Oldest unpaid invoice 10-year anniversary is coming

Fri 6 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

And since we are optimists we still hope it will be paid! This invoice, no. 145* is for all of …  $29.40. If I get it together I’ll post a scan of it as it is, er, fun (maybe only to me?) to see that it was supposed to be for $32.40, but 1 copy of Judith Berman’s Lord Stink chapbook was misbound. Oh, the thrill of it all!

Since the invoice was only for ~$30, we never bothered following up until 2008 when we tried to tidy up all our unpaid invoices. Most of them are/were for bookstores that take LCRW on consignment (argh, the paperwork!) and it was great to suddenly get all these tiny checks. Invoice no. 145 languished. However, it was not alone!

As you can see below in the pasted in info, this bookstore asked for “a standing order for 5 copies of our chapbooks and LCRW.” Yay! Now we could just ship out 5 copies each time we published a zine or chapbook. Pretty sweet. If said bookstore paid said invoices for zines, etc.

Instead this arrangement lasted exactly 1 issue of LCRW and 2 more chapbooks. Silly me. A couple more unpaid invoices later (unpaid balance: $74.40, ooh!) and we realized we should probably stop sending them stuff.

Come on chaps, pay a zinester!

This is one of the big reasons we love our book distributor, Consortium. They deal with all the shipping out and returns and invoices and credits and reinvoicing and shipping and all that and every day I am grateful I don’t have to do it.

We still send LCRW out to some stores that only pay every 2-3 years, but, hey, they pay. This store never did. But they do order our books from Consortium and from wholesalers.

So we sent them reminders in 2008, 2010, and 2012 (and maybe other times, but that’s what’s written on it), and then I realized that our little oldest unpaid invoice was going to turn 10 years old on September 16, 2013. I can hear it now, 10 more years! 10 more years!

Invoice  00145

September 16, 2003

Title                                                                Price        Quantity    Discount    Total
Foreigners and Other Familiar Faces    $5                 3                 40%        $9
Lord Stink                                                      $5                 1                 40%        $3
Rosetti Song                                                  $5                 3                 40%        $9
LCRW 12                                                        $4                 3                  40%        $5.40
Total                       $29.40

As of now you have a standing order for 5 copies of our chapbooks and LCRW.
Thanks for ordering our books from Ingram or directly from Pathway Book Service.

Invoice  00151
November 8, 2003

Title                        Price        Quantity    Discount    Total
LCRW 12                $5               5                     40%        $15
Total                       $15
Sorry—our new chapbooks have been delayed at the printer. We will get them to you as soon as we get them.

Invoice  00172
December 4, 2003

Title                                  Price        Quantity    Discount    Total
Bittersweet Creek            $5                 5                  40%
Other Cities                       $5                 5                  40%
Total                       $30

At last!

* Not all of invoices number 1 to 144 were paid. A few zine and bookstores closed without paying, c’est la vie. You publishes your zines and you takes your chances!

1/14/15, ETA: Added chapbook links and tidied up the post.

Unpaid invoices? $74.40
Amusement over the years? Priceless. Variable!


Coming next week

Thu 5 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

To celebrate publication day of our latest Peter Dickinson reprint: next week Crimespree Magazine will publish a conversation about The Poison Oracle between two fabulous novelists: Sara Paretsky and Peter Dickinson.

 


PW on Tyrannia

Wed 4 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Great review of A. DeNiro’s forthcoming Tyrannia in Publishers Weekly:

“DeNiro (Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead) has crafted the rare work whose setting is the realm of pure imagination.” Read it here.


An American Beer Nerd in Edinburgh 2

Fri 30 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Michael

The Pentland Hills, with Wall

The Pentland Hills, with Wall

Part Two: The North Is Coming

If you haven’t, read part one.

“The North is coming!” cry the beer nerds of Scotland and Northern England, in shameless reference to those bold, glory-seeking fictional beer nerds from Beyond the Wall. In the North, I learned, a brewing renaissance is underway. The dominance of CAMRA-established uniformity I talked about in part one cracks steadily under the small but building onslaught of US-influenced, globally inspired nano- and microbreweries. Edinburgh is full of tiny, endlessly cross-pollinating knots of brewing brilliance, a beer microculture not entirely unlike those I’ve found surrounding Boston and Detroit.

Below I review a lot of bars in no particular order, though I did save some of the best for last. One week, fourteen pubs (plus repeats), miles and miles of walking over hill and under dale, too many pints to count, and thanks in great part to all that low ABV I raved about in part one, only one hangover! The fish and chips and bangers and mash blurred together; the beers and the bartenders did not. I prepared an insufficiently researched beer tour map ahead of time; it  got thrown to the wind. What I found instead was better. I have updated the map—open it in another window and follow along.

Read more


Tyrannia isn’t a geographical location

Tue 27 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Spolia #1

As Gus Iversen notes on the Spolia magazine intro page to A. DeNiro’s story “A Rendition”

Tyrannia isn’t a geographical location as much as a frame of mind. 

Read the intro (“Tyrannia: Population: A. DeNiro“) here and the full story here.

 


Bookslinger: At the Mouth of the River of Bees

Fri 23 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is the title story from Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees.

Previously on Bookslinger:

Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s “Delauney the Broker” (translated by Edward Gauvin) from the collection A Life on Paper.

Ray Vukcevich, “Whisper”

Maureen F. McHugh, “The Naturalist”

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Pelican Bar”

Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”

Benjamin Rosenbaum, “Start the Clock”

Maureen F. McHugh, “Ancestor Money”

Download the app in the iTunes store.

And watch a video on it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySL1bvyuNUE


PW on Spider in a Tree

Wed 21 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Publishers Weekly gave a lovely review to Susan’s forthcoming (at the printer now!) novel Spider in a Tree:

“Stinson restores personhood and complexity to figures who have shriveled into caricature. . . . the payoff is not just the recovered history but the beautifully evoked sense of lives lived under the eye, not only of prying neighbors, but of God, with all the terror and possibility that entailed.”

Read the whole thing here.

If you’re in Western Mass., don’t miss Susan’s launch party/reading on October 2nd and then the her cemetery tour (tickets available at Broadside Books) on October 5th. We’re still adding events, but here’s what we have at the moment:

October 2, 7 pm, Launch party & reading, First Churches, Northampton, Mass. Sponsored by Forbes Library and Broadside Books.
October 5, 1 pm, Public Cemetery Tour. Tickets will be available this autumn.
October 8, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.
(Late October: San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley)
December 15, 5 pm, Bloom Readings, Washington Heights, NYC


Where are they now: Michael J. DeLuca

Tue 20 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Cat! the viewMy archery skills have severely deteriorated. I no longer get paper cuts. I haven’t mistakenly spent too much money mailing anything to Germany in quite some time. The mail room employees at the Easthampton post office have very likely forgotten what I look like.

I moved away from Western Mass, first to Boston, then Detroit, where I meet fewer pagans on a daily basis and not everyone agrees with my politics. I own a house now (real estate: significantly cheaper outside the Valley) and have begun accumulating books once again after a long stretch of itinerant downsizing, but despair at ever getting my house to the enviable state of the Small Beer office in 2005, where one expected any day to die of internal injuries following a tragic book cave-in.

I still write (I will always write) but am less afraid of writers. I still listen to and enjoy indie chamber-pop, but less of it. It has been years since I’ve opened a piece of mail with a tiny cutlass. Through a great stroke of luck and generosity, I once again on occasion get to look at a medicinal mushrooms poster. I still eat wild mushrooms procured from local woods and have not yet died of it. I still drink lots of quite good tea, but eat slightly less amazing chocolate. I ride 100% fewer freight elevators and no longer have much use for a pallet jack.

Otherwise, life remains much the same.

Michael J. DeLuca lives in Michigan. His short stories have been published in Urban Green Man, Abyss & Apex, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others.


Tyrannia, free?

Mon 12 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Good news! We have 15 copies of A. DeNiro’s excellent new collection, Tyrannia and Other Renditions to giveaway* on LibraryThing.

A.’s stories are like no one else’s.* Tyrannia—with a fab cover by Kevin Huizenga—has eleven stories that have been published in Asimov’s, Caketrain, Strange Horizons, Spolia, and other fine books and magazines. This book will knock you over and if you’re lucky, it will do it for free.

Good luck!

* Yes, we used to do Mehgoodreads giveaways but since they got bought by Amazon I closed my account. Bitter? Me? No. Yes, LT are part-owned by the evil empire, too. Meh.

** Yes, I know this is true of everyone. But it’s more true of A.!


One Campus, One Book @ University of Alaska Southeast

Tue 6 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

One Campus, One Book @ University of Alaska Southeast

We’re excited to see how it goes this later this year at the University of Alaska Southeast where Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees has been chosen for their One Campus, One Book program. Check out the huge rendering of Jackie Morris*’s great bee. You can keep up the university and community events on the OCOB facebook page.

Kij will be visiting the campus from November 6-8:

November 8, 2013, 7:00 pm, UAS Egan Library
An Evening with Kij Johnson
Sponsored by OCOB and UAS Evening at Egan lecture series.

November 9, 2013, 1:00-4:00 pm, Douglas Public Library
Community Fiction Writing Workshop with Kij Johnson
Sponsored by the Friends of the Juneau Public Libraries

April 2014, Location TBA
Narrative in Drawing
UAS Student Art Exhibit featuring works based on ‘At the Mouth of the River of Bees’

* Don’t miss Jackie’s pictures of her garden (which is really underselling this link). Flowers? Check. Interesting garden gate? Check. Cat? Check. Unique windows in garden wall? Check. Cornucopia of beauty? Check.


Dr. Capaldi

Mon 5 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, I am a huge fan of The Thick of It, but come on, this is getting ridiculous. I thought last time the Doctor Who writers picked a new actor (er, regenerated) they’d be on the side of the rest of the world, you know, not just white guys from England and Scotland. My mistake. Instead they chose 28-year-old Matt Smith. Huh, we all said.

Surely, the world thought, next time they will go with someone who is not a young white guy.

Well, they picked Peter Capaldi of Local Hero and The Thick of It. A brilliant actor and who can blame him for taking the gig? And, note, he is almost twice Matt Smith’s age! Is that not . . . different! Ta da!

Er, no. Why did they not pick a woman and/or someone who is not white?

For a TV show that’s been running 50 years, this is getting beyond silly and into embarrassing. (Conspiracy theorists note: the next actor will be the Unlucky 13th Doctor. Ooh. Maybe they will pick me only to kill me off in my first episode?)

The Doctor—hey, I know someone will correct me if I’m wrong—is an alien with two hearts who comes from somewhere rather far away and who gets to Time Lord it all up and down the timestream. Yet, somehow, so far he can only be played by (sorry, “regenerate into”) yet another white guy?

Some alien. Blah, blah, blah.


LCRW 29 table of contents

Thu 1 Aug 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Coming next month, maybe sooner to subscribers, the latest issue of our occasional outburst, Lady Churchill’s Rather Late Wristlet. The table of contents is as below. This might even be the right order. Seems a bit farfetched to have the ToC out but not the zine. Heck, there is even a cover.

Fiction

“Smash!” Jennifer Linnaea
“The Groomsmen,” Sarah Blackman
“Fairy Skulls,” Nina Allan
“Yaga Dreams of Growing Up,” Eileen Wiedbrauk
“Dietus Interruptus,” Ian Breen
“Good Keith!,” J. Brundage
“Three Rights Make a Left,” Rhonda Eikamp
“EGGS,” Claire Hero
“Disaster Movies,” Christopher Stabback
“Four Phoebes,” Maya Sonenberg

Nonfiction

“How to Seduce a Vegetarian,” Nicole Kimberling

Poetry

“Re-load,” Kara Singletary
“Noise,” David Galef
“Ksampguiyaeps—Woman-Out-To-Sea” and “Hermitage,” Neile Graham

Cover photo

Dawn Kimberling

 

 

 


Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 29

Thu 1 Aug 2013 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

8.5 x 7 · 60pp · September 2013 · Issue 29 · Ebook (ISBN 9781618730817) available from Weightless.

The new issue of our Occasional Outburst, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (#29! how many times will we claim this number in the future?) is best read while at work. There is a cooking column (“How to Seduce a Vegetarian”) by Nicole Kimberling as well as fiction and poetry from Jennifer Linnaea, Neile Graham, Sarah Blackman, Claire Hero, and many more wonderful writers. Actually, that thing about reading at work. OK, it’s good at home, too.

Read an interview with Food Columnist Nicole Kimberling.

Reviews

Well, you never know, right?

SF Revu

Fiction

“Smash!” Jennifer Linnaea
“The Groomsmen,” Sarah Blackman
“Fairy Skulls,” Nina Allan
“Yaga Dreams of Growing Up,” Eileen Wiedbrauk
“Dietus Interruptus,” Ian Breen
“Good Keith!,” J. Brundage
“Three Rights Make a Left,” Rhonda Eikamp
“EGGS,” Claire Hero
“Disaster Movies,” Christopher Stabback
“Four Phoebes,” Maya Sonenberg

Nonfiction

“How to Seduce a Vegetarian,” Nicole Kimberling

Poetry

“Re-load,” Kara Singletary
“Noise,” David Galef
“Ksampguiyaeps—Woman-Out-To-Sea” and “Hermitage,” Neile Graham

Cover photo

Dawn Kimberling

Made by: Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.

Readers: Julie Day, Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 29, September 2013. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-081-7.Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is usually 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 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. Funny how once this thing has been finished, there’s always something else to do.

One of these days we’ll all be dust and somewhere this paper zine will sit on a shelf. What a laugh!

 


Where are they now: Christian N. Desrosiers

Tue 30 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Boorama, a city in western Somaliland.

Boorama, a city in western Somaliland

I’ve been all over the place, both geographically and career-wise—I’ll do my best to be concise and still interesting. I interned at SBP during my junior year at Amherst College. At the time, I was an English major who was solely interested in literature and making a career in literature. I went on from SBP to a summer internship at the Hudson Review and, in my senior year, I wrote a literary-historical thesis on poverty in Appalachia and applied for a Fulbright scholarship to Indonesia.

My time in Indonesia taught me a lot about myself and my interests. I wrote and published a few pieces in the Hudson Review and other publications—a major coup after a seemingly endless stream of thanks-but-no-thanks emails from journals—but also grew more interested in social justice causes. Writing took too much of my time and what I ended up with seemed like too little to justify all those hours spent writing alone and in a constant state of frustration. I traveled a bit in Southeast Asia—Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar—and subsequently found a job with an educational non-profit in Somaliland, the autonomous region in northwest Somalia. After working there for a year, I started two companies in Somaliland: a logistics company for the fisheries sector (which barely got off the ground) and a renewable energy development firm (still making headway, follow us at www.qoraxenergy.com).

After making some inroads, I’ve left most of the daily operations of Qorax Energy to my co-founders as I prepare to start a master’s program at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. A long way from what I envisioned my future only three years previous as an undergraduate. We’ll see where life takes me next . . .


The Seventh Raven

Mon 29 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Cancelled

A Notting Hill children’s opera is suddenly on the world stage when terrorists try to kidnap one of the children.

Phoenix Award Winner from the Children’s Literature Association
“Going Round by the Byways” (pdf). Acceptance Speech for the Phoenix Award, Buffalo, New York, June 8, 2001

Too old to take part in the annual children’s opera, seventeen-year-old Doll Jacobs makes a place for herself as a junior member of the “opera mafia” who run the show. There are always exactly one hundred children’s roles, but an exception is made for Juan O’Grady, the son of the ambassador from a small South American country, Matteo.

When Mattean terrorists attempt to kidnap him, Juan is hidden amongst the other children and a tense standoff unfolds as the terrorists hold the cast and crew hostage and search for him. Dickinson’s philosophical investigation of whether we can defend “art for art’s sake” is also a taut thriller that will hold readers of all ages to the very end.

“This steady, sober hostage story is not quite a thriller . . . but anyone . . . can be engaged by the argument and enveloped in Dickinson’s carefully textured citadel.”—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Peter Dickinson’s children’s books:

“One of the real masters of children’s literature.”
—Philip Pullman

“Peter Dickinson is a national treasure.”—The Guardian

“Magnificent. Peter Dickinson is the past-master story-teller of our day.”
—Times Literary Supplement

Peter Dickinson OBE is the author of more than fifty books, including many books for children and young adults such as Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures, Kin, Eva, The Dancing Bear, Emma Tupper’s Diary, and  Michael L. Printz honor book The Ropemaker. He is a two-time winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award and winner of the Guardian and Horn Book Awards. He spent seventeen years working at the magazine Punch. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.


Where, etc

Fri 26 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

As I hoped, the Where Are They Now posts are interesting! We posted Sara’s on Monday and next week we will post a second one, from Christian N. Desrosiers. More, as ever, TK!


Audio book news

Tue 23 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

We sent out the following note this morning. More below:

EASTHAMPTON, MA, July 23, 2013 — Small Beer Press is delighted to announce that audio rights to seven new and forthcoming titles have been acquired by Audible.com.

The first release will be award winning North Carolina writer Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection, North American Lake Monsters: Stories. Also forthcoming within the next year are:

Gavin J. Grant, Publisher of Small Beer Press stated, “We love the books we publish and getting audio editions out there is becoming more important day by day. We’ve worked with many of the best audio publishers and are happy to add Audible to the mix.”

Audible, Inc., is the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet, offering customers a new way to enhance and enrich their lives every day. Audible is also the preeminent provider of spoken-word audio products for Apple’s iTunes® Store.

Small Beer Press is a Massachusetts based independent publisher headed by the husband and wife team of Gavin J. Grant and award winning author Kelly Link. Small Beer publishes a dozen or so select titles per year and also runs the DRM-free ebooksite, http://weightlessbooks.com. For more information, visit our website at https://www.smallbeerpress.com.

————–

This should be good news for authors and audio fans everywhere. Previously we’ve worked with

And we were very happy when Brilliance did the audiobook of Steampunk! and Recorded Books did Kelly’s collection Pretty Monsters.

Audiobooks are a growing part of the book business and we want our books read—or listened to—so I expect we will be selling more titles to Audible in the future but we will also shop them around to make sure we do well by our authors and readers.

And if none of this is fast enough for you and you want to listen to a good story right now, then I recommend our podcast which you can listen to here or subscribe to using iTunes or the service of your choice:

 rss feed


Where are they now: Sara Majka

Mon 22 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Sara's apartmentLet’s see . . . after my time with Small Beer Press I spent seven months living in Provincetown as a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center.  From there I moved back to Northampton, MA to start at the University of Massachusetts MFA program.  I graduated from UMass a semester early because I couldn’t wait to move to New York City. That enthusiasm seems funny to me now, but here I am, living in Brooklyn, temping for the summer, saving money before starting the life of an adjunct in the fall. It’s hot here; the subway is unbelievably crowded on my morning commute. I finished a collection of short stories that I’m starting to shop around. I was lucky to be able to go on a lot of trips over the past few years—to Poland, Berlin, cross country by train, small mid-western cities by bus. I’ve begun to think, though, that a more established daily routine would be helpful.

When I volunteered with Small Beer, I think I was testing out publishing work as a potential future, but life seems to have funneled me towards teaching. Still, it was a good time to form relationships that I’m glad to have. It was also good to learn what the slush pile is like, what goes into making a book, and to get an intimate look at a press that’s there to publish books that otherwise might go unpublished.

Sara Majka lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her short stories have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and A Public Space, among others. 


Where are they now?

Fri 19 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

I thought it would be interesting to see where some of our once-were-interns or volunteers are these days so a couple of weeks ago I emailed some of them to ask if they wouldn’t mind updating us on where they’ve been and where they are now.

In part it was curiosity since some of these people really helped out at various times: it’s no fun to mail the zine by myself, it’s much better with company! But I also thought it might be interesting to readers and students and anyone who is interested in working in publishing. The path to (or through) publishing is not simple nor singular, there are an infinite number of ways people enter, enjoy, live, and leave the field.

I’ll post the first one, from Sara Majka, on Monday, and then will post more as and when they come in. With luck we’ll do this again every seven years . . . well, maybe every now and then.


Publication Day: North American Lake Monsters

Tue 16 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Well, much to my regret I did not get to buy Nathan Ballingrud a tea or a beer at Readercon this past weekend. I saw him here and there, he looked pretty happy and I hope he is as this weekend we celebrated—a couple of days early—the publication of his first short story collection, the bleak, terrifying, heartrendingly brilliant North American Lake Monsters. We did manage to get him by the table to sign some copies of his book, so order soon if you’d like one. (We shipped out the personalized copies today.) Nathan is reading at the KGB Bar in New York City tomorrow night with his good friend, Dale Bailey—not coincidentally the co-author of one of the stories in his book, “The Crevasse.”

Early reaction to the book is strong, not surprising given the strength of the stories here. There’s an interview and a story coming up on Weird Fiction Review and reviews coming in some major newspapers and sites and we’re always curious to hear what readers think of our books. This one is excellent, but, oh so harsh!

Here’s where you can see and hear Nathan in the next month or two:

July
28 – Aug. 3, Shared Worlds, Wofford College, SC

August
3, 7 pm, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC (Bull Spec 3rd annual summer speculative fiction event)
28, 7 pm, Malaprop’s, Asheville, NC

“Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other. These stories are full of sadness and sorrow, but they’re not merely sad. Like Tom Waits, Ballingrud is an expert at teasing out every delicious shade and nuance, every fine gradation of misery and pain. It’s a heady and fantastic cocktail mixed from roughnecks and down-and-outers and flawed people who find in their ordinary and terrible world monsters, magic, and the strange. Ballingrud’s fantastic elements are never seen full on, but always out of the corner of your eye, and it makes them all the more haunting.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“A good horror story stays with you long after reading it. A great horror story doesn’t simply stay with you, it haunts you, and Nathan Ballingrud’s fiction does just that. He breathes life into rough, blue-collar characters and places them in some of the best dark fiction being written today. Every single story in this collection is an emotional gut punch.  The despair that saturates these tales is rich, and often it is not the supernatural elements in these tales that is horrific.”
—Arkham Digest

“For those willing to go down the dark road that’s laid out here, and those willing to feel complex patterns of sympathy, disgust, and horror for (often bad) people, this is an interesting collection. Uncomfortable a read as it is, it has the tinge of reality to it: a reality that often we’d rather not look at.”
—Brit Mandelo, Tor.com


North American Lake Monsters

Tue 16 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

July 16, 2013 · published simultaneously in trade cloth (9781618730596) & trade paper (9781618730602) Ebook · 9781618730619 | Available on Audible
Trade paper, Second printing: 10/14 · Third: 10/16 · Fourth: 6/19 · Fifth 2/25
International editions: Agave, Hungary. Edizioni Hypnos, Italy. MAG, Poland. Russia. Spain. Ithaki, Turkey.

Adapted into the TV series, Monsterland, on Hulu

Shirley Jackson Award winner
World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award finalist Locus Recommended Reading 
Rights sold: Audio; Poland (MAG), Hungary (Agave); Russia (AST); Spain (Fata Libelli)

Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud’s intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible. These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.

Table of Contents
You Go Where It Takes You
Wild Acre
S.S.
The Crevasse
The Monsters of Heaven [read on Tor.com]
Sunbleached
North American Lake Monsters [read at the Weird Fiction Review]
The Way Station
The Good Husband

Reviews and Reactions

“This short story collection teems with monsters — from vampires to werewolves to white supremacists — all in a contemporary Southern setting. In ‘Sunbleached,’ a vengeful teenager kidnaps a vampire. In the title story, a serial killer lake monster terrorizes a town, while a father recently released from prison struggles to reconnect with his family. Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Karen Russell, and Stephen King, these nine short stories center around working-class lives and examine themes of toxic masculinity and monstrosity.” — Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed

“My favorite collection from the last 5 years.” — Sarah Langan

“A bleak and uncompromising examination of 21st century masculinity through lenses of dark fantasy, noir, and horror. Ballingrud is an important figure in North American letters.” — Laird Barron

“Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters is an exceptional fictional debut: It deserves a place alongside collections like Peter Straub’s Magic Terror, Scott Wolven’s Controlled Burn, Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Like those works, Ballingrud’s stories delve into the damaged psyches of American men, with a distinctly twenty-first-century awareness of  the world we now inhabit, itself as damaged as the shellshocked figures that populate it. Ballingrud’s tales are ostensibly tales of terror, meticulously constructed and almost claustrophobically understated in their depiction of an all- encompassing horror that, despite its often unearthly shimmer, is human rather than supernatural in origin; Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as reimagined by Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy.” —Elizabeth Hand, F&SF

“Pain has a rich and varied language, both mundane and transcendent, with infinite variations and many subtle flavours. Pain is one of the most private experiences people face, and yet a universal experience. North American Lake Monsters uses this palette to create most of its narrative hues and textures, to sharpen and heighten the characteristics of its profoundly human, deeply flawed characters. What sets this collection of short stories apart is the way the supernatural, magical and horrific are utilized like a light source, illuminating dark places while casting even deeper shadows. Ballingrud’s writing is piercing and merciless, holding the lens steady through fear, rage and disgust, showing a weird kind of love to his subjects, in refusing to turn away, as well as an uncompromising pitilessness. Angels and vampires are placed next to lost white supremacist boys and burnt-out waitresses. All are equally, horribly ugly and real.” —Toronto Globe and Mail

“North American Lake Monsters is not a physically demanding book — slim, spare and elegant in appearance, not heavy to the heft — but here appearances are deceptive. Because it is a truly impressive book, one to which attention should be paid. The stories carry (so lightly) a weight of hinterland and incident, of emotional power and implication, seemingly to excess for their modest size. And they punch with that weight solidly behind them.” — John Howard, Wormwood

“Each one of these nine stories has the capacity to seduce and terrify you.” —Andrew Liptak, io9

“Matched to his original ideas and refreshing re­furbishments of genre set pieces, Ballingrud’s writ­ing makes North American Lake Monsters one of the best collections of short fiction for the year. —Locus

“The beauty of the work as a whole is that it offers no clear and easy answers; any generalization that might be supported by some stories is contradicted by others. It makes for an intellectually stimulating collection that pulls the reader in unexpected directions. The pieces don’t always come to a satisfactory resolution, but it is clear that this is a conscious choice. The lack of denouement, the uncertainty, is part of the fabric of the individual stories and of the collection as a whole. It is suggestive of a particular kind of world: one that is dark, weird, and just beyond our ability to impose order and understanding. These are not happy endings. They are sad and unsettling, but always beautifully written with skillful and insightful prose. It is a remarkable collection.” —Hellnotes

“Ballingrud’s language transforms known quantities into monsters again. . . . “You Go Where It Takes You,” the opening story of the collection, sets the tone and, with its shocking ending, frames the moral of North American Lake Monsters. Transformation carries a shocking cost. Two recent, disastrous transformations of the American landscape reverberate through the book: Katrina and the financial crisis. New Orleans is felt as a lost love. So is the American Dream, which seems now to have vanished for good along with Bear Stearns’s collateralized debt obligations. The transformations of Ballingrud’s characters echo these cataclysms. And yet–despite all the blame that’s flying around the landscape, and in the teeth of our contemporary hysteria about anything resembling reckless behavior–he refuses to judge them. These people do some really terrible things. They suffer. But there’s no sense of comeuppance earned, much less deserved. This is the most striking quality of this extraordinary collection: the compassion of Ballingrud’s gaze. He makes no excuses for his characters, never comes near to glorifying their bad choices, and yet never looks down on them. The reader is left with the scarcely bearable knowledge that in the end, the subjects of North American Lake Monsters are human.”—Amazing Stories

“What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition.” —John Langan, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Dark, quirky stories.”—Charlotte Observer “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other. These stories are full of sadness and sorrow, but they’re not merely sad. Like Tom Waits, Ballingrud is an expert at teasing out every delicious shade and nuance, every fine gradation of misery and pain. It’s a heady and fantastic cocktail mixed from roughnecks and down-and-outers and flawed people who find in their ordinary and terrible world monsters, magic, and the strange. Ballingrud’s fantastic elements are never seen full on, but always out of the corner of your eye, and it makes them all the more haunting.” —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“A good horror story stays with you long after reading it. A great horror story doesn’t simply stay with you, it haunts you, and Nathan Ballingrud’s fiction does just that. He breathes life into rough, blue-collar characters and places them in some of the best dark fiction being written today. Every single story in this collection is an emotional gut punch.  The despair that saturates these tales is rich, and often it is not the supernatural elements in these tales that is horrific.” —Arkham Digest

“For those willing to go down the dark road that’s laid out here, and those willing to feel complex patterns of sympathy, disgust, and horror for (often bad) people, this is an interesting collection. Uncomfortable a read as it is, it has the tinge of reality to it: a reality that often we’d rather not look at.” —Lee Mandelo, Tor.com

“It’s Raymond Carver territory, beautifully written and right on target for today: construction work, waitressing, tattoos, and white supremacists. And shattering each story is the luminous, the terrifying, the Lovecraftian otherness that reveals what it really feels like to be alive in this moment in time.  Ballingrud’s fantastical werewolves and human skins and Antarctic staircases evoke the truth of our own fears about life.” —Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse)

“One of the best horror short story collections published during the last couple of years.” —Rising Shadows

“These stories are dark and gritty nightmares, filled with a deep and humane soulfulness. You don’t get a lot of dark fiction or horror quite like that. Wonderful stuff.” — Christopher Barzak

“Ballingrud’s lyrical and intense stories play on deeply personal fears and anxieties of the social outcast, the people who struggle to maintain relationships (spousal, parental, etc). People who are us. And like Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollack, Ballingrud’s stories pack an authentic emotional punch. No sentimentality here. Ballingrud doesn’t moralize and he doesn’t offer easy answers. You probably won’t like the protagonist of “You Go Where It Takes You,” but you’ll empathize with her; you’ll understand why she’s doing what she’s doing. And, ah, that’s the horror. Ballingrud’s stories will keep you up at night, and you’ll continue to obsess over them for many days after.” — Paul Tremblay

“Highly recommended. Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection uses complex characters and startlingly beautiful language to reinvent the horror genre. In Ballingrud’s grim landscapes we encounter the supernatural as a chink in the human: sometimes terrifying, sometimes marvelous, but always captivating. His stories reward repeated reading.” — Helen Marshall

“One of the best collections I’ve read in years. Beautifully crafted fiction, stories that’ll really affect you and keep you thinking long after you’ve finished the book.” — Tim Lebbon

“The exceptional quality of the writing aside, what most impressed me about this collection was how the uncanny and the supernatural were used to augment stories that a chronicler of everyday tragedy and misfortune, like William Gay for example, often wrote about. At times I felt like I was reading a new approach to horror fiction, and that’s a very refreshing prickle to feel across my scalp.” — Adam Nevill

“Wild Acre” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

Listen: Audio discussion with between Nathan Ballingrud and Karen Lord and Karen Burnham about the story “The Good Husband.”

Susan Stinson and Bob Flaherty (“My god, Susan! What you have you done to me!”) talk about North American Lake Monsters on WHMP.

Interviews

Red Room interview by Asha Vose
Read an interview. the Laurel of Asheville Shirley Jackson Awards blog BooklifeNow

Early Reviews

Tor.com on “Sunbleached.” Colleen Mondor on “North American Lake Monsters.” Lucius Shepard writing an appreciation of “You Go Where It Takes You.” Two videos in which Nathan participated, promoting Teeth (Ellen Datlow, ed.), which featured “Sunbleached.” “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.”—Jeff VanderMeer

“Nathan Ballingrud’s ‘The Way Station’ is another story of the sort I’ve come to expect from him: emotionally intense, riveting, and deeply upsetting in many ways. It deals with loss, with the aftereffects of Katrina on a homeless alcoholic who’s haunted by the city itself before the flood, and in doing so it’s wrenching. . . . It’s an excellent story that paints a riveting portrait of a man, his city, and his loss.”—Tor.com on The Naked City

“But the two most remarkable stories in Naked City are by relatively new authors: ‘The Projected Girl’ (Haifa) by Lavie Tidhar and ‘The Way Station’ (New Orleans and St. Petersburg, Florida) by Nathan Ballingrud are both heartbreakers.”—John Clute on Strange Horizons

About the Author

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts in 1970 but has spent most of his life in the South. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His stories have appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies, and he has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. His second collection, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell includes the novella “The Visible Filth” which was filmed by Babak Anvari as Wounds. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.


Bookslinger: Delauney the Broker

Fri 12 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is French legend Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s “Delauney the Broker” (translated by Edward Gauvin) from the collection A Life on Paper.

Previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger:

Ray Vukcevich, “Whisper”

Maureen F. McHugh, “The Naturalist”

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Pelican Bar”

Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”

Benjamin Rosenbaum, “Start the Clock”

Maureen F. McHugh, “Ancestor Money”

Download the app in the iTunes store.

And watch a video on it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySL1bvyuNUE


Readercon: more signed books

Thu 11 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

This weekend we are off to Readercon and the program tells me I am on one panel (below) and Kelly will be interviewing guest of honor Maureen F. McHugh. We will also have a couple of tables in the bookshop—along with many friends from far away, yay!

I was going to paste in all the panels various Small Beer authors or connected peeps will be on but it got unwieldy. Program!

This also means you can order signed or personalized books by:

Nathan Ballingrud (new book!), Greer Gilman (yes, that new chapbook!), Elizabeth Hand, Maureen F. McHugh (we will have copies of the limited edition of Mothers & Other Monsters at a rather excellent price), John Crowley, Ted Chiang, John Kessel, Vincent McCaffrey, Howard Waldrop, Kelly Link, and maybe more? Just leave a note in the comments (or we will just suppose that’s what you want anyway).

Saturday

9:00 AM    VT    Reading: Jedediah Berry. Jedediah Berry. Jedediah Berry reads “The Family Arcana,” a story in cards.

9:00 AM    NH    Reading: Elizabeth Hand. Elizabeth Hand. Elizabeth Hand reads Flash Burn, the in-progress third Cass Neary novel.

10:00 AM    VT    Reading: Michael J. DeLuca. Michael J. DeLuca. Michael J. DeLuca reads “Remorse and the Pariah,” a mini-epic poem published in Abyss & Apex.

12:00 PM    RI    The Works of Maureen F. McHugh. Nathan Ballingrud, Dennis Danvers, Gavin J. Grant, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Charles Oberndorf (moderator). As Jo Walton said in a review ofMission Child, Maureen F. McHugh’s work explores “chewy ideas rather than shiny ones.” This is true of her novels, such as the Tiptree Award–winning China Mountain Zhang; her intense short stories, each of which contains an astonishing amount of narrative and conceptual complexity; and her alternate reality games, including the groundbreaking “I Love Bees.” McHugh’s work introduces the reader to communities large and small (families, subcultures, towns, nations, planets) and describes them with compassion, affectionate humor, and honesty. This panel will endeavor to give her rich, nuanced writing the close reading it deserves.

1:00 PM    NH    Reading: John Crowley. John Crowley. John Crowley reads unpublished work.

1:00 PM    CL    Kaffeeklatsch. Ken Liu, Maureen F. McHugh.

5:00 PM    F    Maureen F. McHugh Interviewed by Kelly Link. Kelly Link, Maureen F. McHugh

10:00 PM    F    Reading: Howard Waldrop. Howard Waldrop. Howard Waldrop reads from a work to be determined.

Sunday

10:00 AM    NH    Reading: John Kessel. John Kessel. John Kessel reads from the novel-in-progressSunlight or Rock.

12:00 PM    VT    Reading: Nathan Ballingrud. Nathan Ballingrud. Nathan Ballingrud reads fromNorth American Lake Monsters: Stories, published by Small Beer Press, which will debut at Readercon.


An American Beer Nerd in Edinburgh

Wed 10 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Michael

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Edinburgh from Holyrood Park

Part 1: Culture Shock

I spent a week in lovely, misty, craggy, beery Edinburgh, Scotland, walking everywhere and drinking everything. This was my first time in the UK as a full-fledged beer nerd, engaging immersively with the beer culture that is perhaps dearest to my heart. I’d visited London and Dublin years before; I’d researched as extensively as might be considered reasonable from the other side of the ocean. So I wasn’t completely oblivious. Indeed, I thought myself quite well-prepared. I thought I knew what to expect.

Not so.

Read more


Holly Black’s book is in the 2nd Humble Ebook Bundle

Wed 10 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

The 2nd Humble Ebook Bundle now includes Holly Black’s dark and delicious short story collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories.  A couple of the extras were included with the 1st bundle in case you missed them but Holly’s collection and Machine of Death are new. Humble Bundle says:

“If you have already purchased the bundle, these refreshing reads should automatically show up on your download page. New customers can access them by paying more than the current average on the site. All four books are available DRM-free in PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats — perfect for your computer, eBook readers, and tons of mobile devices!”

Also, a bunch of the Humble Bundle authors will be taking part in a group Reddit AMA on Thursday, July 11 at 12:30 EST.

You choose how your purchase is divided: between the authors, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Child’s Play Charity, or the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and the Humble Bundle peeps themselves.

We say: go forth and acquire 10 new DRM-free ebooks including books by Cory Doctorow, Will Wheaton, Cherie Priest, Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Beagle, and, yes, more!


Signed copies of North American Lake Monsters

Fri 5 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Nathan Ballingrud will be at Readercon next weekend in Burlington, Mass. (Additional readings are also scheduled, see below.)

If you’d like a signed or personalized copy of North American Lake Monsters (publication date is July 16th), we’ll take orders until this Thursday, July 11th, and then mail copies out the next week.

July
11 – 14, Readercon, Boston, MA
17, 7 pm, KGB Bar, NYC
28 – Aug. 3, Shared Worlds, Wofford College, SC

August
3, 7 pm, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC (Bull Spec 3rd annual summer speculative fiction event)
28, 7 pm, Malaprop’s, Asheville, NC

 


Cory on North American Lake Monsters

Fri 5 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Cory Doctorow wrote about Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection today on BoingBoing:

Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other. These stories are full of sadness and sorrow, but they’re not merely sad. Like Tom Waits, Ballingrud is an expert at teasing out every delicious shade and nuance, every fine gradation of misery and pain. It’s a heady and fantastic cocktail mixed from roughnecks and down-and-outers and flawed people who find in their ordinary and terrible world monsters, magic, and the strange. Ballingrud’s fantastic elements are never seen full on, but always out of the corner of your eye, and it makes them all the more haunting.

This slim volume traces the fine veins of unhappiness in a way that no other writer of science fiction or fantasy I know of can match. If you’ve ever enjoyed a long cry, or come out of a deep funk to discover the joy of the contrast of the light and the sun, then you know why these stories are so powerful and moving.


Quelle Horreur

Wed 3 Jul 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

You know, with Errantry and Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters, we are definitely getting our share of the darker books out there. Both authors are nominees for this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards which will be presented in a week or so at Readercon, where you can meet both authors! Should be a busy con, and a laugh.

Nathan’s book, being a fab piece of work, is about to see some nice reviews and mentions, more on those later. In the meantime it’s great to see a couple of nice reviews of Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry: Strange Stories popping up recently. Nic Clarke at Strange Horizons wrote

“. . . 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.”

and Helen McCrory on Pank said

“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.”

which both capture something of the disturbing nature of Liz’s stories. Shiver me timbers!


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