Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 28

Fri 28 Dec 2012 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

8.5 x 7 · 60pp · January 2013 · Issue 28 · Available! Published! Excited! · Ebook available from Weightless.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (a self-titled Occasional Outburst) returns either incredibly late for 2012 or incredibly early for 2014.

The latest issue of LCRW features magic, killing curses, broken lands and broken lands, a wandering octopus, a robot on the run, invisibility, neighbors, and The Book of Judgment.

What is not to love? Our cooking columnist Nicole Kimberling returns with advice on “Feeding Strays” and although we only managed one poem, it’s a good one.

Reviews

“Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet returns after taking 2012 off. The new issue is very good, with a set of stories that mostly push the SF/Fantasy envelope in engagingly strange directions. Kevin Waltman’s ‘‘Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts are Like Broken Hands’’ is, once decoded, a familiar enough dystopia, but the surface is strange enough to intrigue. It’s told by stolid Bolder, who thinks he lives in a utopia (because he’s been told so), until his attraction to Palmetto lures him astray. Amanda M. Pawley’s ‘‘Vanish Girl’’ is also dystopian SF, here featuring a girl with an invisible house, an invisible leg, a vicious roommate, and a state-supported addiction: again, it’s oddness that reveals itself to be somewhat familiar, but then in the end spirals strange again. My favorite story remains quite strange throughout: Krista Hoeppner Leahy’s ‘‘Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest’’. This is about a curse-killer who marries a sort of walking tree, only to lose her over the question of how to raise their child – but we also have a Quixote who swears to save the hero from his death, and a Midas who isn’t sure if his curse is good or bad, and a dangerous plague. The language really sells the story in the way it reveals the strangeness of the setting.”
—Rich Horton, Locus

“Always happy to see a new issue of this occasional story outburst. I grope for a term to suggest the nature of the highly imaginative fiction here; “weird” will not do; “fabulist” is wrong; “odd” might fit, but I think I’ll settle on “strange”. Yes, these are strange stories, in which even experienced explorers of genre terrain may occasionally find themselves on uneven footing; there are few overworn trails here.”
—Lois Tilton, Locus Online

“The entire issue made me smile. I’m looking forward to the next issue, whenever it may come.”
—Fantasy Literature

“Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is the kind of magazine that you want to read slowly. Read a story. Put the magazine down. Absorb what you have just read. Then, after a while, read another story. Repeat. After more than a year’s absence here is issue #28 with more of their very different stories.”
—SF Revu

Fiction

Michael Penkas, “Coffee with Count Presto”
Krista Hoeppner Leahy, “Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest”
Kevin Waltman, “Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts Are Like Broken Hands”
Erica Hilderbrand, “Akashiyaki (Octopus Dumplings, serves two)”
Brian Baldi, “Springtime for the Roofer”
Andrea M. Pawley, “Vanish Girl”
Kamila Z. Miller, “Neighbors”
Helen Marshall, “The Book of Judgment”

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, “Feeding Strays”
About the Authors

Poetry

John McKernan, “Prayer to Oatmeal”

Cover

Junyi Wu

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Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.

Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison, Molly Seeley, David Mitchell, Dustin Buchinski, Geoffrey Noble, Julie Day, Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 28, January 2013. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-067-1.Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is usully published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 16 of the print issue for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets.

LCRW is available as an ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c. Contents © 2013 the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Apologies for the delay. The next issue will come sooner than you or I think. As ever, thank you for reading.

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About These Authors

Brian Baldi’s writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Invisible Ear, and elsewhere. He is fond of seltzer.

Erica Hildebrand has a soft spot in her heart for superheroes, dinosaurs, and the conquerors of antiquity. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, her fiction has appeared in Bewere the Night, M-Brane SF, The Edge of Propinquity, and more. Her comics have appeared in Space Squid and Kaleidotrope. She lives in Pennsylvania.

Jenny Jerome was a Brooklyn girl who moved to London, married, had kids, published a literary journal, and had a fair amount of fun.

Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a writer and actor. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007. Her work has appeared inShimmer, The Way of the Wizard, Writers of the Future, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Kamila Zeman Miller lives with her family on small acreage in the Columbia River Gorge, where she paints and writes. She has the obligatory large number of rescued cats, as well as dogs, goats, chickens, and a very weird rabbit. If you meet her, be careful not to ask about her garden unless you’re a plant nerd with a patient ear.

Nicole Kimberling resides in Bellingham, Washington with her epically long-time partner, Dawn Kimberling, two bad cats and a rotating assortment of houseguests. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Though currently the editor of Blind Eye Books, she has mostly made her money working as a professional cook.

Aurora-winning poet Helen Marshall is an author, editor, and self-proclaimed bibliophile. Her poetry and fiction have been published in ChiZine, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex and Tesseracts among others. Her of poems have been collected in Skeleton Leaves and her short stories in Hair Side, Flesh Side. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D in medieval studies at the University of Toronto.

John McKernan—who grew up in Omaha Nebraska—is now retired after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust.  He has published poems in many places from The Atlantic Monthly to Zuzu’s Petals.

Andrea Pawley is a state of mind. No, make that several states of mind all going at once. Raised under curious circumstances, she now lives in the long shadow of the Washington Monument with a man and a plan, neither of which is perturbed by her nocturnal habits, her odd diet or her devotion to dead presidents. (Not money, actual dead presidents.)

Michael Penkas has lived in Chicago since 2004. He’s had a half-dozen short stories published, most recently in War of the Worlds: Frontlines.

Kevin Waltman has an MFA from the University of Alabama, and has published two young adult novels, Nowhere Fast and Learning the Game. He has also published short fiction with Six Bricks Press, Esquire.com, the Emerson Review, and the Connecticut Review. He lives in Coker, Alabama, with his wife Jessica and their magical dog Henry.

Junyi Wu is an illustrator from Los Angeles who likes pops of color, weathered textures, and pools of light, and likes to draw, arrange shapes, and be outdoors.

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Happy Holidays

Fri 21 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Our office is closed from today, December 21, through until December 29th. We wish you the peace and joy for you and yours for the holidays.

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Small Beer Podcast 15: Lydia Millet’s The Shimmers in the Night

Tue 18 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Lydia Millet, Not a Journal., Julie Day, Lydia Millet, Podcastery, small beer podcast, The Shimmers in the Night| Posted by: Julie

These podcasts are special little moments that pop up in my life, but even when I’m not “on mic” I’m reading to an audience. Every day for almost a decade, I’ve sat with my children and read. Yes, we have a TV. Yes, we have broadband access. But every day we sit together and read novels: novels for kids. That adds up to quite a lot of books.

We read the first book in Lydia Millet’s Dissenters series, The Fires Beneath the Sea, last year, and its sequel, The Shimmers in the Night, earlier this fall. In between, we’ve read quite a number of other books, some of which are just amazing and some of which only part of my tribe actually enjoyed. Hint: it was not the reader. Parenthood has its trials . . .

The Shimmers in the Night was a blast for both reader and audience. Not only that: months later my younger child still asks if the next “Shimmers” book is “ready yet,” while my older child made me solemnly swear to get this particular podcast online “immediately.”

What makes this podcast extra-special is that Lydia Millet herself is the reader. With the help of a friend, she read and recorded Chapter 1. How fricking cool is that?

I hate to listen to recordings of myself if others are nearby, but I know I’ll be listening to this particular edition with two smaller people by my side.

Episode 15: In which Lydia Millet reads chapter 1 of The Shimmers in the Night.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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Updates: Dickinson, Le Guin, Hand, more

Mon 17 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, Lydia Millet, Maureen F. McHugh, Peter Dickinson, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

This weekend the Wall Street Journal picked Peter Dickinson’s new collection of short stories, Earth and Air, as one of the 10 best books of fiction of 2012:

“Much modern fantasy draws upon myth and folklore, but not many authors can enter wholly into the surprising and novel logic of myth. In this brilliant collection of stories, Peter Dickinson recasts Beowulf and Orpheus, investigates tales of earth-spirits, explains the footwear of Mercury and accounts for the survival of Athena’s owls in Christian Byzantium. These beautiful stories, our reviewer believed, ‘deserve to become classics of the genre.'”

Look! Peter has a shiny new website with tons of extra stuff. (Including another new book!) There are gems everywhere, including this from the news section: “Most Tuesdays I bike up into the town to have tea with a 92-year-old friend.  Week before last we laughed ourselves into hiccups talking about funerals.  Did us both a power of good.” Ha!

You can listen to Ursula K. Le Guin on BBC’s The World. It’s all about language. I know you’ll love it.

Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe chat with Maureen F. McHugh about writing, games, online and TV things, writing for TV and other media, the Chinese economy, writing collaboratively, and more on the Coode Street Podcast.

Coming tomorrow, we have Julie Day’s final Small Beer podcast of 2012, an extra special edition featuring Lydia Millet reading the first chapter of The Shimmers in the Night.

Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry gets a lovely review in her sort-of-local paper, the Maine Sunday Telegram: “No writer has cornered the market on darkly beautiful, unsettling stories. But it’s a niche that Elizabeth Hand inhabits with uncanny ease.”

I haven’t seen the new Hobbit movie but I loved these Tove Jansson illustrations for the Swedish edition that someone on Twitter (thank you, Tweetee!) posted.

Ellen Datlow has a Kickstarter! Also, Red Emma’s in Baltimore is moving. Check out that timeline and help out? Also, there’s an Indiegogo for a student film version of Kelly’s story “Survivor’s Ball.”

Short story lovers may have noticed that we are the sponsor of the current issue of One Story. We love One Story — and their new project, One Teen Story (which, you know, would make a great present for teens . . . !) — and for the last couple of years we have been very happy to be one of their sponsors. Here’s editor Hannah Tinti’s post about the story:

Issue #172: Goodbye, Bear

December 7th, 2012 3:44pm by Hannah Tinti

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Valley gives

Wed 12 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

There’s a fascinating experiment in local giving going on here today, 12/12/12—for once, a date that works in the UK and the USA!—on Valley Gives. The three organizations who raise the most money today will receive $15K, $12K, and $10K, and the 12th gets, of course, $1200, as well as random $1,000 drawings, for, natch, 12 hours, all in all the bonuses add up to $200,000. If you live in the Happy Valley area* today’s a good day to send some people a great holiday present.

* Or even if you don’t! We have local branches of Habitat for Humanity, the Humane Society, etc.

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Stranger Things Happen Limited Edition is here!

Tue 11 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions| Posted by: Gavin

Guess what just arrived in the office? The Subterranean Press signed and numbered limited hardcover edition of Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen. What a treat this book is. Someone asked me once why Small Beer didn’t publish it ourselves and I have the answer right here in these two books in my hands.

You can now get STH (as it goes by around the office) in a 6″x9″ hardcover with a fantastic wraparound jacket by Kathleen Jennings. I may have to sacrifice one of the dustjackets to my wall—although Kelly bought some of the art from Kathleen, so maybe that will be good enough. I’ve included two of the title-page illustrations Kathleen did for each of the stories in the book, “Shoe and Marriage” and “The Specialist’s Hat.”

As Carolyn Kellogg noted in the Los Angeles Times, “This is one of the ways that publishers can distinguish the print work they do from the e-books they issue, focusing on creating an object that’s worth having. And Link’s work seems a great place to start.”

Kelly isn’t in the office today but she will be later this week and then we will ship out the personalized copies asap.

Of course the book is still available in our paperback edition—now in its seventh printing with that iconic Shelley Jackson cover—and as an ebook, although neither of those editions include the two-story hardcover chapbook (Origin Stories: “Origin Stories” and “Secret Identity”) that comes with the Sub Press edition. Those are some crazy, beautiful books and here are some photos to prove it:

              

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That’s Alright

Mon 10 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Off to Boston for  nonwork thing today. In the meantime, we discovered we could get the Sunday NY Times (including all digital access) for less than the price of just the digital access. It was great fun to have the total brick of paper delivered. Definitely read more than I usually do online.

Download the BookSlinger app and read this week’s story: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Start the Clock“—one of the best sf stories from the last 10 years—from The Ant King and Other Stories.

Over at Kirkus Reviews Elizabeth Hand chats with Jessa Crispin about Errantry and more.

On Bookslut Julie Phillips has a short essay on Ursula K. Le Guin which is full of mad, great quotes about Le Guin’s work that I completely agree with. As for will she be read in 50 years? If I’m alive: yes! If not, yes! Earthsea will outlast us all and some readers will always begin there and go on out to Searoad, Unlocking the Air, The Left Hand of Darkness, 

Look, a free magazine of International Science Fiction.

Kathleen Jennings’s American Sketchbooks: Part 1: World Fantasy and Toronto and Part 2: Illuxcon, New York and Colorado.

Stuck in my head:

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Paradise Tales wins the Sunburst Award

Thu 6 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Geoff Ryman| Posted by: Gavin

Lovely sunny news from Canada: Geoff Ryman’s short story collection Paradise Tales has won the Sunburst Award. The winner of the 2012 YA award is All Good Children by Catherine Austen (Orca).

It is hard to believe—as he has written so many great books—but Paradise Tales is Geoff’s first short story collection. The sixteen stories include three set in Cambodia and a couple on Mars, some are contemporary and some are set in the far future. The wide-ranging nature of the collection reflects Ryman’s diverse interests in the world of today and tomorrow and how we humans will (or won’t deal with it). One of the things I wish more reviewers would point out is how funny some of Geoff’s stories are. His story “V.A.O.” (in which a retiree has to work who in his nursing home might be carrying out a string of robberies) is dark and satirical but it’s also hilarious in parts.

The most recent review I’ve seen of the book was by J. J. S. Boyce on AESciFi—the CanadianScience Fiction Review—which ended with a line I fully agree with:  “Short-form speculative fiction doesn’t get much better than this.”

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Free copy of Trafagar

Thu 6 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

You know the drill! Remember, you can read an excerpt here.

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Trafalgar and Josefina

Wed 5 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin

Belletrista just posted “Trafalgar and Josefina,” an excerpt which will give you a nice sense of our forthcoming book by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar. Along with the book there is a short intro—and a great picture of the two of them—by the translator, Amalia Gladhart:

Trafalgar’s adventures are curious, funny, sometimes hair-raising, always thought-provoking. His stories are sought after, traded among acquaintances, shared sparingly by those lucky enough to hear them first hand. And the importance of the storytelling process is always evident. Trafalgar loves to tell a tale—and he loves to draw it out, pausing for another cup of coffee, petting a friend’s cat, playing hard to get; his listeners prod him impatiently, but he will not be rushed.

Read on.

 

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Ted Chiang, movie(!), and Lightspeed

Tue 4 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Lightspeed, Ted Chiang, the movies| Posted by: Gavin

The new issue of Lightspeed Magazine just went out and besides all that new and shiny stuff it includes Kelly’s story “Catskin” and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Kelly’s story will go live on December 18th but Ted’s is exclusive to the ebook—which of course you can get on Weightless.

The other big news for Ted Chiang fans was last week’s announcement that “Story of Your Life” has been optioned for film. The source material is about as good as it gets, so fingers crossed that it will be made and be great.

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Bookslinger Update: “Child-Empress of Mars”

Mon 3 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Interfictions 2| Posted by: Gavin

Consortium’s Bookslinger features Theodora Goss’s “Child-Empress of Mars” this week:

The Bookslinger app has been updated with a new story!

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That’s it.

Thu 29 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

The Unreal and the Real is out of stock at the distributor. If you want copies for the holidays, order them now. (Powells have plenty.)

We think they were two of the best books published this year—no matter what other lists say! Wait a couple of years and try and see. Of course we feel the same about all the books we publish (otherwise, sang the chorus, what would beeeeee the point?) so if you miss them, may we suggest:

a deep and dark collection of strange stories . . . half a dozen stories of earth and air . . . a debut collection that Adam Roberts mentioned in the Guardian . . . that Armitage family . . . a guidebook to 26 fantastic cities . . . a first of its kind anthology of contemporary Mexican stories . . . nine stories of science, aging, and imagination . . . a pageturning science fiction thriller . . . the Sykes’s children’s find their mother and she is no longer who they thought she was!

       

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Tomorrow in Northampton

Thu 29 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookshops, chuntering on, I've got to wear shades, panels, so bright| Posted by: Gavin

Did I ever post this? I’m on a panel tomorrow morning at our lovely local library (handy, I can pick up the 2 books I have on hold!) with Susan Stinson—whose Northampton novel, Spider in a Tree, we will publish next year, Nancy Felton, co-owner of one of our local bookshops, Broadside (who carry LCRW, yay!), and an amazing book artist, Daniel E. Kelms. Come on by!

The State of the Book in the Digital Age

Friday November 30, 2012
10:00 AM

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A CHAT WITH FOUR LOCAL BOOK PEOPLE

What’s up with books these days? Books are ordered online, created on demand, and distributed in digital form to individuals and libraries. True SEO Professionals improve the search engine results that’s why people are able to find books more easily online. Sadly many bookstores have closed in recent years, and publishers have had to drastically downsize, retool or go out of business.How have individuals and businesses responded to this new environment? Are books giving a last gasp or being reinvented? An author, a book artist, a publisher and a bookstore owner will give their thoughts on the changing environment for books.

Panelists:

Susan Stinson is the author of three novels and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Writer in Residence at Forbes Library, she is also an editor and writing coach.

Daniel E. Kelm is a book artist who enjoys expanding the concept of the book. In addition to creating his own projects he offers consultations, bindery services, and rental of his studio and equipment.

Gavin J. Grant is the publisher of Small Beer Press. He co-edits the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet with his wife, Kelly Link, and runs an the independent press ebooksite, http://weightlessbooks.com, with a friend.

Nancy Felton is a co-owner of Broadside Bookshop, where she has worked since 1980 in a variety of capacities, including children’s book buyer, sales clerk and bookkeeper. She has been an active member of NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) and Pioneer Valley Local First.

Come to Forbes Library on Friday, Nov. 30 at 10 am to hear these local book lovers talk about their own experiences, and give their visions of what books might look like in the future.There will be plenty of time for questions from the audience.

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The Unreal and the Real: Publication Day

Tue 27 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Publication day, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

It is amazing to sit here and think about these two books being out in the world. The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands.

There are many people we owe thanks to for their help and patience as this rather big book came slowly into sight: Ursula K. Le Guin, of course, and her agent, Vaughne Lee Hansen of the Virginia Kidd Agency; John D. Berry for designing the covers; Tugboat Printshop for the use of their art; and Michael J. DeLuca, Julie Day, Kelly Lagor, Anne Horowitz, Julia Patt, and Georgiana Lee for last minute help.

Should you wish signed copies, you should keep an eye on Ursula’s calendar. Her next reading is at Powell’s City of Books on January 6, 2013.

Now the books are out and getting read and reviewed widely, selling like hot cakes, and generally behaving as if, yes, it is incredibly obvious that such books would be well received, it is an immense relief and a hell of a way to end the year on.

Because, besides an upcoming issue of LCRW, this (these!) is (are!) the last book(s!) from us for 2012. (Ok, ok, so we’re well into our 2013 books and buying books for 2014, what’s your point?) Whether you read these books in their lovely hardcover editions or download them as ebooks, I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

 

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The Unreal and the Real: Where on Earth

Tue 27 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Selected Stories Volume One
Second Printing: January 2013
9781618730343 · trade cloth · 281pp · $24
9781618730367 · ebook · $14.95
Audio book available here from Recorded Books.
[Volume 2.]

Now available in one volume from Simon & Schuster/Saga.
— Four Questions from Publishers Weekly

Don’t miss Ursula K. Le Guin’s acceptance speech upon receiving the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
— Profiles in: Boston Globe · The Guardian · NPR · Los Angeles Times · New Yorker · Salon ·

Read the Paris Review interview.

Oregon Book Award winner.
World Fantasy and Locus award finalist.

“There is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin,”wrote Choire Sicha in November. This two-volume collection of her masterful short stories – one book of science fiction, the other of the mundane – “guns from the grim to the ecstatic, from the State to the Garden of Eden, with just one dragon between.”
—Slate Top 10 Books of the Year

“Ursula K. Le Guin is a gift to the world, to the cosmos even. Her works have inspired generations of readers to imagine the endless possibilities of the universe and our own imaginations. Nowhere is the power of Le Guin’s voice more evident than in the nearly forty stories selected for these stunning collections. The first volume includes terrestrial stories full of magical realism and satirical wit. The second volume covers the celestial and the fantastical, straying to the stars and beyond. Both volumes leave the reader in awe of Le Guin’s range and craftsmanship. A perfect addition to any library.”
—Casey Stryer The Elliott Bay Book Co.

“A century from now people will still be reading the fantasy stories of Ursula K Le Guin with joy and wonder. Five centuries from now they might ask if their author ever really existed, or if Le Guin was an identity made from the work of many writers rolled into one. A millennium on and her stories will be so familiar, like myths and fairytales today, that only dedicated scholars will ask who wrote them. Such is the fate of the truly great writers, whose stories far outlive their names.”
—The Guardian

For fifty years, National Book Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have shaped the way her readers see the world. Her work gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power. Le Guin’s writing is witty, wise, both sly and forthright; she is a master craftswoman.

This two-volume selection of almost forty stories taken from her eleven collections was made by Le Guin herself, as was the organizing principle of splitting the stories into the nominally realistic and fantastic.

Where on Earth focuses on Le Guin’s interest in realism and magic realism and includes eighteen of Le Guin’s satirical, political, and experimental earthbound stories.

Highlights include World Fantasy and Hugo Award winner “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” the rarely reprinted satirical short, “The Lost Children,” Jupiter Award winner, “The Diary of the Rose,” and the title story of her Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Unlocking the Air.

Stories in this volume were originally published in venues as varied as Playboy, TriQuarterly, Orbit, Redbook, and The New Yorker. 

Companion volume Outer Space Inner Lands includes Le Guin’s best known nonrealistic stories. Both volumes include new introductions by the author.

The Unreal and the Real is a much-anticipated event which will delight, amuse, and provoke.

New: Ursula K. Le Guin interviewed on The Millions.

Listen to Ursula K. Le Guin on BBC’s The World.

Robin Morgan interviews UKL, Women’ Media Center live.

Listen to an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on the Writer’s Voice.

Read an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on Wired.

LA Times Holiday Gift Guide.

Reviews for Simon & Schuster’s 2016 one-volume hardcover edition

“A truly majestic collection from one of our finest writers, The Unreal and the Real includes a wide range of Le Guin’s short fiction. Filled with keen observations and splendid storytelling, Le Guin’s prose is effortless and graceful, encompassing a multitude of worlds and the people who inhabit them.” — Mary J, Powell’s Books

“Le Guin’s storytelling talent and expressive language make every character’s choices feel true and significant, and all of the stories resonate with the reader.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Reviews

“Ursula K. Le Guin is the rare writer whose fiction is equally at home in the New Yorker or in Asimov’s Science Fiction. . . . Whether her stories are set in worlds beyond this one or in the building down the street, Le Guin is an astonishing creator and chronicler of communities, and an observer of the ways in which we interact, for good and for bad. These books serve as a fine reminder of that.”
—Tobias Carroll, Minneapolis Star Tribune

From Julie Phillips essay in Bookslut:

“In an email interview, [David Mitchell] spoke of how Le Guin could dream up a nonexistent world ‘and make it feel more real than the ‘real’ here and now around me, this Worcestershire I’m growing up in. Sometimes I think my writing life is the theory, practice and emulation of that same trick.'”
—David Mitchell

“I read her nonstop growing up and read her still. What makes her so extraordinary for me is that her commitment to the consequences of our actions, of our all too human frailties, is unflinching and almost without precedent for a writer of such human optimism. She never turns away from how flinty the heart of the world is. It gives her speculations a resonance, a gravity that few writers, mainstream or generic, can match.”
—Junot Diaz

“A lot of her work is about telling stories, and what it means to tell stories, and what stories look like. She’s been extremely influential on me in that area of what I, as a beginning writer, thought a story must look like, and the much more expansive view I have now of what a story can be and can do.”
—Karen Joy Fowler

 “I feel possible with her in the world. Too much else denies who I am or who I could imagine myself to be.”
—Andrea Hairston

“Le Guin’s science fiction, including The Lathe of Heaven and the antiwar The Word for World Is Forest, ‘helped shape my way of thinking about men and women, love and war. She was and remains a central figure for me.'”
—Michael Chabon

“What can be said about Le Guin that hasn’t already been said? She is one of the most iconic of all living writers, in or out of genre. This two-volume set provides an amazing look at the sheer depth and breadth of her short fiction—and should further add to her influence and her legacy.”
—Omnivoracious: The Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Collections of 2012

“A career-spanning two-volume sampling of Ursula Le Guin’s short stories, in beautiful hardbacks, as chosen and introduced by the author herself. The stories add up to a masterclass in contemporary fiction, divided according to setting—the ones in Where On Earth all take place on some version of this planet, with Outer Space, Inner Lands visiting locations further afield. Even if, like me, you own all nine of Le Guin’s original collections, these books are too beautiful to resist.”
—New Zealand Herald, Best Books of 2012

“The Unreal and the Real guns from the grim to the ecstatic, from the State to the Garden of Eden, with just one dragon between. (Every collection needs one dragon.) In every good career-spanning collection, you can observe an author growing into her authority. Here, every story, in its own way and from its own universe, told in its own mode, explains that there is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.”
—Slate, “No Better Spirit”

“Le Guin has a tendency to write in a fascinating style, a hybrid of minimalism and just slightly pretentious pithiness; when the story can support that kind of emotional payload, it’s powerful stuff.”
—Nerds of a Feather

“Only ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ and ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ are among the author’s well-known classics. On the other hand, read ‘Hand, Cup, Shell’ or ‘The Matter of Segri.’ Then consider that there may really be no such thing as minor Le Guin, particularly if one is disposed to savor a command of the English language that remains nearly unequaled in the ranks of English-language sf and fantasy. Equally good as an introduction to the author’s short fiction or to fill in gaps that may remain in larger collections.”
—Booklist

“The first of a two-volume collection focuses on stories that are occasionally tinged with magic but remain primarily realistic…. This volume shows that SFWA Grand Master Le Guin can make as great a mark outside genre fiction as she did within it.”
—Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

Volume One: Where on Earth

“Introduction: Choosing and Dividing”
“Brothers and Sisters”
“A Week in the Country”
“Unlocking the Air”
“Imaginary Countries”
“The Diary of the Rose” [audio; BBC Radio 7, read by Laurel Lefkow]
“The Direction of the Road”
“The White Donkey”
“Gwilan’s Harp”
“May’s Lion”
“Buffalo Gals”
“Horse Camp”
“The Lost Children”
“The Water is Wide”
“Texts”
“Sleepwalkers”
“Hand, Cup, Shell”
“Ether, OR”
“Half Past Four

Praise for Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story collections:

“An important writer. Period.”—The Washington Post

“Witty, satirical and amusing. Yet it is the author’s more serious work that displays her talents best, as she employs recurring themes and elements—cultural diversity, unlikely heroes and heroines, power’s ability to corrupt, love’s power to guide—and considers characters and types (women, children, the differently sexed and gendered) so often disenfranchised by other, more technologically oriented SF writers. . . . [A] classy and valuable collection.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”
—Time

“Le Guin’s prose is so luminous and simple, and she always tells the truth, and when I’m with her people, I’m with living people, on worlds as solid and real as my own. Le Guin has a gift, which is to transform words into worlds.”
—Molly Gloss

“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula Le Guin’s.”
—Grace Paley

“[Le Guin] examines the most public of politics and the most intimate of emotions, constantly challenging her readers to reconsider what it means to be human and humane.”
—Mary Doria Russell

“Le Guin brings reality itself to the proving ground.”—Theodore Sturgeon

“[E]verything Le Guin does is interesting, believable, and exquisitely detailed.”—Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“Delicious . . . her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”—Library Journal

“There is no more elegant or discerning expositor than Le Guin.”—Kirkus Reviews

“‘Beauty’ is the word for what Ursula K. Le Guin has wrought here. She explores ways in which we can be foreign and alien to each other, yet still love. Sometimes I don’t even know why the tears had sprung to my eyes: I just knew that I was deeply moved.”—Nalo Hopkinson

“I don’t know anyone else who can do what Le Guin does. Her work is simple and brilliantly clear, like a Buddha’s laugh: joyfully serious, delighted with the joke that is life. Le Guin writes about love, pure and simple—love and all the ways in which it refuses to be bound—and she does so beautifully.”—Nicola Griffith

“Le Guin’s writing touches on something ancient in all of us—something atavistic, of folktales and sagas, that comes from deep inside.”—Carol Emshwiller

“Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and the force of a Twain.”
—The Boston Globe

Cover by John D. Berry.
Cover art: “Wildcat” copyright 2010 by Paul Roden & Valerie Lueth, Tugboat Printshop.

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Award and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes, among others.

In recent years she received lifetime achievement awards from Los Angeles Times, World Fantasy Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legends award. Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award.

Her recent publications include three survey collections: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas; The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories; and The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena, Stories and Songs (Library of America) as well as a collection of poetry, Late in the Day, and a nonfiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Her website is ursulakleguin.com.

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The Unreal and the Real: Outer Space, Inner Lands

Tue 27 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

Selected Stories Volume Two
Second Printing: January 2013
9781618730350 · trade cloth · 333pp · $24
9781618730374 · ebook · $14.95
Audio book available from Recorded Books.
[Volume 1.]

Available in one volume from Simon & Schuster/Saga.
— Four Questions from Publishers Weekly

Don’t miss Ursula K. Le Guin’s acceptance speech upon receiving the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
— Profiles in: Boston Globe · The Guardian · NPR · Los Angeles Times · New Yorker · Salon ·

Read the Paris Review interview.

Oregon Book Award winner.
World Fantasy and Locus award finalist.

For fifty years, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have shaped the way her readers see the world. Her work gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power. Le Guin’s writing is witty, wise, both sly and forthright; she is a master craftswomen.

This two-volume selection of almost forty stories taken from her eleven collections was made by Le Guin herself, as was the organizing principle of splitting the stories into the nominally realistic and fantastic.

Outer Space, Inner Lands has twenty stories, including such modern classics as “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” and “Nine Lives” (both of which have been reprinted more than twenty times); Tiptree Award winner “The Matter of Seggri”; Nebula Award winner “Solitude”; and the secret history “Sur,” which was included in The Best American Short Stories.

Le Guin’s stories range from somber (“Small Change”) to hilarious (“The First Contact With the Gorgonids”), from fairy tales (“The Poacher”) to the quiet end of the world (“She Unnames Them”).

Stories in this volume were originally published in venues as varied as Amazing Stories, Playboy, Universe, The New Yorker, and Omni, and received the Hugo, Tiptree, Nebula, Asimov’s, and Locus awards.

Companion volume Where on Earth explores Le Guin’s satirical, political and experimental earthbound stories. Both volumes include new introductions by the author.

The Unreal and the Real is a much-anticipated event which will delight, amuse, and provoke.

Reviews

“Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.”
—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal

“The Unreal and the Real guns from the grim to the ecstatic, from the State to the Garden of Eden, with just one dragon between. (Every collection needs one dragon.) In every good career-spanning collection, you can observe an author growing into her authority. Here, every story, in its own way and from its own universe, told in its own mode, explains that there is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.”
—Slate, “No Better Spirit”

“The metaphorical language of fantasy has the capacity to touch us in the most profound ways. But many otherwise great fantasy writers, including JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, fall too easily into the traps of dogma and moral superiority, making their medicine sometimes hard to swallow. The stories of Ursula K Le Guin manage the sublime trick of touching our hearts while also satisfying our cynical, modern minds. For this reason her stories will pass into legend, to touch many generations to come.”
—The Guardian

“Consistently excellent.”—Nerds of a Feather

“Only ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ and ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ are among the author’s well-known classics. On the other hand, read ‘Hand, Cup, Shell’ or ‘The Matter of Segri.’ Then consider that there may really be no such thing as minor Le Guin, particularly if one is disposed to savor a command of the English language that remains nearly unequaled in the ranks of English-language sf and fantasy. Equally good as an introduction to the author’s short fiction or to fill in gaps that may remain in larger collections.”— Booklist

“Second of a two-volume set, this bare-bones collection focuses on SFWA Grand Master Le Guin’s overtly fantastic visions. Settings of 20 stories, all previously anthologized, include both the science fictional Ekumen, a community of worlds populated by humans shaped by the hubristic Hain of the distant past, to such fantastical realms as the West Reach, “where dragons breed on the lava isles.” Le Guin’s imagination ranges widely; the most interesting sequence involves the world Seggri, whose gender politics are charmingly different from ours but equally constrained. This short collection, offering samples from across Le Guin’s career to date, shows why she has been a major voice in science fiction and fantasy since the 1960s.”
—Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands

“Introduction”
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“Semley’s Necklace”
“Nine Lives”
“Mazes”
“The First Contact With the Gorgonids”
“The Shobies’ Story”
“Betrayals”
“The Matter of Seggri”
“Solitude”
“The Wild Girls”
“The Fliers of Gy”
“The Silence of the Asonu”
“The Ascent of the North Face”
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds”
“The Wife’s Story”
“The Rule of Names”
“Small Change”
“The Poacher”
“Sur”
“She Unnames Them” [podcast, read by the author]

Praise for Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story collections:

“She is the reigning queen of…but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom? Or, in view of her abiding concern with the ambiguities of gender, her queendom, or perhaps—considering how she likes to mix and match—her quinkdom? Or may she more properly be said to have not one such realm, but two?”
—Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books

“She is a splendid short-story writer…. Fiction, like Borges’s, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Ursula Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own.”
—The Boston Globe

“Admirers of fine literature, fantastic or not, will cherish this rich offering.”—Publishers Weekly

“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen… and while science fiction techniques often buttress her stories they rarely take them over. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”
—Newsweek

“Le Guin’s powerful work illustrates that fantasy need not be escapist, that gender studies need not be dry or strident, and that entertainment need not be mindless.”
—The Onion

Cover by John D. Berry.
Cover art: “Golden Apple Tree” copyright 2010 by Paul Roden & Valerie Lueth, Tugboat Printshop.

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Award and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes, among others.

In recent years she received lifetime achievement awards from Los Angeles Times, World Fantasy Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legends award. Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award.

Her recent publications include three survey collections: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas; The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories; and The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena, Stories and Songs (Library of America) as well as a collection of poetry, Late in the Day, and a nonfiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Her website is ursulakleguin.com.

 

 

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Saddest email of the weekend

Mon 26 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin

Suffice to say, another copy of Errantry is on its way:

I write book reviews for XXXXX. You were nice enough to send a copy of Elizabeth Hand’s ERRANTRY, which I have been planning to write up for December — but today my bag went missing after a screening of Lincoln, of all things. (I’m fascinated trying to work out who it is who go to see Lincoln on a Saturday afternoon while keeping an eye out for bag-thieving opportunities.)

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Friends on film & elsewhere

Wed 21 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Gwenda Bond, movies, Ted Chiang, to be watched| Posted by: Gavin

Ok, so Gwenda Bond’s book Blackwood is (ok: may be) going to be made into a TV series! Cool? Cool! . . .

. . . and our neighbor one-town-over Cassandra Clare’s bestselling Mortal Instruments series breaks into movieworld next summer in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones! (“Everything you’ve heard about monsters . . .  all the stories are true . . . “)

We went to see Cloud Atlas the other night. I think it was the first good film I’ve seen in ages. Ok, so I might not have seen anything in the cinema since The Avengers, but have I missed anything good? I’m glad we made the trip out to see Cloud Atlas. Even with the weird and bad choices (and I’m not just talking casting Tom Hanks here) the producers made, they did a good job of making a big, complicated book into a big, complicated film.

Meanwhile over in Chicago, The Chicago Nerd Social Club (what a great name!) are featuring Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others at their next book club meeting:

When: Monday, December 10, 2012 – 6:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Filter, 1373-75 N Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL
Cost: Free

And in Uppsala, Sweden (hello everyone in that lovely city!), Wired’s Noah Schachtman unwinds a fabulous story of a philologist who, gifted with a mysterious manuscript, eventually helps decode it:

. . . in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn’t even have an Internet connection at home. But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation—the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another.

Then, down in North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer has a great story on Kelly’s cousin Bryan Jones who with his friend Mark “Hootie” Bowman (I never knew his name was Mark, I’ve only ever heard of him mentioned as Hootie!) are selling “interactive hardbacks that introduce children to popular colleges and universities.” In other words, if you have a sports-obsessed parent in your life, hie thee to Collegiate Kids Books and get them a book now.

Action movie!

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A new LCRW

Tue 20 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

News!

We’ve got a table of contents for Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 28, the one that is a little late! It should be out next month. (Have you heard that before?) Partly this was inspired by finding five new stories and poems to buy for the next issue! This issue is missing a column from our Dear Aunt Gwenda, so if you have questions for our Dear Auntie, send them along and we will see if we can bring her back for the next issue. Which may come sooner than you might expect!

Without further witherwathering, here’s the table of contents for the June December 2012 issue of LCRW:

Fiction

Michael Penkas, “Coffee with Count Presto”
Krista Hoeppner Leahy, “Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest”
Kevin Waltman, “Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts Are Like Broken Hands”
Erica Hilderbrand, “Akashiyaki (Octopus Dumplings, serves two)”
Brian Baldi, “Springtime for the Roofer”
Andrea M. Pawley, “Vanish Girl”
Kamila Z. Miller, “Neighbors”
Helen Marshall, “The Book of Judgment”

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, “Feeding Strays”

Poetry

John McKernan, “Prayer to Oatmeal”

Cover

Junyi Wu

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Low stock warning

Mon 19 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kij Johnson, Maureen F. McHugh, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

As we head into the holiday season, I’m happy to see we have some hit books that will soon be out of stock:

It looks increasingly likely that our two volume Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin will be sold out by publication day (November 27).

We just got copies in of the second printing of Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees so, it won’t be out of stock but for those who collect first editions, we will keep shipping them out from the office until we run out.

And although it’s now in its third printing, we still have a few first printings of Maureen F. McHugh’s collection, After the Apocalypse. 

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Listening to Ursula K. Le Guin

Mon 19 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Right now I’m listening to Francesca Rheannon’s interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on the Writer’s Voice.

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Trafalgar’s chaste light

Thu 15 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin

Before you know it we’ll be publishing our second novel by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar, translated by U. of Oregon professor Amalia Gladhart. Originally published in Argentina in 1979, it’s a very light and funny book. We had some good news recently: the book is getting a small grant to help with translation costs from the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Culture of the Argentine Republic. (Obra editada  en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de  la República Argentina.) How cool is that? It is awesome.

We’re also working with Ron Guyatt on the final cover.

Trafalgar is a novel-in-stories and the first one, “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” is more bawdy than the others, which is a funny way to set things up! But it also starts right in with Trafalgar Medrano, salesman and storyteller, who, given time and seven double coffees, will tell all about his sales trips to the farthest parts of the galaxies. Another of the stories, “Trafalgar and Josefina,” is forthcoming on Belletrista, but you can get a tiny taste of the first story here:

“By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon”

I was with Trafalgar Medrano yesterday. It’s not easy to find him. He’s always going here and there with that import-export business of his. But now and then he goes from there to here and he likes to sit down and drink coffee and chat with a friend. I was in the Burgundy and when I saw him come in, I almost didn’t recognize him: he had shaved off his mustache.

The Burgundy is one of those bars of which there aren’t many left, if there are any at all. None of that Formica or any fluorescent lights or Coca-Cola. Gray carpet—a little worn—real wood tables and real wood chairs, a few mirrors against the wood paneling, small windows, a single door and a façade that says nothing. Thanks to all this, inside there’s a lot of silence and anyone can sit down to read the paper or talk with someone else or even do nothing, seated at a table with a cloth, white crockery dishes, and real glass, like civilized people use, and a serious sugar bowl, and without anyone, let alone Marcos, coming to bother them.

I won’t tell you where it is because one of these days you might have adolescent sons or, worse, adolescent daughters who will find out, and goodbye peace and quiet. I’ll give you just one piece of information: it’s downtown, between a shop and a galería, and you surely pass by there every day when you go to the bank and you don’t even see it.

But Trafalgar came over to me at the table right away. 

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Errantry: publication day

Wed 14 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, Errantry| Posted by: Gavin

Everyone’s favorite writer of strannnnge, uneasy, disquieting, disturbing, itchy and scratchy stories, Elizabeth Hand, has a new book, Errantry: Strange Stories (print | ebook), out today.

Errantry collects ten of Liz’s recent stories and includes the very popular “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” as well as Shirley Jackson Award winner, “Near Zennor.” (Between this, the forthcoming Le Guin Selected Stories and Kij Johnson‘s book, we’ve had a great year for short story fans!) And I should  mention that next year we’ll be reprinting one of our favorite of Liz’s novels, Mortal Love. More Liz, all the time!

As for Errantry, Stefan Raets writes in his review on Tor.com today:

These are stories of the overwhelmingly mystical breaking into our world in small, almost unnoticeable ways, seen from the point of view of the few people who get to witness those minor intrusions and who then have to try and process their meanings. The subtlety is deceptive: there’s something huge going on, but it’s as if we and these characters are peeking at it through a keyhole, only seeing a small glimpse of what’s on the other side and only being hit by a small portion of the light it sheds. The suggestion that that door may open further is only part of what gives these stories their “slightly sinister” atmosphere.

Liz’s stories definitely get under your skin. There’s nothing quite like reading these stories late at night with the light pooled around you and being aware that you can’t quite see what’s going on in the darker corners of the room. Is that something moving?

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Errantry: Strange Stories

Wed 14 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books, Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin

November 2012 · trade paper · 9781618730305 / ebook · 9781618730312
Second printing: January 2019

Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

“Near Zennor” is a Shirley Jackson Award winner.
Listen to Liz reading “Hungerford Bridge.”

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand’s new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

“At her best, Hand does just this: We find ourselves wrapped in an evocation without knowing fully how she got us there, shivering with fear at an image of lights or blinking with awe at the modest beauty of a small, rare creature living its life, seen from a distance.”
—Aimee Bender, Washington Post

“With grand feeling and inventiveness, Hand writes of modern life edging just into the impossible. Her ragged modern characters, often lost or stoned or just unfixed in their lives, set out over moors or into hidden parks in search of realities less dispiriting than our own.”
—Village Voice

“As I was reading Errantry: Strange Stories, the phone rang. I answered it and whispered ‘Hello?’
“‘Why are you whispering?’ asked my friend.
“‘I’m reading this really bizarre book of short stories,’ I said. That was my short answer. But the long answer is this: I’m whispering because as I was reading Hand’s stories in my quiet house on a cold December day, the threads of my reality frayed a bit along the edges and it would take more than a telephone’s ring for me to pull myself back together. I’m whispering because I’m scared to disturb the intricate and delicate worlds that Hand has created in this collection of stories that alternately draw me in and scare me away.”
—Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

I thought of this tendency a lot when reading Elizabeth Hand’s collection Errantry: Strange Stories. Though I know that Hand’s background is in work that’s less overtly realistic, I know her best through her kinda-mystery Generation Loss, which is as much a meditation on art and the passage of time, and an evocative description of an isolated coastal town in Maine, as it is a book in which someone must solve something. What makes Hand’s collection notable are those moments where the fantastical (or at least the surreal) briefly collides with the mundane, but doesn’t necessarily lead to transcendence. A couple of the stories involve brief encounters with the strange, but it’s less about the existence of the supernatural than it is on the effects of having one’s worldview fundamentally altered. In the two stories that open the collection, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” and “Near Zennor,” strange things occur, but they’re within the larger contexts of memory and grief, and they’re as difficult for their characters to put together as more earthly mysteries.”
— Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Hand’s strangeness is redolent of the sort of disturbing, uncanny children’s books that gave you nightmares at the age of nine (for me, Alan Garner): books with malevolent forces lurking under sunny hillsides, where adults aren’t going to save our heroes, and whose endings are staggeringly bleak.”
— Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons 

“Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky.”
—Helen McCrory, Pank

“The stories confound yet delight, blurt unanswerable questions yet hold their tongue. Each will leave you scratching your head and asking, “Well, what if . . . ?” Overcoming the constraints of genre, Errantry is strange fiction at its finest.”
—Rain Taxi

“No writer has cornered the market on darkly beautiful, unsettling stories. But it’s a niche that Elizabeth Hand inhabits with uncanny ease.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram

“Talented Hand has won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Tiptree Award and the Nebula Award, among many others. The reason for this lies less in her imaginative worlds, as impressive as they can be, and more in her skill at crafting words, each phrase and each sentence carefully shaped and laid in place to create the singular diadem that is a Hand story. The tales here are all recent, and are all evidence of Hand’s prolific, fertile imagination. Hand enthusiasts should, of course, have already pre-ordered this collection; those new to her work should acquire it as soon as possible.”
—Romantic Times Book Review

“Explores the odd and impossible dreams that can motivate and dishearten people in everyday life.”
—Bangor Daily News

Omnivoracious: The Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Collections of 2012
“Just more evidence of the self-assurance and complexity Hand has brought to fiction in the middle part of her career.”

“When novelist and short story author Hand (“Available Dark; Generation Loss”) subtitled this collection “Strange Stories,” she gave readers a hint about what to expect. Lord Byron said “what a strange thing man is…” and it is true, everyone is a little strange, life is a little strange. This original, varied, collection of stories is not strictly fantasy, and certainly not horror, for Hand is more subtle than that. The stories are so different from each other it is hard to find a common theme or thread, but whether reading about ordinary people sharing peculiar experiences, people undergoing fantastic transformations, a young woman with supernatural powers, or a pair of witches, each story leaves the reader curious, thinking about what they read, but disquieted, with a lingering, though not necessarily unpleasant, sense of unease. VERDICT An enjoyable trip to the dark side, certainly worth a try for those who enjoy short stories but not necessarily elements of fantasy, and a must for fans of Hand’s previous work.–Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
—Library Journal

“Ten evocative novellas and stories whisper of hidden mysteries carved on the bruised consciousness of victims and victimizers. Memories and love are as dangerous as the supernatural, and Hand often denies readers neat conclusions, preferring disturbing ambiguity. The Hugo-nominated “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” marries science fiction and magical realism as three men recreate a legendary aircraft’s doomed flight for a dying woman. A grieving widow in “Near Zennor” unearths a secret of spectral kidnapping in an ancient countryside. “Hungerford Bridge,” a lesser piece, shares a secret that can only be enjoyed twice in one’s life. Celtic myth and human frailty entangle in the darkly romantic “The Far Shore.” The vicious nature of romantic love is dissected with expressionistic abandon in the dreamlike “Summerteeth.” Hand’s outsiders haunt themselves, the forces of darkness answering to the calls of their battered souls. Yet strange hope clings to these surreal elegies, insisting on the power of human emotion even in the shadow of despair. Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”
—Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Near Zennor
Hungerford Bridge [audio]
The Far Shore
Winter’s Wife
Cruel Up North
Summerteeth
The Return of the Fire Witch
Uncle Lou
Errantry

Cover image “The Hunt in the Forest” by Paolo Uccello by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Read more

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P&W article

Fri 9 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ig Publishing, Publishing, Small Beer Press, To Read Pile, Two Dollar Radio| Posted by: Gavin

Did you see the huge lovely article by Michael Bourne featuring family-run presses in the current issue of Poets & Writers? There’s a big old photo of Kelly and me (we’re the stern ones!). The article features Ig, Two Dollar Radio, and Small Beer, and looks at the joys and sorrows (er, pros and cons?) of running a publishing house together. First up: Ig Publishing, run by Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson (their photo is nice and cheery!). Ig have a nice line of Dive Bar books but are perhaps best known for their popular politics titles. Next: Two Dollar Radio, run by Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf—who have a fab, informal photo!—who published Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps along with other books you may know. You may want to get your Two Dollar tattoo now—they’ll send you free books for life. But seventeen people have already done it and they are capping the offer at 25!

It was fun to be interviewed for the article. I always want people to talk about the books, not the press—Wait, what’s that you said about us? Oh, do tell! Let me not protest too much—and it’s hard to talk about the press without talking about our lives since the public/private split in indie press publishing can be near nonexistent.

That said, there was a fabulous article written in alternating first person by two poets, Brenda Shaughnessy and Craig Morgan Teicher, in the summer issue, “Enduring Discovery: Marriage, Parenthood, and Poetry.” The couple are married and are both published poets with new books out this year. Everything went well until:

“After a healthy pregnancy with no complications, our son suffered a catastrophic brain injury at delivery…. Our beautiful, amazing boy is now five years old and he has severe cerebral palsy. He’s nonambulatory, nonverbal, and has a smile that lights up a room like nothing else. Yes, we’ve been through hell, but we’ve had this angelic, loving, marvelous child with us the whole time.”

Both poets speak about their own lives, their family, and their work so clearly and strongly that I had to stop and read the whole article at once and then put their new books on the To Be Read list. So I like other people talking about their lives! Thanks for the write-up, Poets & Writers!<

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Beers of WFC 2012

Fri 9 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Literary Beer| Posted by: Michael

Fermented Adventures was well represented at World Fantasy Convention in Toronto this past weekend. As you can imagine, we went at it in earnest, like the semipro drinkers…er, writers…we are.

I bought and saved up beers over a couple months until I had 24 bottles of really good Michigan beer. I muled it (legally) over international lines. Then Scott, Raj and I and a crowd of other writers sampled and shared them all weekend alongside Toronto microbrews liberally provided by con staff, hotel bar and friends.

It all went (gloriously) something like this:

• Mill Street Organic, Toronto – a yellow lager, meh
• Steam Whistle Pilsener, Canada – very nice, crisp and authentic-tasting
• Frankenmuth Pilsener, Michigan – Not quite as authentically German-style but I like it
• Arcadia Loch Down, Michigan – a very nice scotch ale, 7% alcohol, round, easy drinking
• Bells Double Cream Stout, Michigan – reviewed earlier by Scott, decent but not mind-blowing.
• Growler of IPA from some local Toronto brewpub – spicy, earthy, citrusy, medium bitter, a kitchen sink IPA
• Smithwicks – Not nearly as good as the Arcadia scotch ale.
• Rickard’s Red, Molson – Not bad. Middle o’ the road.



• Bells Cherry Stout – We love the sour/stout combo. This as far as I’m concerned is the exemplar.
• Founders Breakfast Stout, Michigan – the gold standard
• Pilgrim’s Dole Wheat Wine, New Holland, Michigan – a huge 12% alcohol wheat wine with currant, plum flavor notes. Amazing, but would have been 100x better if I’d aged it 3 years first.
• Dark Horse Blueberry Imperial Stout, Michigan – The blueberry is almost all in the nose, so not quite a sour stout but still delicious.
• Mill Street Coffee Porter, Toronto – A tiny bit too much coffee for me in a porter this light.
• Atwater Block Bourbon Barrel Porter, Michigan
• A different growler of IPA from some local Toronto brewpub – Super-citrusy, aggressively bitter, a bit much for me but nice to sample.
• Motor City Brewing Works Hard Cider, Detroit – Best Detroit area cider I’ve had, dry, strongly effervescent, acidic, strong in tannin, with funky earthy notes from the yeast. Must buy more….



• 2012 Hot Pepper Chocolate Stout, my homebrew – This one had a pepper in the bottle, very fiery indeed
• 2011 Sweet Fern Scotch Ale, my homebrew – A 70 shilling ale flavored with a pinch of wild-harvested sweet fern, a spicy, woody perennial
• 2011 Cyser, my homebrew
• 2011 Honey Porter, my homebrew

And that’s just the ones I can remember!

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The Diary of a Young Monster Hunter

Thu 8 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

Next year we are reprinting Peter Dickinson’s novel Eva Tupper’s Diary. Guess who did the cover? Kathleen Jennings, yay! Publishing being what it is, we’re telling the sales reps about the book now so that they can take it to the booksellers and then when you wander into your local bookshop next May, boom! there it is. Emma arrives in Scotland to spend the summer with her cousins, the McAndrews. The McAndrews have the typical kid’s book family: a late mother, a distant father, and an assortment of cousins four years apart from 14 onup.

There’s also a mini-submarine and perhaps more. Here’s an excerpt from early on in the book:

“Creature?” said Emma. “Do you mean a monster?”

Andy laughed.

“Oh yes, we’ve got one of those,” he said. “It’s made of rafts of weed which get carried up from the bottom by gases from decaying stuff underneath them. They make black hummocks, quite long sometimes, so that you see several things in line that might be the humps of a sea-serpent, and then the gas gets out and they sink again. That’s what all the monsters really are—Loch Ness and Loch Morar as well as ours. How long since anybody saw its head, Mary? Mouth, eyes, teeth?”

“Och, you’ll not see them and live,” said Mary placidly. “But there was poachers came up from Glasgow when you were in your cradle, Master Andy—an ignorant class of men, as everybody knows there’s no fish worth poaching in our loch. But they brought two boats by night, and nets, and by morning both boats were overturned and three of the men vanished. Those were the last poachers I heard of coming this way.”

“And the first,” said Roddy, “if everyone knows there’s no fish worth poaching. Hey!”

Mary had walked round behind his chair while he was talking, and now biffed him hard on the ear with her open palm; then she nodded to Emma and walked out smiling. Roddy rubbed his ear and went on eating his toast.

“Even if there’s only a story about a monster. . .” said Emma. “I mean there’s only a story about Loch Ness.”

“That one’s had two hundred years to spread,” said Andy.

“But things happen so much faster now,” said Emma. “I mean if only you could get your story on television . . .”

“Cousin Emma,” said Andy, lordly and handsome, “you have only just reached civilisation after a formative childhood in the desert. Understandably you are besotted by the television set. But you will later learn that it cannot do everything—in particular it cannot make one stretch of water which might have a monster in it look more interesting than another stretch of water which might not.”

“He’s the expert,” said Roddy. “His girl’s in the Glasgow studios.”

 

 

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