some of the difficulties stepmothers face here? Why are stepmothers traditionally seen as wicked? With more families being headed by single parents, will the stereotype of the wicked stepmother lose popularity?
6. McHugh works within a number of literary traditions including realism (“Eight-Legged Story“), ghost stories (“In the Air”), science fiction (“The Cost to Be Wise”), fantasy (“Ancestor Money“), fairy tales (“The Beast”), and narrative nonfiction (“Interview: On Any Given Day”). Science fiction has been characterized as a literature of exploration and therefore seen as especially appropriate for teenagers. Are these stories you would give to a teenager to read? What aspects of these stories would you have enjoyed as a teenager?
7. One of the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease is that life decisions for an individual have to be made by someone else. Do the reactions of the Alzheimer’s sufferer’s families in these stories seem realistic to you? How about the treatment of and the treatments for the disease?
8. What would you do if your partner were cured of Alzheimer’s but was not quite the person they had once been? (As in “Presence”)
9. In “Laika Comes Back Safe,” is Tye a werewolf or a kid who thinks he’s a werewolf? Which is scarier?
10. In “Ancestor Money,” a woman burns an offering for her grandmother. In China, these offerings include paper money called ‘Hell Money’ and elaborate paper models of houses, cars and even things like paper model fax machines and paper model cell phones. The idea is that when they are burned, the ancestors receive them as goods and money. What would you send your ancestors?
11. McHugh’s protagonists are frequently trapped in some way — by love, by law, by history, by illness. How do you feel about reading stories in which the narrator has little power and few choices? How well do you think McHugh’s narrators do in the circumstances in which they find themselves?
12. When it’s possible to rejuvenate your body, will you?
13. Would you describe these as love stories?
14. Did this collection remind you of any other books? What did these stories gain by being collected together? What differences do you experience between reading stories separately in magazines as compared to reading them in a collection or anthology?
More:
- The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
- Interview with Maureen F. McHugh
- BookStandard.com Interview.
-
Mothers & Other Monsters: hardcover | trade paperback | limited edition | ebook
Maureen McHugh Interview
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
An Interview with Maureen F. McHugh
from the Reading Group Guide (PDF Download) for Mothers & Other Monsters
Q. The title of the collection identifies the recurring motif of mothers, and their interactions with other family members, a motif central to many of these stories. Was this a conscious choice or a pattern that you recognized after writing and publishing the stories?
A. I started writing stories about mothers because of something the writer Karen Joy Fowler said at a workshop. In a story by another writer, the main character’s mom called, and Karen made the offhand comment that she was glad to see a mother in a story. At the time I was struggling mightily with the whole exercise of being a stepmother and one of the things I had trouble sorting out was the difference between issues that were ‘step’ issues and just the same stuff that comes up for every parent. In my eyes, everything was because I wasn’t my kid’s ‘real mom’. (We had full custody of my stepson.) Some of those things were just parent things. When something is important to me and I don’t understand it, I often write about it.
Mothers were just expected to be so perfect, you know?
Some of the pieces in the collection had already been written by this point, but I found that mothers had already started coming up in my fiction, and came up more and more. I had been thinking about a collection on and off for years and kicking around names, most of which were pretty stupid. Then Small Beer Press asked me to do a collection and I realized the name of the collection was Mothers & Other Monsters, and everything just sort of jelled around that.
Q. What is it that makes mothers such rich territory in fiction?
A. Nobody much writes about them. There are some great stories about mothers, but for the most part, motherhood is a very rigid role. A Hollywood actor observed recently that she had reached the point where she had two choices in roles, Good Mommy and Psycho Mommy. (Shirley MacLaine specializes in the grandmother version of these roles — but Psycho Grandmothers also Dispense Wisdom and Allow Children To Be Themselves.) I’m a different mother than any of my kid’s friend’s mothers. And they’re all different from each other in ways a good deal more complicated than Good Mother and Bad Mother.
There are some really good things written about motherhood. Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing” is one. Lorrie Moore’s harrowing “People Like That Are the Only People Here” is another wonderful short story. But for the most part, we can explore the relationships between lovers and between fathers and sons, but we’re nervous about talking about mothers and children.
Q. You are also able to focus closely on the experiences of children and teenagers in such stories as “Interview: On Any Given Day” and “Laika Comes Back Safe.” What are the difficulties involved in capturing the voices of these younger characters?
A. Language. My language for teenagers is inevitably a bit lame. My son helped me a bit. I told myself that even if their language was dead on, in five years it would sound preposterous, and just wrote it anyway. I’m also oddly protective of my teenagers. I work really hard not to embarrass them. My memories of being an adolescent usually involve one humiliating moral or social failure after another. I tend to shy away from doing that to them.
But I’m really comfortable with coming-of-age stories. I think my generation has never believed we were adults.
Q. It seems as if literary fiction is finally returning to a broader, more inclusive spectrum than the realism that has been predominant for so long. Your stories often work with speculative elements. How do you view the role of realism in fiction?
A. You know, I always get this question asked from the other direction — how do I view speculative elements. This is a great question. I was drawn to science fiction for the ways in which it allowed me to skip parts of real life I hated. I liked SF that made life more romantic. I liked Andre Norton’s protagonists finding out they weren’t ordinary. I wanted to be a mutant, an escapee from a different reality where I was special.
I studied writing for years. Some of that was formal — I have a masters degree from New York University that would be an MFA in creative writing if I got it today. Some of it was the more traditional way to become of writer. Write a lot, most of it bad, find people who can tell you it’s bad. Learn to get better. I found power in realism. I liked psychological realism when I read it. Those details — the moments we have all experienced but maybe never seen written down — work like a kind of electric jolt in a good story. In the Lorrie Moore story I mentioned, her two-year-old son has cancer. She describes being in the office of the pediatric oncologist and her son is doing that thing toddlers do so joyously, flicking on and off the light switch, while the pediatric oncologist explains what the cancer means and what they’ll do. How many times have I seen a toddler entranced with a switch — a flashlight, a vacuum cleaner, anything. And juxtaposed against the patient doctor explaining the moment is almost unbearable.
Q. How do you think working with fantastic or science fictional elements enriches your work?
A. It’s like a lens. It takes the story and throws the elements of relationship in high relief. In “Frankenstein’s Daughter,” the situation is not so uncommon. The daughter has chronic health problems that will potentially be fatal. The mother pays very little attention to her son because her daughter is so often in a life-or-death situation. The fact that the daughter is a clone of her dead daughter just heightens the situation. It justifies the very common feeling ‘this is my fault’ because she chose her daughter’s existence. And it startles the story in some way. I like that the daughter’s physiological problems come right out of the scientific literature on cloning. But I also like that, as I wrote the story, I found that the family was very much like a lot of other families.
Q. Your stories have been recognized both inside and outside the SF genre. Do you feel more at home as a writer in either field?
A. Both and neither, I guess. Science fiction has been really good to me, but I am conscious of having disappointed a lot of readers. People complain that I write boring stories. Depressing stories. That my stories could be about today if you took the speculative element out. Some of my stories, like “Laika Comes Back Safe,” may not even have a speculative element. (Although just because I think that doesn’t mean it’s true.)
But outside the field, I think I’m seen as a little precious. I write science fictional stories about moms. Kind of a niche. The way feminist writing is seen as a niche. I feel that for years my stories weren’t read outside the field. So inside the field I was seen as not science fictional enough and outside the field I was too science fictional.
This is a little like stepparenting/parenting issues. The non-genre writers I know also have difficulties with the ways in which their work is visibly shaped for the market. Any time a book or story is in the world, it’s in some place in a book store, in some specific magazine that means some people see it and others don’t. Often there are people who don’t see it who might very much like it, and people who do see it who feel misled by the packaging.
Q. Your stories often deal with the domestic, although usually in bold, original settings. Do you feel fiction that focuses on older women or domestic life is treated differently?
A. Sometimes. For one thing, I get asked about the fathers a lot. Where are the fathers? But mostly no. I’ve been really well received, and I’ve gotten extraordinary attention from my peers. I’d say that my fiction has been treated very well by people from workshops like Sycamore Hill and Rio Hondo, and by the East Side Writers and the local SF writer’s group. They grappled directly with it, called me to account on it, and in large part let me become the writer I am today. Editors have always published my work, they haven’t marginalized it.
Q. Several of the stories in the collection — most notably “Oversite” and “Presence” — feature characters dealing with the fallout of Alzheimer’s or dementia in their lives. What are you exploring in these stories?
A. Alzheimer’s, like other brain disorders, calls into question the very nature of self. What is self? Who are we? I think we are our physical selves, particularly our brains. I have a particular fear of dementia and of loss of self. More so, I would say, than a fear of death. The irony of that is that now my mother has dementia, so for the past few years I have been privy to a close-up look of the way in which her ‘self’ is dissolving. The ‘self,’ I must say, is very persistent. Even as my mother loses aspects of language and some of her personality changes, there is a stubborn core of something that, at this point at least, is still recognizably connected to the historic ‘her.’
Q. Consciousness and identity emerge as two strong themes within the collection. What did you want to say in dealing with these?
A. I don’t know that I wanted to say anything. I think I don’t understand consciousness or identity. There’s a saying in fiction, ‘Write what you know.’ I think better fiction comes out of writing about the things that are important to me, but that I’m fundamentally uncertain about. That doesn’t mean I sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a story about identity.’ I always think I’m writing a story about a girl who thinks her best friend is a werewolf. It just happens that I circle back to those issues of identity.
As a writer, I have a couple of itches that I scratch, things I return to again and again. I tend to be drawn to motherhood because I’m trying to find a way to convince myself that I wasn’t a monster. I’ll get an idea for a story and think, I know, I’ll make the mother have Alzheimer’s. Not thinking about the connection between a teenager finding her way and an old woman losing her way and a mother helpless in the middle to ease either passage. I find out about all those things years later. I put them there, because those things are by default interesting to me. But it’s not conscious.
Q. Did you learn anything new about these stories in the process of choosing and ordering them for the book?
A. I find it difficult to reread my own fiction. It was nice to see that a lot of it had held up. And I was surprised at how much the same things kept coming up, again and again. The mother in “The Lincoln Train,” for example, has some form of dementia.
Q. How are these stories different from your novels, if at all? How does your writing process differ between the two?
A. I often write short stories to a deadline. Often, anymore, a workshop. They are more likely to be ideas that I’m not at all sure will work out. I can take more risks because most of the time I know that in a couple of months I’ll at least have a draft.
Two of my novels have come out of short stories, so at some level, there is some overlap. But when I intentionally start a novel, I’m thinking it will have more ingredients than a short story. More loose ends. More questions and more stuff.
Q. You’ve talked in the past about workshopping with other writers being an important part of your writing life. What do you take from those experiences?
A. As I get older, I think I get better at reading and understanding stories, and some of that is from workshopping.
Mostly it’s been very rare for someone not to tell me something that didn’t show me a way to read the story I’d written. A lot of times it wasn’t the way I wanted the story read. And a lot of times it said stuff about the story and about my writing that I wasn’t very good at hearing.
But it’s the only way I know to get better.
Q. Who are some writers you admire or who have influenced your work?
A. At any given time, anyone I’m reading who strikes me is going to have a pretty strong affect on me.
When I was in my twenties I was really taken by the work of Samuel R. Delany and the novels of Joan Didion. I think I was drawn to the romanticism of Delany. I was also really taken with the way so much of Didion’s stories happened off the page. I was also strongly drawn to a little book by Marguerite Yourcenar called Coup de Grâce. I reread it a couple of years ago and saw all sorts of aspects of it that distress me now that I’m in my forties but it affected me powerfully when I was younger.
A few years ago I found myself utterly charmed by the sheer artificialness of Raymond Carver’s stories. I had always thought of them as very psychologically realistic. Minimal. All that. But what I like about them now is how artificial they are. Perfect little setups that spring shut at conclusion. Lately I’ve been reading the short fiction of Joy Williams. It’s really astonishing.
I like the work of Kelly Link a lot.
I like the Harry Potter novels. Great escapism.
When I was younger, I expected what I thought of as a rigorous kind of lack of sentimentality in novels. Anything else struck me as cheating. Lately I have been drawn more and more to certain kinds of sentiment. Books like I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Q. What can we expect to see from you next?
A. I’m working on a novel. I’ve been working on it for six or seven years. But this time, I swear I’m going to finish it.
Interview by Gwenda Bond.
More:
- The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
- Talking Points
- BookStandard.com Interview.
-
Mothers & Other Monsters: hardcover | trade paperback | limited edition | ebook
Mothers & Other Monsters – Limited Edition
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Mothers & Other Monsters – Reviews
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Mothers & Other Monsters
Maureen McHugh
Story Prize Finalist
Book Sense Notable Book
“All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical. But here the fantastical seems so normal, so part of our everyday experience, that we simply accept McHugh’s premises, odd as they might be when you consider them independently of the tales themselves. The adjective that best represents this collection is ‘unsettling’. How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man she’s attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she dreads introducing him to her dead brother (“In the Air”); “Ancestor Money,” in which a bequest entices a woman to leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China; or “Laika Comes Back Safe,” the story of two teenagers who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives, but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. Whether it’s alternative history that seems so real you start to question your own knowledge of the past (“The Lincoln Train”) or a tale of the horrifying end of a utopian colony (“The Cost To Be Wise”), McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right hands. I was so impressed by these stories that I immediately went back and read McHugh’s first novel, China Mountain Zhang, which I had somehow missed, and enjoyed it thoroughly.”
— Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, “Books for a Rainy Day““Unpredictable and poetic work.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer (Recommended Summer Reading)“[McHugh] cherry-picks subtle magical or futuristic elements from the expansive genre library.”
— Angle“McHugh’s prose style is unique.”
— LEO (Louisville Eccentric Observer)“McHugh is enormously talented…. [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense of a humor, and a keen wit.”
— Strange Horizons“Passion and precision.”
— Locus“There’s not a single story that isn’t strong, and most are brilliant.”
— Ideomancer“Clear, bright, and honest.”
— New York Review of Science Fiction“Each story in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics of families and the vagaries of being human. “Ancestor Money”” considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the living; “The Lincoln Train” describes an alternate ending to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped westward on crowded trains. “Nekropolis,” the germ of McHugh’s novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of families in it. In “Eight-Legged Story,” a stepmother comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in “Frankenstein’s Daughter,” a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter’s clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by shoplifting. McHugh’s stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters’ lives — slices of life well worth reading and rereading.”
— Booklist“The 13 stories in McHugh’s debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power. In “Presence,” a woman helps her husband through an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer’s disease and, by the story’s end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing personality. “In the Air” bridges three generations with its account of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter by means of biologically implanted homing devices. “Laika Comes Back Safe” represents so believably the feelings two school friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate Civil War history in “The Lincoln Train” or a tale of extraterrestrial anthropology in “The Cost to Be Wise,” McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to the wider audience they deserve.”
— Publishers Weekly“In this collection of stories, Maureen F. McHugh explores the subject of technology and identity, demonstrating that technology can only be a lens for what defines us as human, that is, our intimate relationship with the world around us and all the beings with whom we share that world. It is not technology which transforms us into monsters, but the danger of losing our sense of compassion toward ourselves and others in the face of monstrous choices.”
— Greenman Review“Stories that abjure future or alternate-history settings for a here-and-now (sometimes problematically so) in which women, most of them mothers (though again often problematically) seek to negotiate landscapes for which their lives thus far have left them unprepared.”
— Tangent Online“Moving.”
— Shortform
Praise for McHugh’s previous books:
On Nekropolis:
- “Exquisite.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- “This luminous tale of forbidden love in a near-future Morocco explores the evolution of human nature in a world where technology has redefined the meaning of the word human. . . . Speculative fiction at its best.” — Library Journal
- A New York Times Notable Book
- A Book Sense 76 Pick
- Amazon Best of the Year
On China Mountain Zhang:
- “McHugh’s achievement recalls the best work of Delany and Robinson without being in the least derivative.” — New York Times Notable Book
- Winner of the Tiptree, Lambda, and Locus Awards.
On Mission Child:
- “McHugh delivers another astonishing, compulsively readable novel.”–Booklist (starred review)
- “Fans of Ursula Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh’s intelligent, carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet very alien.” — Publishers Weekly
- “Beautiful . . . outstanding . . . McHugh is one of the finest U.S. fiction writers working today.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune
- “Emotionally compelling . . . immensely satisfying . . . wonderfully structured and beautifully achieved . . . a splendid science fiction novel . . . McHugh makes an alien world and an imagined society feel compellingly real, and uses this setting to say something significant about being human.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
- “Mission Child is an epic map of voice meeting voice, world meeting world–tragic, heartfelt, and vibrant with life.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude
Magic for Beginners – Reviews
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
magic for beginners: stories
kelly link
Best of the Year Lists:
- “Link’s stories … play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and J.K. Rowling, and Link finds truths there that most authors wouldn’t dare touch.”
— Time Magazine - “Link’s writing shimmers with imagination.”
— Salon - “A mind-bending blast, as funny, disturbing and poignant as anything I’ve read this year.”
— Capitol Times - “The storyteller’s mantra — “It gets better” — come to life and multiplied.”
— Village Voice - “Link’s powerful prose places this collection into a class of its own.”
— Boldtype (2005 Notable Books) - San Francisco Chronicle.
Story Prize recommended reading list.
Reviews | UK reviews
“One of current fiction’s little-known treasures.”
— Time Magazine“Dazzling…. One to savor.”
— Entertainment Weekly (A, Editor’s Choice)“For Kelly Link, life is suddenly magic.”
— Detroit Free Press (Hillil Italie, AP)“Magic for Beginners (Harvest, $14), is worth picking up. Doing so will put you in the hands of a true conjurer.”
— Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer“Kelly Link is the future of American short fiction.”
— Alexis Smith, Powells.com Staff Pick“Fierce and witty.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer“These stories shimmer like impressionist paintings.”
— Montreal Gazette“Kelly Link is the best short-fiction writer working in science fiction and fantasy today, and her new collection, Magic for Beginners, proves it.”
— Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net“Link’s stories are delightfully playful, almost precocious, as she creates palimpsests of secret passages, hidden doors, quiet pulses of deeper meaning…. Link is fast becoming a major talent.”
— Boston Globe“Fresh and unaffected, yet honed to the essential.”
— Salon“Advanced alchemy.”
— The Believer“Sinister and sublime.”
— Boston Phoenix“Exuberantly eccentric.”
— Time Out New York“Link’s powerful prose places this collection into a class of its own.”
— Boldtype“Spellbinding.”
— Time Out Chicago“Kelly Link writes from way out in left field.”
— Charlotte Observer“A complete delight.”
— Rich Horton, Locus“These tales are every bit as remarkable as those in her first collection.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus* “Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.”
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)“Cult-favorite fabulist and Shirley Jackson-esque master of the short story, returns with an eagerly-awaited new collection of thoughtfully strange tales that sprinkle the mundane with pixie dust, a dash of old-fashioned tragedy and a bit of gallows humor.”
— The Ruminator Review“Truly magical, with masterfully crafted stories that are as dark as they are delightful….Sometimes hilarious, sometimes disconcerting, Link’s stories demonstrate her wicked sense of humor and genius wit.”
— Bookpage“KELLY LINK has an uncanny knack for casting spells over her readers, for luring them into the dark places — the attic, the underworld, a realm beneath a hill. Her first collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, was published by Small Beer Press, a tiny independent publisher in Northampton founded by Link and Gavin J. Grant that, according to its Web site, is “committed to publishing short story collections and novels by authors we feel are slipping through the cracks.” These stories bend and transcend genre as Link stirs together myth, mystery, horror, and fantasy. Her second collection, Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press, 272 pages, $24), is due out in July and promises the same mix of the sinister and the surreal. But the stories — more suggestive than they are descriptive — shouldn’t be pigeonholed as only for sci-fi and fantasy fans. Because for all Link’s use of fairy tale and phantasm, she roots her stories in the life that we know. The narrator in “The Faery Handbag,” for example, tells the story of her grandmother’s magic bag — a bag so black it feels like “when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness” — which if opened correctly leads to a secret realm, and if opened incorrectly leads to a howling, hairless Cerberus-like dog. The story begins in the Garment District, in Kendall Square; there’s a sly reference to the Star Wars prequels; and, beyond the handbag, it’s a story of young lost love. Fairy tales and myths may be timeless, but these stories are of this moment.”
–Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Phoenix“Link is the purest, most distinctive surrealist in America.”
— Booklist“These nine stories are the kinds of stories for which literary phrases like “surrealism” and “magical realism” were invented, and I guess they’ll do, although they seem pretty stale and pale in the face of Link’s boundlessly creative prose. Let’s just say that nobody mixes the fantastical and the ordinary together quite like Link does, spinning tales that are both funny and disturbing, straightforward and elliptical, unreal and real.”
— The Capital Times“One of the most fascinating writers practicing the craft today.”
— The Simon“Wishful thinking on the brink of disaster.”
— Village Voice“Magical realism meets horror meets postmodern absurdism. Very fresh and funny.”
— Michael Knight, Knoxville Metro Pulse Summer Reading Guide“A bizarre and enchanting read, worth reading and re-reading.”
— Daily Nebraskan“A wonderful rattlebag of fantastic tales from far beyond the concrete sidewalks and convenience stores we know. Like her first collection, Magic for Beginners uses humor as the main prism through which the author views her mostly hapless or at least happy-go-lucky characters. The strange attraction of Link’s fiction is that even when you’re not really sure what’s going on you’re having way too much fun reading to stop and rereading these tall tales is a positive pleasure.”
— Rich Rennicks Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC“The stories in Magic for Beginners make their own strange, perfectly formed sense. Link creates these familiar, spooky, sometimes funny worlds with cats parented by witches, or a cheerleader hanging out with the devil, or creepifying rabbits. I’m always a little tense reading these stories. In the very best way, I never know what is coming next. If she only parcelled out one elegant sentence at a time I would beg for each one.”
— Pam Harcourt, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL“I am in love with Kelly Link’s new collection of stories, Magic For Beginners, just out in hardcover. This book is a fairly complete list of my favorite things. She sort of summarized it best when she signed it for me: “Love, Magic, Zombies!” It’s fantastical, whimsical, and dead serious and it makes me interested in short stories again.”
— Alexander Chee, author Edinburgh, in Books To Watch Out For“This is one of the most extraordinary and wonderful books of the year.”
—Time Out London, Mar. 27, 07“Possibly grimmer than Grimm.”
—The Herald, Feb 2, 07“Beautifully written short stories; eccentric and dark, the collection is an Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups.”
—Dazed and Confused“Link’s writing is bold, tender, mischievous and unsettling.”
—Cork Evening Echo, Feb 17, 07“These are weird and wacky tales, each with their own barmy internal logic which draws you in, flips you on your head and leaves you dizzy with disbelief…. Link’s extraordinary use of language is as haunting as the tales themselves. She blends fantasy and reality into an irresistible melange that, at its best, becomes a powerful metaphor for the unreliability of perception.”
—Jane Wessel, Venue (****)“Link’s magic is to show the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa: no mean feat.”
—RTE Guide (*****)“Just when you think you’ve read all the best magic and fantasy stories, along comes Link and the dull world is enchanted all over again. Her imagination floats free into her very own twilight zone.”
—Saga, Mar 07“Whether she’s writing about a suburban family haunted by rabbits or a grandmother who keeps a world hidden in her handbag, Link’s stories are witty, moving and sometimes scary.”
—The Gloss Magazine, Feb 07“A collection of nine stories from a talent to watch, this is a lyrical fantasy where the ordinary is made extraordinary.”
—The Bookseller, Oct 06Advance Praise
“Kelly Link owns the most darkly playful voice in American fiction since Donald Barthelme. She is pushing the American short story into places that it hasn’t yet been pushed, while somehow managing to maintain a powerful connection to traditional forms and storytelling values.”
— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay“The dream-logic of Magic for Beginners is intoxicating. These stories will come alive, put on zoot suits, and wrestle you to the ground. They want you and you will be theirs.”
— Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones“A wonderful rattlebag of fantastic tales from far beyond the concrete sidewalks and convenience stores we know. Like her first collection, Magic for Beginners uses humor as the main prism through which the author views her mostly hapless or at least happy-go-lucky characters. The strange attraction of Link’s fiction is that even when you’re not really sure what’s going on you’re having way too much fun reading to stop and rereading these tall tales is a positive pleasure.”
— Rich Rennicks Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC“The stories in Magic for Beginners make their own strange, perfectly formed sense. Link creates these familiar, spooky, sometimes funny worlds with cats parented by witches, or a cheerleader hanging out with the devil, or creepifying rabbits. I’m always a little tense reading these stories. In the very best way, I never know what is coming next. If she only parcelled out one elegant sentence at a time I would beg for each one.”
— Pam Harcourt, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL
Anya DeNiro
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Alan DeNiro, Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Anya Johanna DeNiro is a trans woman and writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and received a BA in English from the College of Wooster and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. Her novella City of a Thousand Feelings was published by Aqueduct Press in 2020 and was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. Her novel OKPsyche followed from Small Beer Press in 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues, including One Story, Catapult, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Santa Monica Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Her work has been a finalist for the Crawford Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Naomi Mitchison
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
August 2005: We are reprinting Travel Light as the second title in our Peapod Classics series. Small, cute, collectible!
NYTimes obit — including hilarious spelling: “An obituary on Saturday about Naomi Mitchison, the British writer and early feminist, misspelled the surname of the Labor Party leader at whom she once threw a half-plucked partridge. He was Hugh Gaitskell, not Gaitskill.”
Books in print as of October 2002:
- The Corn King and the Spring Queen
- To the Chapel Perilous
- When the Bough Breaks, and Other Stories
- Solution 3
- Buy Naomi Mitchison’s books in the UK
Interview with Naomi Mitchison, April 1989
Here’s a short essay on one of Mitchison’s young adult novels, Travel Light, that ran in F&SF in June 2001
My staff pick for BookSense.com in March 2001
Find books by Naomi Mitchison on BookFinder.com
This page is a placeholder. (Submissions welcome.)
Naomi Mitchison was born in Scotland in 1897 and died at the age of 101 in 1999. In the USA she isn’t too well known, but I recommend her, even if you have to search for some of her books. Judging by the number of times it’s been brought back into print, the most popular of her historical novels is The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Soho Press have put it out under their Hera Series which includes novels by Cecilia Holland and Gillian Bradshaw.
If historical fiction isn’t your thing, don’t turn up your nose quite yet, she also wrote science fiction (Solution 3, [Feminist Press], Memoirs of a Spacewoman), some of the most enjoyable autobiographies I’ve ever read (You May Well Ask, Small Talk), children’s books (including the wonderful Travel Light), plays (with Lewis Geilgud), poetry, essays, short stories, and biographies; over 70 books in all.
Mitchison was born in Scotland because her mother wanted a woman to attend her at the birth which was difficult to find outside Edinburgh. Despite her proto-feminist leanings her mother never managed to get beyond her Tory beliefs and it wasn’t until Mitchison was older that she realized that she shared her deep Socialist views with her father. Socialism has a long and respectable history in Scotland and does not carry the same negative connotations that the media and populace seem to fear in the USA.
From an early age Mitchison seems to have been very self aware. Excerpts from her early diaries in The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (Virago, 1997) by Jenni Calder and in her own autobiography show her as a learned companion to her older brothers as they study science and try to keep up with their father’s work. Her family lived well. Her father, J.S. Haldane, was a respected scientist and her uncle, Richard Haldane, a cabinet minister during World War I. She lived variously in Scotland and England until moving back to Scotland in 1937 with her husband, the politician Dick Mitchison. She was politically active all her adult life and came to the USA in the 1930’s to see how the working class, poor and minorities were faring. She also was well-connected in the arts and political world and put her time into campaigning in support of her beliefs. She believed in sexual freedom, women’s rights and social justice. She was successful enough in her own lifetime to be consistently published but despite that and her family money problems plagues her well past the usual retirement age.
This first ran in Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop’s Annotated Browser.
Partial Bibliography – Howard Waldrop
Fri 31 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
From Howard Waldrop’s own bibliography.
“The Ugly Chickens,” Universe 10, edited by Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1980
Dream’s Edge, edited by Terry Carr, Sierra Club, 1980
1981 Annual Year’s Best SF, edited by Donald Wollheim, DAW, 1981
Best SF of the Year #10, edited by Terry Carr, Pocket, 1981
Best SF of the Year: 10th Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, Dutton, 1981
Nebula Award Stories 16, edited by Jerry Pournelle, Holt, 1981
Best of Universe, edited by Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1982
The Legend Book of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, Legend (UK), 1992
My Favorite Science Fiction Story (chosen by Harry Turtledove), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1999
“Der Untergang des Abendlandeschmenschen,” Chacal # 1, 1976
Mammoth Book of Vampires, edited by Stephen Jones, Carrol & Graf, 1992
Book of Vampires, edited by Stephen Jones, Barnes and Noble, 1997
System Shock, comic book adaptation, forthcoming
“Ike at the Mike,” Omni, June 1982
Best of Omni SF #1, edited by Ellen Datlow, Zebra, 1984
One-act play adaptation, Minicon 1991
Elvis Rising, edited by Kay Sloan and Constance Pierece, Avon, 1993
Mondo Elvis, edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole, St. Martin’s Press, 1994
We Could Do Worse (4 cassette audio collection), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (read by Yancy Butler), New Star Media, 1999
“Dr. Hudson’s Secret Gorilla,” Shayol #1, November 1977
Rivals of King Kong, edited by Michel Parry, Corgi (UK), 1977
“… The World, As We Know’t,” Shayol #6, December 1982
The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, Norton, 1993
“Green Brother,” Shayol #5, April 1982
Dinosaurs!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace, 1990
Also published as Weird Business, graphic story hardback edited by Joe Lansdale, Rick Klaw, and Ben Ostrander, Mojo Press, 1995; adaptation by Steven Utley, art by John Lucas.
“Mary Margaret Road-Grader,” Orbit 18, edited by Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1976
Best SF of the Year: 6th Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, Dutton, 1977
“Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me,” Nickelodeon #2, September 1976
“Horror, We Got,” Shayol #3, Summer 1979
“Man-Mountain Gentian,” Omni, September 1983
The Year’s Best SF: First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, Bluejay, 1984
Omni Book of Science Fiction #5, edited by Ellen Datlow, Zebra, 1987
“God’s Hooks,” Universe 12, edited by Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1982
Bestiary!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace, 1986
The One That Got Away, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh, Bonanza Books, 1989
Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s Press, 1996
“Heirs of the Perisphere,” Playboy, July 1985
Nebula Awards 21, edited by George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987
Playboy Book of Science Fiction, edited by Alice K. Turner, HarperPrism, 1998
Michael wants to provoke you
Thu 30 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., the world, Zines| Posted by: Gavin
Go read this great angry rant by Michael about the choices we all make every day, their ramifications, and the importance of reconsidering them every so often. What’s your footprint? The starving musk oxen of today are the abandoned water-starved cities of tomorrow:
You’ve probably heard by now about the Bush Administration covering up evidence of melting icecaps.
20,000 musk oxen starved to death in the arctic because of a phenomenon called a “rain on snow event”. Rain falls on snow, turns to ice. Oxen come by and try to dig with their hooves for the grass under the snow. But they can’t break the ice. So they die.
…
Learn the rules of recycling in your town, and follow them, for real, all the time. If you work in a different town than you live in, learn those rules too. Hassle your co-workers about it. If they see you picking their plastic and aluminum out of the trash enough times, they’ll quit throwing it away out of guilt. I’ve seen it happen. No, you should not feel guilty for making other people feel guilty. Guilt is the only thing that’s going to get anybody to change.
Then check out one of Michael’s takes on the future post-collapse: take a trip down the river in “Starlings” on Abyss and Apex.
The Hortlak, part 2
Thu 30 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Audio out, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
If you like the free audio stories, check out Frank’s site. He’s podcasting some of his own stuff as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and others.
Following Ray
Wed 29 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ray Vukcevich, Zines| Posted by: Gavin
I emailed Ray Vukcevich recently about another of his stories from Meet Me in the Moon Room selling to a Japanese magazine (“No Comet” will be either the third or fourth, can’t remember) and he mentioned that he’d just had a story published on Smokelong Quarterly (don’t like the name). His story, “A Funny Smell,” is a short blast of displacement, philosophy, faith, and laughs—a typical Vukcevichian moment—and there’s an interview to go with it.
The ToC at the bottom of the page (smart design!) listed a Dan Chaon story, “The Hobblers,” and Dan’s always worth reading so I read that—the time dilation and emotional weight was a little similar in effect to some of Ray’s stories—and then the interview with Dan.
Since I’d read a couple of stories by two guys I knew I thought I should try some people I didn’t, so I skimmed through a few and liked “Me and Theodore Are Trapped in the Trunk of the Car with Rags in Our Mouths and Tape Around Our Wrists and Ankles, Please Let Us Out” by Mary Hamilton which has a brilliant opening, “I built a bridge and named it Samuel.”, and continues in a mad rush that works and “Rats” by Z. Z. Boone (spoiler: the rats don’t make it).
Then I went back to Dan’s interview which mentions he has a new novel out this September (Await Your Reply) and I would be remiss not to point out here that there is a sort of tuckerization in there that will jump out to people that us and make them laugh.
In his interview, though, there’s a link to an essay published on The Rumpus, “What Happened to Sheila.” Which is heartbreaking and should be read. And there there’s a link to Sheila Schwartz’s novel Lies Will Take You Somewhere which came out in April from Etruscan Press and which PW called “a strong debut novel.”
For a taste of Sheila’s work I followed the link (still on Rumpus) to a story by her, “Three Cancer Patients Walk Into a Bar” which is tough and wickedly smart. Sheila’s writing is an acquired taste but it’s good, strong stuff and I recommend you give it a shot.
something from next winter
Tue 28 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Art, Holly Black| Posted by: Gavin
Here’s something fun: an early shot of the front cover of Holly Black‘s creepy and wonderful first short story collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories which Big Mouth House will publish in February 2010:
And here’s the table of contents with the place of first publication in (parenthesis):
“The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” (Eternal Kiss)
“A Reversal of Fortune” (The Coyote Road)
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” (Troll’s Eye View)
“The Night Market” (The Faery Reel)
“The Dog King”
“Virgin” (Magic in the Mirrorstone)
“In Vodka Veritas” (21 Proms)
“Coat of Stars” (So Fey)
“Paper Cuts Scissors” (Realms of Fantasy)
“Going Ironside” (Endicott Journal)
“The Poison Eaters” (The Restless Dead)
+ one more story.
Sara @ Bookcourt
Tue 28 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Books, To Read Pile, YouTube| Posted by: Gavin
The Times just did a piece on the history of Bookcourt in Brooklyn, a great place where we had Carol Emshwiller and others read, including a slideshow of the family’s apartments above the bookshop — not enough books! But then, they have a store full of them.
One of our long-time volunteers, Sara Majka, recently read there on at the launch party for the latest issue of A Public Space and you can see her, Samantha Hunt, and editor Brigid Hughes in this taping of the evening:
How did 100,000,000 women disappear?
Mon 27 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., the world| Posted by: Gavin
From The Star:
How did 100,000,000 women disappear?Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm
In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.
Even if you think you know this story it’s worth reading.
Trampoline – Images
Fri 24 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Trampoline: an anthology
Edited by Kelly Link
First a picture from the Quail Ridge reading (Dave Shaw & Richard Butner):
,
then the Joseph-Beth reading (Christopher Rowe, Kelly Link, & Christopher Barzak):
O
A window display created by Greer Gilman for a bank in Harvard Sq., Cambridge, MA, July 2003.
All over the country home insurance companies inquire, “Do you have a Trampoline?”
O
Original Trampoline webart:
O
Click the book cover for a larger image. Painting by Shelley Jackson.
Trampoline – Reviews
Fri 24 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Trampoline: an anthology
Edited by Kelly Link
“Exceptional visions in which the authors aren’t afraid to take chances with how they deliver the stories to us.”
— F&SF“No unblinkered, gloveless reader can resist the stream of associations unleashed by Ford’s story and the rest of Trampoline: influences as disparate as science fiction, magic realism, pulp, and Twilight Zone morality plays.”
— Village Voice“In short, Trampoline is yet another unique source of powerful, exciting, new approaches to fantasy and interstitial fiction. It is flexible enough and fresh enough that I hope it proves to be the beginning of a series. It occupies its own rather beautifully fragile place in the fantastical fiction milieu.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online“The editor should be commended, not only for an intriguing compilation…but that she manages to stay out of the way of it. The only thing that intrudes here is her taste in the story selection and ordering. There’s no tiresome manifesto here, no chest-beating about movements or genres or rants against publishing mediocrity and how some merry band of rogues is going to revolutionize anything. She understands that the role of editor is to let the work speak for itself.”
— SF Site“Trampoline does what most other anthologies only dream of–it manages to be both significant and eminently readable. Link brings together some of the top names working in fantasy, science fiction, and horror today, as well as some up-and-coming talents who deserve wider recognition. All of the stories push the genre boundaries, creating a collection on the cutting edge of modern genre fiction.”
— Peggy Hailey, Book People, Austin, TX“A major anthology…. Most impressive is Greer Gilman’s “A Crowd of Bone”, a huge novella, all but unclassifiable…told in Gilman’s difficult but rewarding allusive, poetic style, sheer joy to read…. The images are striking, the prose rhythms are perfect, and the slowly emerging story is moving and starkly bittersweet.”
— Rich Horton, Locus, 8/03“What constitutes ‘unusual’? Some recent anthologists have tried to tackle the question…but Link is content to show, not tell.”
— Faren Miller, Locus, 8/03“Fabulous Tales”
— Washington Post, July 27, 2003Books Under Review — oddly organized due to Google Ads
Trampoline: an elastic mattress-like contrivance on which acrobats, gymnasts, &c. leap.
Trampoline: an original anthology edited by Kelly Link, the award-winning author of Stranger Things Happen, and co-editor of the zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Trampoline: twenty astounding stories by Christopher Barzak, Richard Butner, Alan DeNiro, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Greer Gilman, John Gonzalez, Glen Hirshberg, Samantha Hunt, Alex Irvine, Shelley Jackson, Beth Adele Long, Maureen McHugh, Susan Mosser, Ed Park, Christopher Rowe, Dave Shaw, Vandana Singh, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson.
-
- We are closed to submissions.
- The Book of Love
- » by Kelly Link
- » A Limited Edition
- Not a Journal
- » updates &c.
- Books
- » Latest Title
- » Chapbooks
- » Big Mouth House
- » More ...
- Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
- » Subscribe
- » Submit
- » Advertise
- Read!
- » Creative Commons
- » Samples
- » Listen
- About
- » Guidelines
- » Catalog
- » Contact
- » For Academics
- » Of Small Beer
- » Links
- Shop here
- » Preorder
- » Mail Order
- » I Hear You're Working on a Novel and more zines
- » Bundles
- » Bookstores
- Updates
- » Events
- » Bonus Materials Email List
- » Occasional Email List:
-
Tags
-
A. DeNiro
Art
Audio out
Awards
Ayize Jama-Everett
Benjamin Parzybok
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Books
bookshops
Carol Emshwiller
Cons
ebooks
Elizabeth Hand
events
Free books
Greer Gilman
Howard Waldrop
Interstitial Arts
Joan Aiken
John Crowley
John Kessel
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Lord
Kathe Koja
Kelly Link
Kij Johnson
Laurie J. Marks
LCRW
Literary Beer
Maureen F. McHugh
Nathan Ballingrud
Pop
Publishing
readings
Sarah Pinsker
Sofia Samatar
Susan Stinson
the world
To Read Pile
Uncategorized
Ursula K. Le Guin
Vincent McCaffrey
website bumph
Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
YouTube
-
Archives