Steve Berman has put out the first issue of a new magazine, Icarus, through Magcloud, one of those Web 2.1 long tail site thingies where you can publish what you like on any scale. Since niche mags are dying off like dinosaurs after a meteor crash, it will be interesting to see how this develops.Not sure if we will put out LCRW through them the way we did with Lulu; the ebook + zine format ($5 vs. $13) works quite well at the moment.
Not sure if you can subscribe or not, but you can preview and order the first issue here:
Icarus is the first magazine devoted to gay-themed speculative fiction and writing – from fantasy to horror to science fiction, and all the weird tales that fall between the cracks. Our first issue features short stories by Jeff Mann, Joel D. Lane, Jameson Currier and Tom Cardamone; interviews with Dan Stone and graphic artist Peter Grahame; poetry by Lawrence M. Schoen; plus book reviews, an article about the Gaylactic Network, and brief happenings in gay publishing. Icarus is published by Lethe Press.
We’re having an internet nofun time with all our @smallbeerpress.com emails not working. Boo. Old emails: info @ lcrw.net for instance still work. One of these years we will change over prop’ly, one of these years.
Update: snafu all untangled and everything is working again!
IndieBound just added a list widget so that people can have multiple wish lists (one for family, one for, er, friends?).
Of course we abused it right away to make a list of Small Beer books. Actually, Small Beer Press books, will have to go back and make a small beer booklist later. Copy and paste at will.
Michael Northrup’s firstnovel, Gentlemen, just got a review in the NYTimes and Michael, well, he’s a funny guy, so: lifted from his site:
I am having a contest on my website to celebrate the review of Gentlemen in today’s New York Times Book Review. The money line of the review is the last one: “Northrop’s first novel is creepy, yet it has what can pass for a happy—or at least satisfying—ending.” Yet it could be so much moneyer! That’s where you come in.
Simply write your own ending to the sentence: “Northrop’s first novel is creepy, yet…”
For example, Northrop’s first novel is creepy, yet so is Northrop. So much fun! So much easy! Just leave your entry as a comment on my site. The winner will be picked by a celebrity guest judge and will receive amazing prizes! (You know, kind of.)
It took a while to organize but we’ve just posted Michael’s great picture of Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes. These angled shots give a much better idea of what one of our books look like and this, thanks to Kathleen Jennings’ wonderful cover, is one of the more beautiful ones we’ve put out:
Greer Gilman’s novel, Moonwise, is decidedly thorny. It won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. “A Crowd of Bone” is one of three linked stories, variations on a winter myth. The first, “Jack Daw’s Pack,” was a Nebula finalist for 2001, and the subject of a Foundation interview by Michael Swanwick. A sometime forensic librarian, Gilman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.
Reviews
Cloud & Ashes
“A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origins. Seasons, weather, lust, pain, sacrifice … the stuff of old ballads becomes intensely real, with the natural contradictions of a cold wind that both chafes and dances…. And the payoff is immense. I finished Cloud & Ashes almost tempted to write a thesis that compares it favorably to what James Joyce did in Ulysses and tried in Finnegan’s Wake, yet feeling like I’d lived through it all.”
—Locus
“Moving, engaging, mysterious, glorious…In her flying pastiche of words and images Gilman does in the fantasy vernacular what Joyce aimed for.”
—Tangent
A Crowd of Bone
“Gilman’s ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Greer Gilman’s diamond of a novella . . . might reward a lifetime of re-reading. A question like ‘What is it about?’ is as useful applied to Gilman’s novella as asked of a snow leopard. Both simply are.” —Locus
Moonwise
“Greer Gilman is a writer like no one else. Many try to employ the matter of myth and folktale, but their tongues are inadaquate—Gilman can employ words as the bards of Ireland did, to make realities . . . Moonwisedoesn’t resemble a work of the past age—it is the past age come back new, in its clothes and its language and its dark riddling heart. Moonwise simply has no peers.” —John Crowley
KL: Were there any particular writers or stories that influenced the writing of the story that will be appearing in Trampoline? If so, how exactly did they influence the writing of your story?
GG: Folk songs and ballads, mostly, ravelled out and rebraided. Lots of Anon. Some formal poetry: Hopkins and the Gawain poet, for the hedge-entangled language; Andrew Marvell, for the mowers. And for the soliloquies, a slew of playwrights. It’s a winter’s tale, a late romance. I wrote it for the ear, as much as for the imagination. There are two sorts of voices here, in counterpoint: Cloudish vernacular and a high Jacobean iambic, endlessly enjambed.
I owe the vision of the Scarecrow/Hanged Man/Child Sacrifice to the late miraculous Lal Waterson. Her song, “The Scarecrow,” haunts me, and it has for years.
Oh, and Thea’s magic is inspired by the art of Andy Goldsworthy.
KL: Is your Trampoline story generally representative of the sort of story you usually write? To elaborate: is this story a departure in style or subject matter (or any other sort of departure, for that matter) for you? If so, what was different or new for you in the writing of this story? Do you think it is a new direction for your writing, or simply an experiment?
GG: I keep moving inward. It gets bigger.
KL: What’s your favorite cocktail?
GG: Chocolate.
KL: Which of the seven deadly sins is your favorite these days?
GG: Don’t know whose friends they are, but Sloth and Gluttony keep hanging around my kitchen playing cards.
KL: What’s your favorite rule of thumb?
GG: When you come back for it, it won’t be there.
KL: Do you have any pets? How many? And if so, how do they affect your writing (if at all)?
GG:No. None. Not at all.
KL: What is the writer’s role in inhabiting the commercial spaces of publishing?
GG:Waiting anxiously in hallways.
KL: Best trampoline story you know (or, in lieu of story, rules for best trampoline game you’ve played).
GG: The one with the castellated blancmange and the roller skates has seldom been attempted.
KL: Where do you hope to haunt when you’re gone (or, I guess, when you come back)?
GG: A kitchen table with old friends. A library. Woods in autumn. An English wood in spring. A winter hillside on a starry night. My desk when I’m writing well. The seacoast of Bohemia.
KL: What are your favorite kids’ books? What was your favorite when you were a kid (say, 10)?
GG: Say five, six, seven.
I always loved Mary Poppins and Irene’s Great-Great-Grandmother (in The Princess and the Goblin). They were my first intimations of godhead. Mary Poppins is Artemis. (“Is this a Nursery or a Bear Garden?”) Prickly, aloof, but a great protectress if she’s yours. And the sun, moon, and stars dance for her: she’s a strange attractor for the numinous.
But Irene’s Grandmother — ah, she indwells. I’ve been writing about the moon ever since. And threads and labyrinths and rings, and children lost in houses which are dreams.
Alice got into my warp as well. Everyone she meets is so rude. And that row of asterisks as she’s shrinking — chin to foot — gave me a sense of the magic in typography, of spell.
What else? I loved The Golden Almanac, which gave me my fascination with the turning year. October had “The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies, O!” in a whirl and tatter of leaves — so ballads keep for me that vivid restless melancholy.
Oh, and fairy tales. “The Snow Queen” for the shards of mirror and the puzzles of ice; for the winter hag who is fell and beautiful, the crones in their reeky hovels, and the robber girl. And “The Twelve Swans” and “The Dancing Princesses.” I loved the nettleshirts that bound winged creatures to the earth, the wood of silver underground.
The Oz books, alas, have faded for me, though I read them all with passion. I still have my Scarecrow and my Witch, but she’s indelibly Margaret Hamilton.
There are other children’s fantasies I love — The Wind In the Willows, Earthsea,and Green Knowe, stories by Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones — but I found them long afterward.
And a little later on–at eight, nine, ten — I read and loved The Secret Gardenand A Little Princess; Hitty: Her First Hundred Years; all the Alcott books; Elizabeth Enright…All the girl books, and whatever I could lay my hands on. But the fantasies came first.
KL: Tell me a little about when you left home to live on your own.
GG: Oh, I just snailed away, carrying myself with me.
KL: If you could have a writer of your choice come live with you, who would it be and what writerly stuff would you want to talk to them about?
GG: Dear me. I wouldn’t dream of imposing my company on strangers. They have their own friends, or ghosts of friends; their own rooms on earth or elsewhere. Unless by chance we meet in that publisher’s hallway…? And then drift away for tea. I’d love to talk with Sylvia Townsend Warner. And Angela Carter. Hope Mirrlees? I’d be shy of Shakespeare, though I’d love to watch him in rehearsal. And I’ve always wanted to take Jo March to the movies.
KL: When’s the last time you changed your mind about something? I think I mean a radical shift of personal values — regarding art (“Suddenly, I’m not crazy about Billie Holiday, in fact, I’m not even sure I’m spelling her name right”), regarding anything (“Actually, you can go home again”).
GG: I do change my mind, but glacially. Hard to remember what I thought in the Mesozoic.
KL: What book or books do you press upon friends?
GG: Whatever book is Three-Bearically right for that friend. I get a huge kick out of perfect matches. I don’t press.
KL: What can we, as a group, do to increase the popularity of multi-stage bicycle racing as a spectator sport in America?
GG:Free lemonade?
KL: I once had a creative writing teacher tell me that he didn’t understand why authors used science fiction or magical realism to tell a story or impart a theme. Why do you think we do, when good old realism might do the trick?
GG: For the tang of it, the taste of Otherwise; for all the flavors of quark: not just Truth and Beauty, but up, down, charm, and strangeness.
KL: My story has a semi-wild chimpanzee in it; does yours?
GG: Alas, no.
KL: Have you found that during the Reagan-Bush-Bush-Quayle-Bush-Cheney era the quality of your writing has gotten a little dodgier?
GG: No. My life, maybe. Not my writing.
KL: What, in your opinion, is the relationship, if any, between the so-called real world and your particular imaginary one?
GG: Aslant. Their landscape is like the north of England; but their laws are otherwise. It’s as if the White Goddess and the Golden Bough were true, as if metaphor and myth were physics. Metaphysics. Cloud has the same stars as this world — our sky is their Wood Above — but their constellations are strange. Somehow this world is bound to theirs: the back side of their brighter tapestry.
Can I quote myself?
“Not that there aren’t quilt knots here and there, stitching heaven and earth. Houses, in the astrological sense; or sacred places, which are realer than the world, and have a way of disappearing like the egg in Alice. Woods, stone circles, sheepfolds. And the one long seam, the Milky Way.”
KL: If you could live in a book, which one would it be?
GG: Oh, I’d like to travel in many books. Sadly, I can’t envision stories while I’m reading them, so I’d dearly love to see a score of other worlds. And talk with their denizens. But here’s where I live.
KL: Can you say something, particularly in light of these grave times, about the writer’s role or responsibility in the creation of work that is purely literary, that is the work of the imagination, as opposed to work that serves more overtly and directly as a voice of conscience?
GG: With all respect for the voices of conscience, it would be a sad grey world without works of pure imagination. Wodehouse. Austen. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
KL: Gertrude Stein said: “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense, to get to the very core of this problem of communication of intuition.” The relationship of form to content. Form as it facilitates communication, particularly communication of the remote, of the mysterious. Form as it permits the dramatization of states of mind. As it serves to make comprehensible the incomprehensible. What are your views on this subject?
GG: Fugue, rhyme, rainbow — I love all sorts of patterns and forms. Conjugations and crystals. Self-assembly. Mathematics. I think people are made to make patterns, to see them with delight. Defy entropy!
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (2008). He edited Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006) and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), and The Secret History of Science Fiction (forthcoming from Tachyon) with James Patrick Kelly. He teaches American literature, science fiction, fantasy, and fiction writing at North Carolina State University.
Well, maybe more like Your Rich Pal Who Likes To Directly Support the Arts‘s Name Here. The Interstitial folk have had the great idea of sending out a direct call for support for their new anthology in Tweeterland, Blogistan, Flogistan, and Facebukia. And in case those countries are not on your usual paths, here’s the goods:
We live in a world of niche marketing. The Interstitial Arts Foundation brings artists together to tear those barriers down.
The first volume of Interfictions, published in 2007, was hailed as “A phenomenal collection…engrossing and provocative” (Hipster Bookclub) that “belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
This second volume features original work by a whole new set of writers who joyfully explore the big imaginative spaces between conventional genres. And this time, we’ll be reaching out to even more readers by publishing a series of free stories on the new Interfictions 2 Annex online!
What can you do to help? This extraordinary collection of interstital fiction needs your financial support. We’re asking you to sponsor not just a book, but an idea – the idea that artists need to be able to express themselves freely and directly to their audiences, without the restraints of conventional genre limitations.
Here are some ways you can help us publish Interfictions 2:
SUPPORT AN INTERFICTIONS 2 STORY
$500 pays one author for a 10,000 word short story
$375 pays one author for a 7,500 word short story
SUPPORT THE INTERFICTIONS ONLINE ANNEX
8 stories will be available only online, with one appearing every week from August until November 2009.
$400 covers author honoraria for the entire Annex
$50 pays one author for an Annex story
SUPPORT THE NUTS & BOLTS OF ACTUAL BOOK PRODUCTION & PROMOTION
$400 covers typesetting fees
$200 buys Interfictions 2 a magazine ad
$100 prints up promotional postcards
$25 sends out five copies to reviewers
Your Choice: Gift amount of your choosing supports the IAF’s General Fund
Become an Interfictions 2 Sponsor with a gift of $500 or more, and we’ll list you as a Sponsor on our Friends of Interfictions 2 web page. And if your gift of $500 or more is received by June 30, 2009, your name will be published in the printed anthology!
Your gift of $499 or less will get you listed on a Friends of Interfictions 2 web page as a Booklover, and Booklovers who donate between $375 and $499 by June 30, 2009 will have their names published in the printed anthology. Individual supporter names will not be linked to specific stories or work.
SUPPORT A STORY, GET A BOOK!
We’ll also send signed copies of both Interfictions and Interfictions 2, signed by editors Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, to supporters who contribute $375 or more. In addition, Sponsors of $1,000 or more can choose to receive a signed limited edition print of Connie Toebe’s “Moonlight“, the art used on the cover of the first Interfictions.
Or you can mail your check along with the 2009 Gift Form to P.O. Box 35862, Boston, MA 02135. Contributions of any size are most welcome.
The IAF is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, so your contribution will be fully tax-deductible. But more importantly, when you make a gift to the IAF, you can bask in the knowledge that you are helping to build a new work of literature that can change people’s lives.
Thank you for your continued support. Please feel free to link to or pass on this page to anyone else you think might be interested in art without borders!
Warmly,
Ellen Kushner
Vice President & Co-Founder,
Intersitial Arts Foundation
but zombies, “talking animals, mermaids, a book that writes itself, a race of tiny people — whose lives are filled with pathos and tragedy — searching for their lost homeland, the ancient and massive ship of the series title; myths and legends from all and sundry, and haunting them all, a mad king who once declared himself a god. . . .
When GM goes into bankruptcy hope someone fires the people in the US who decided that is ok to make cars for Europe that get 71/59 mpg but not sell them here…. Autobloggreen reports on the latest Vauxhall Corsa:
It’s not a hybrid and it doesn’t have a plug, but Vauxhall’s new Corsa ecoFLEX is the company’s most fuel efficient production vehicle ever: on the UK’s extra urban fuel cycle the car is rated at 71 mpg (U.S.); the combined rating is 59 mpg (U.S.). This is a boost of 13 percent compared to the previous high-mpg Corsa….
Want to go work on an indie film in Canada? Jim Munroe’s latest project sounds fantastic—and you can be a part of it—a movie of a documentary series from 2040 when:
a generation of Torontonians have grown up after the economic collapse of the west. The movie consists of episodes of a documentary series popular in mainland China about the bad jobs some white people have — the plucky and resilient souls unlucky enough to be born into the slums of North America.
Add your memory object to Laura Moulton‘s new project Object Permanence which has an actual real world component as well the webpage. The Object Mobile is on the ground in Portland: track it down and add your own object.
Henry Wessells’s Temporary Culture is producing another beautiful book:
HOPE-IN-THE-MIST
The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life
of Hope Mirrlees by Michael Swanwick
Hope-in-the-Mist is the first book-length study of British author HOPE MIRRLEES, whom Virginia Woolf described as “her own heroine — capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed.” Raised in Scotland and Zululand, Mirrlees studied with the great classical scholar Jane Harrison and later lived with her in Paris and London. Mirrlees wrote one major poem, Paris (1920), the missing link between French avant-garde poetry and her friend T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) ; her novel Lud-in-the-Mist is an acknowledged classic of fantastical literature. An earlier version of Hope-in-the-Mist was published in the journal Foundation in 2003.
30 copies, hand bound in chartreuse Asahi book cloth with Ann Muir marbled endsheets, signed by Michael Swanwick and Neil Gaiman, and with the frontispiece signed by Charles Vess.
Five copies lettered A – E, for presentation.
Subscribers issue, 25 numbered copies : $300 in U.S. ; foreign $325 (includes shipping and a copy of the trade issue).
But by the time you’ve explored the many forms (physical and metaphysical) of Unleaving, spent time with various incarnations of Ashes, and seen just what Margaret could become after childhood’s left behind, it shouldn’t be all that hard to show a little patience with her adolescent uncertainties, plus subplots and further arcane references. And the payoff is immense. I finished Cloud & Ashes almost tempted to write a thesis that compares it favorably to what James Joyce did in Ulysses and tried in Finnegan’s Wake, yet feeling like I’d lived through it all.
“Many people have used ballads as sources of literary fantasy. I use ballads, but in shreds and patches, along with things I’ve read, word etymologies, a lot of dialect — my writing is both folk and baroque. I’ve got these great slabs of rhapsody and blots of vernacular. I think I use a fairly low percentage of Norman French-Latinate English, simply because I love the old root stock of the language. There are a scattering of words in my books I’ve made up on models from root stock. I love words passionately! (Maybe I should have been a philologist.) I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary at college, and spent all my time in the English students’ lounge reading their copy.
Hey, we didn’t mail anything out today (we are still [sorry!] behind from our almost-cleared-out warehouse sale, yay!) because there was a glitch in our mailing systems. So we emailed the mailing company, Endicia, and within a couple of hours they returned our call, apologized, and credited us a with a couple of months service free.
Wow.
We used to use P*ney-Bowes and they were awful. Every time we ordered supplies it was like stepping up to someone and asking to be punched in the face. No, wait. Punched twice. There was even a service charge for buying postage. When we bought $400 of postage at the post office it cost $400. When we buy it from Endicia it costs $400. When we bought it from ShtnyBws it cost $418.99. Why?
They introduced some kind of completely useless rewards or points program, they insisted on sending us a stupid magazine (and then tried to charge for it!) and basically made us feel that they could do without us more than we could do without them and we should watch it otherwise they might drop us. Or raise yet another esoteric fee on us.
So: Endicia, what a breath of fresh air. Thanks for the credit!
This message (and recommendation to switch) brought to you by the letters h a p p y and a complete lack of behind-the-scenes-sponsorship.
A good time? Knishes?* A trip back in time to the 1890s?
Or, maybe, books to show off — and even some to give away — at BookExpo. Which books? Lots to show off since last year, including The Baum Plan, The Ant King, The King’s Last Song, The Serial Garden, and now Cloud & Ashes.
Wait, wait, wait, though. Did we ever mention the books we’re going to be publishing this autumn and winter? The books we have been reading and playing with and designing and sometimes talking to the authors and thinking about covers but never actually doing anything about them? No?
Hot dang and Whoops!
Ok then, here are our next four titles (plus we have more more more TK after these, ha!) of which we will have early early not-at-all-real copies at BookExpo this week (as they are in various stages of discomportment and have just arrived in from a couple of different local printers):
September: Hound by Vincent McCaffrey. A debut novel about a Boston bookhound, books, death, and maybe the death of books. This is the first in a series and it will come out in hardcover.
October: Second Line: Two Short Novels of Love and Cooking in New Orleans by Poppy Z. Brite. This paperback collects two of Poppy Z. Brite‘s chaotic and fun short novels (The Value of X and D*U*C*K) featuring two New Orleans chefs, Rickey and G-man, who grow up together, fall in love, open a restaurant, Liquor, and have some fun along the way. Poppy is writing a new afterword to go with the novels. Love this series, love that we get to be a part of publishing it. Huge thanks to Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press for helping put this together.
November: Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. The editors went out into the fields and found 21 pieces of excellently border-crossing material. They’re also putting together an online launch party and auction which will be filled with wonderful art, music, and stories. The book will be the icing and the cake, though.
January: Suprise! We are still eating Christmas cake and not thinking about books. Not all true, though, as Feb. is going to be a big mouth month:
February 2010: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories by Holly Black. Our second Big Mouth House title is a debut collection of young adult stories from New York Times bestseller (and one of our neighbors), Holly Black. Holly’s stories have just gone from strength to strength over the past few years — as evidenced by her appearances in various Best of the Year anthologies and lists. The Poison Eaters includes a new Modern Faerie Tale as well as some of our favorite stories of recent times.
So, if you’re going to the big show in NYC, drop by the Consortium (our distro) area and say hi. Jed will be there all the time (except for knish breaks), Gavin should be there on Friday & Saturday, and, with luck, Kelly will be there on Saturday. Books, baby, all about the books!
In all the excitement of the new year (cough), we forgot to point our Japanese readers to Carol Emshwiller’s novel Carmen Dog which came out recently from those magnificent people at Hayakawa.
That cover is just genius. We haven’t seen copies of it yet — they are usually shipped by slow boat, literally, but when we do, give it 4-5 more months and we’ll post pics up here.
Almost forgot one of the award lists that came out recently: way back in April (where’s the telescope? Who can look back that far?) the finalists for the Locus Awards were announced. A bit of a disappointment in the collection department that John Kessel or Ben Rosenbaum didn’t get nominated, c’est la vie with awards seasons though.
Here’s the Small Beeriana-connected stuff (a bit of a reach, but Kelly still works here) and it was nice that the final Year’s Best volume received a nod:
Stepping outside Small Beer HQ for a minute to point readers to 3 AM Magazine where they’ve just posted a new story of mine (that would be Gavin, if you can’t see the sig line on the website), “The Elect.” The story was written a couple of years ago. It was a dark time in this country. Freedom was talked of and flags were waved, even while freedoms were being taken away from more and more of us. Thus, stories like this.
Those who remain in the book business (at least we’re not trying to sell gas guzzlers, phew) will party like it’s a very quite 2009 in NYC, Thursday to Sunday, at the Javits center — and, we have a couple of things Worth Doing while there.
Even if you’re not going, you can still go to our party and Ben Rosenbaum and Jedediah Berry’s reading at the might McNally Jackson Books.
We may have the inflatable couch this year, we may not. We have a shelf of books on display at the Consortium booth. We may have some freebies and galleys, but, not many. Hey, it’s the recession! Jedediah will definitely be there, Gavin will likely be there Friday/Saturday, and various friends and volunteers and Stars, baby, Stars will be there to spread the word. They’ll be like a street team, except in a convention center. And not really a team. Although there should be 11 of them and one of them will have big gloves on and will be known as “The safest hands in soccer.” All true.
Plus, there may be a last minute addition to this schedule but it will depend, like everything else at the moment, on she who must be obeyed:
Thu., May 28, 7:00 PM Pre-BEA Party (with Melville House, Stop Smiling Books, The Feminist Press, NYRB Classics, and the Little Bookroom)
Melville House, 145 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, NY 11201
(take the F train to York or the A/C to High Street)
Fri., May 29, 3:00 PM
Table 23, Holly Black signs ARCs of her young adult short story collection, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (Feb. 2010).
Sat., May 30, 3:30 PM
Table 17, Vincent McCaffrey signs ARCs of Hound ( Sep ’09), a debut mystery in which a Boston bookhound has to work who killed his ex and why.
Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant are the proud parents of a baby. Ursula Annabel Link Grant, originally due on June 16, showed up three and a half months early. Born in February 2009, they weighed 1 lb 9 ounces and has spent the last three months in the neonatal intensive care unit at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass.
We expect to bring Ursula, who is currently well over 4 lbs, home in about two weeks. Right now we’re very thankful for the fabulous NICU nurses and doctors, the Ronald McDonald House in Springfield, the support of our friends and family, and also that we have health insurance.
Small Beer Press’s generous parental leave policies mean that Kelly and Gavin will take some time off in the next year or two. The latest issue of LCRW has been delayed until summer but otherwise everything should remain on schedule. Because premature babies don’t travel well, our travel schedule will be curtailed for the foreseeable future. We will post pictures in a couple of weeks.
He’s the one at the Small Beer Press tables! Meet David J. Schwartz who has a fantastic series of pictures on Flickr: it is well worth digging in to see what he’s been up to all winter. We just love these pics and love going back to see faves. A few are here, but really, if you have a minute, go check out the rest.
Dave (and, your goodself, if you want) will be personing the Small Beer tables at Madison, Wisconsin’s amazing alternaworld convention, WisCon, this coming weekend and he will have most of our books in the dealers’ room including Greer Gilman’s new Cloud & Ashes (Although sadly neither we nor Greer will be there) as well as Guest of Honor Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song (get it, get it signed!). Despite our best intentions, there will not be a new issue of LCRW until summer.
There will be copies of Dave’s dark and thoughtful novel, Superpowers, and, hopefully, many other things of interest. Many of which will appear throughout the convention as people wander up and drop stuff off to sell (got a book or a zine? Bring it along!). In the meantime: Dave!
This month, or maybe next, depending on which bibliographic source you believe, Greer Gilman’s second novel, Cloud & Ashes, springs fully formed into the world. If you’ve ever had a chance to hear Greer read you’ll know what an entrancing, immersive experience this book is.
To begin with, I wanted a Yorkshire dialect, because I so love the Watersons’ voices. It’s changed over the long years, becoming more itself, more Cloudish, but it’s founded on Yorkshire, mostly on the Dales and the North York Moors and coast.
Somewhat recently, Greer was one of the guests at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and she sent us a recording of her reading. Greer is introduced by her friend and fellow conspirator, Faye Ringel, and after a 40-minute reading, Sonya Taafe sings “The Scarecrow,” one of the songs Greer incorporates into the novel, then Greer reads a little more. You can download and listen to the (large) MP3 here.
We spent a decent part of last week shipping out most (nothing ever gets finished) of the pre-orders for Cloud & Ashes as well as a goodly number of review copies, so there should be more happy readers and more people reading about it soon.
For more about the book, see our page, Greer‘s, or order your copy now:
Here’s an interview with David Suisman just in time for his reading this Thursday at Barnes & Noble (105 Fifth Ave. at 18th St., New York, at 6pm) in NYC:
The Times has a short piece on Scribd‘s latest maneuvers to become the place to go for reading offline text online and uses a rather lovely image of many of our books to illustrate that at least one publisher has most of their list on the site: check out Small Beer Press on Scribd:
We are still shipping books from our warehouse clearance sale (that went well!).* However, it went so well that we will be shipping stuff out for the next couple of weeks. Today Uline are delivering (come on, come on, deliver already!) many new boxes (since we recycled all we had on hand) which should mean massive amounts go out real soon now.
We have just signed a couple of books for next summer: two novels! Where are the short story collections? Ah, well, we have a contract to be worked on for one of those next!
We are reading submissions still: but, it we are slow right now. If you query, you may hear from us, you may not. Sorry. We love putting out a zine, but in times of great need (um, printer demands payment for lovely book), reading drops down and col calling bookshops becomes the groovy thing to do.
* Turns out old John Maynard Keynes was right: people will buy stuff in a depression if the price is crazy enough. That’s a direct quote.
Karen Joy Fowler has a great essay about writing Wit’s End on Powell’s blog (Wit’s End is just out in paperback, read now!). She does life in the connected (pre-collapse? c-cough) 21st century very well:
A lot of my novel is focused on privacy, and what that means in the age of the internet. This includes things like the creation of the author persona, the mediated fake intimacy of the net, and a new kind of accessibility of writer to reader.
In the first week of May I’ve had two interviews that are now available for your listening. In the first, by Douglas Lain, author of LAST WEEK’S APOCALYPSE, we talk about science fiction, politics, utopia, some of my short fiction, and my twenty-year-old novel GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE). It’s available at Dietsoap, Doug’s quirky website, along with other recent podcasts.
The second interview was on the May 7 edition of “The State of Things” with Frank Stasio on WUNC radio, 91.5 FM in the Research Triangle. We talk about “Pride and Prometheus”, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Here’s the link.
Writing about farmers has taught me a lot about how to be a witness. In simplistic terms, it’s because not much actually happens on the farm. Most days in the lives of farmers I know are composed of unremarkable tasks repeated over and over: milking one cow after another, weeding up this row and then down the next. Any writer who expects to swoop in, get a hot story, and then swoop out, will likely come away empty-handed.
I’ve learned that, to write about farmers, one must instead slow down to that rhythm of repetition. The writer must sit in the combine as it chugs along in concentric circles, taking hours to close in on the center of the field, only to pick up, move to the next field, and do it all over again. Being witness means a willingness to pass the same barn or tree or fencepost two dozen times and continually try to learn something new about it.
And Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief) gets an in-depth interview on Bookslut that goes well beyond the usual questions:
Women in this time period were almost always buried in their wedding dresses, because these were the nicest pieces of clothing they owned. I grew up in New England surrounded by old graveyards, and often picnicked and played in them. For this book I went back and spent time there and took many names for characters from the headstones.
Someone in Lexington, KY, made a great picnicking display at the library, and, maybe in the hope that he would keep his subjects away, included a copy of The Ant King. (Thanks Christopher!)
Ben Rosenbaum’s first collection The Ant King and Other Stories collected many (but not all, that guy is prolific!) of his stories in one place and showed off the range of Ben’s interests and talents. Booklist, following up on their previous starred review, just released a very interesting, nicely different and wide-ranging Top 10 List of SF and Fantasy titles for 2008. If you’re looking for a hardcover, we still have a few in stock but the distributor is out and maybe we will call it out of print later this month!
If you’re in the NYC area, you can catch up with Ben at McNally Jackson later this month. He’s a fast-moving and somewhat hard to pin down (or maybe you can catch him at WisCon?), but he will be reading with Small Beer Press’s own assistant editor Jedediah Berry (The Manual of Detection) on May 27th at 7 PM.
The Ant King and Other Stories. By Benjamin Rosenbaum. 2008. Small Beer, $24 (9781931520522); paperback, $16 (9781931520539).
The most adroit sf and fantasy writer in ages, Rosenbaum can satirize, kick butt on narrative conventions, handle metareality direly and lightly at the same time, and change tone on a dime without shattering continuity. Dazzling, dazzling stories.
Bio
The first volume of Interfictions, published in 2007, was hailed as “A phenomenal collection…engrossing and provocative” (Hipster Bookclub) that “belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
