Limiteds limitations reached

Thu 28 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Just marked the limited editions of Hal Duncan’s An A-Z of the Fantastic City and Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners as out of print. Yay! This might have something to do with updating the LCRW subscription page.

There are a few unsigned, unnumbered hardcovers of the former for sale and it is still available in the saddle stitched chapbook edition and ebook. The interior illustrations by Eric Schaller are so great and fit the book so well that we only ever made a pdf ebook — perfect for your big phone, water proof (really?) tablet, computational device — see for example the frontispiece below.

frontispiece


Bookslinger: Up the Fire Road

Fri 22 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is Eileen Gunn’s story “Up the Fire Road” from her collection Questionable Practices.

Previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger:

Howard Waldrop’s Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning story  “The Ugly Chickens.”

Howard Waldrop’s “A Dozen Tough Jobs.”

Bernardo Fernandez’s “Lions” (translated by co-editor Chris N. Brown) from Three Messages and a Warning.

John Kessel, “Pride and Prometheus”

Kij Johnson’s “At the Mouth of the River of Bees”

Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s “Delauney the Broker” (translated by Edward Gauvin)

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


Sofia Samatar: Overnight Success

Wed 20 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

A Stranger in Olondria coverOn Sunday night in London, California writer Sofia Samatar was presented (in absentia) with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention. Samatar received the award for her debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013), as well as short stories published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, We See a Different Future, and other magazines and books.

Samatar began writing A Stranger in Olondria in 1998 in Yambio, South Sudan. She was teaching high school English and there was a 6 p.m. curfew and no internet or television. In between cards, reading, and listening to the BBC, Samatar hand wrote the first draft of her novel. She had no idea how long it was until she moved to Egypt in 2001 and got her first computer. After typing it up, she found it was well over 200,000 words — twice as long as the final version.

In 2011, thirteen years after she started Olondria, she sold the book to Small Beer Press and who published it in 2013. Since then the book has received the Crawford Award, been nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Nebula, Locus awards, and rights have been sold in Poland and France with more expected to follow.

Why this novel of a pepper merchant’s son, thirteen years in the making, struck such a chord with readers might be explained by the process as well as the circumstances. Far from home with few resources, Samatar wrote deep background history for her world, most of which did not make it into the novel yet the reader is comforted by the knowledge that the writer’s familiarity with the story is more than just what is shown on the page. Samatar, who is now an Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing at California State University, Channel Islands, explored the joys and pains of learning to read, of travel, and the idea of whether only victors are ever able to tell their stories.

Samatar is working on more short stories and her second novel, The Winged Histories. She does not expect it to take thirteen more years.


Help a neighbor out?

Wed 6 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

The other night there was a fire in the Paragon Arts building in Easthampton, the refurbed warehouse where we have our office and a storage unit for overstock. We got off pretty lightly: sooty water came under the door and messed up a couple of rugs (or: they soaked it up and stopped it spreading further) and some boxes of books got wet. We’re still waiting for our insurance person to call us back about that.

The fire was on Monday night but I found out about it when I got the paper early on Tuesday morning. So I went on with the usual routine: feed kid and take her to summer camp, then hightailed it over here to catch up.

The fire was across the hall from our office. Marlene Rye, the artist whose studio the fire started in, lost a lot of work plus she had to cancel the three week summer arts camp for kids that she teaches. She has a fundraiser here. On the other side of the wall is Show Circus Studio. Their big mats soaked up a lot of water so had to be dried. They put out a call for help and many, many volunteers answered from all over the valley: that was incredible to see. Their summer camp was cancelled yesterday but, impressively, is back on today. The fire was on the third floor so studios (and the mailboxes!) on the second and first floors were also damaged — see Maggie Nowinski’s post here. At some point there may be a fundraiser/art party of some sort and we’ll spread the word if it happens.

We’re very grateful that the sprinklers went off, that they only went off in the studio with the fire, that the firefighters came so quickly, and that the cleaning crew were here yesterday who said that this recommended janitorial company is perfect for the job. I’m still waiting on the insurance person and hoping that the cleaning crew are gong to clean our overstock room (in which the lights no longer work, ooh, spooky) but overall we’re knocking on wood, trying to help neighbors, very glad to still be here surrounded by too many books and tchotchkes, and trying to continue as if it were a normal Wednesday. We also plan to move to new place so we are looking for good long haul trucking insurance services.

Here’s today’s story in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (damn the paywall!), here’s a slideshow from MassLive, and here’s the fundraiser again.

ETA: here is the fundraiser for the artists on the first and second floors whose work was destroyed by the water pouring down from above.

ETA2: you can see the very small amount of damage we sustained in these photos. In terms of books to toss: about 400. Time? Days!


LCRW 30 Table of Contents

Mon 4 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 30Moving slightly slower than your average contemporary glacier — although with the same glorious grace! [let’s not talk moraine fields] — the next issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is slowly making its way from the imaginations of these writers to the pages of a paper zine. Sure, electronic editions will be zapped out, too. And in November or December, there will be another one!

As per usual—wait! Nothing is as usual! It’s LCRW! It’s a grab bag of weird! It’s sci fi! Fantasy! True tales of terror! Fish who pilot driverless cars shucking their wearable computers which have been providing telemetry to the anthills of our back yard! Poemtry! (There are a lot fewer exclamation marks in the zine than there are here.)

Pre-order your copy of this tremendous zine here or get wild and optimistic and subscribe here.

Fiction

Sarah Kokernot – Odd Variations on the Species
Erica L. Satifka – The Silent Ones
Anne Lacy – I Know You Hate It Here
Robert Stutts – With His Head in His Hand
Sarah Micklem – The Purveyor of Homunculi
Damien Ober – The Endless Sink

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling – Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof at the Potluck
About the Authors

Poetry

Daniel Meyer – A Question for the Devil
Anne Sheldon – Island Folklore
Amanda Robinson – Five Poems:
Speculative Fiction
The Vampire and the Mermaid Converse
The Vampire Drives a Hard Bargain
The Vampire Listens to Woody Guthrie
Undead Temporality


Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 30

Mon 4 Aug 2014 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

8.5 x 7 · 60pp · September 2014 · Issue 30 · Ebook (ISBN 9781618730824) available from Weightless.

With the thirtieth issue, LCRW—(maybe? probably? perhaps, for now?) the only zine named after Winston Churchill’s mother—changes everything. We turn blue into tree. We make electricity solid. We publish stories that shake the world so hard it takes a left at Albuquerque and is never seen again. Fiction! Poetry! Dancing in the aisles. Chocolate is distributed in the streets. The world sighs, is remade.

Note: nothing in the paragraph above has anything to do with any of the half dozen stories and seven poems below.

Reviews

“Here are six short stories in this little magazine on the literary end of the genre, complete with nameless narrators, and spilling over the edges.”
— Locus

“Another example great issue of the unique Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.”
— SF Revu

Fiction

Sarah Kokernot – Odd Variations on the Species
Erica L. Satifka – The Silent Ones
Anne Lacy – I Know You Hate It Here
Robert Stutts – With His Head in His Hand
Sarah Micklem – The Purveyor of Homunculi
Damien Ober – The Endless Sink

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling – Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof at the Potluck
About the Authors

Poetry

Daniel Meyer – A Question for the Devil
Anne Sheldon – Island Folklore
Amanda Robinson – Five Poems:
Speculative Fiction
The Vampire and the Mermaid Converse
The Vampire Drives a Hard Bargain
The Vampire Listens to Woody Guthrie
Undead Temporality

Made by: Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.
Readers: Julie Day, Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Emily Cambias, Dustin Buchinski, Geoffrey Noble, and David Mitchell.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 30, September 2014. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618730824.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. twitteringwitlessness.com/smallbeerpress · Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 19 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 © 2014 the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. Huge thanks to Melanie Conroy-Goldman and all the lovely people we met at the Hobart & William Smith TRIAS Residency. And what lovely wines they have in the Finger Lakes! No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

About these Authors

Though she has never reigned supreme at any potluck when Justin was also present, Nicole Kimberling has still managed to feed hundreds of people—even some who tried very hard to avoid ingesting foodstuff. She is the editor of Blind Eye Books.

Sarah Kokernot was born and raised in Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, decomP, Front Porch, and West Branch. She currently lives in Chicago where she works at 826CHI, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center.

Anne Lacy would like to thank the UCross Foundation for giving her a nice place to finish this piece. Some of her nonfiction can be found in Issue 78 of Crazyhorse and on the website of American University, where she received an MFA. She is at work on a novel-length interpretation of Snow White set in the Republic of Texas.

Daniel Meyer is a children’s librarian and the president of the Storytelling Center of New York. He draws monsters for fun.

Sarah Micklem is the author of two novels about a camp follower, Firethorn and Wildfire (Scribner, 2004 and 2009). “The Purveyor of Homunculi” is from a series of tales set on the imaginary Isle of Abigomas. They were inspired by a small book called Realms of Fantasy: Folk Tales from Gozo by George Camilleri (Gozo Press, 1981). Many of Gozo’s real folk tales had unsatisfactory plots, which Micklem took as permission to write anti-climactic stories too.

Damien Ober is the author of the science-fiction novel Dr. Benajmin Franklin’s Dream America (Equus Press). His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, NOON, Confrontation, B O D Y Literature, The Baltimore City Paper, VLAK and port.man.teau. He received the 2002 Sherwood Anderson Award, was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize and had a screenplay chosen for the 2013 Black List. Currently he writes for the Syfy Channel show Dominion.

Amanda Robinson lives in Western Massachusetts, where she is a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her first chapbook, Dario Argento Is Not My Boyfriend, won the 2014 jubilat MAKES A CHAPBOOK competition. She edits Industrial Lunch magazine.

Erica L. Satifka’s short fiction has previously appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer, among others. She lives somewhere in the United States with her husband Rob and three needy cats. Find her online at ericasatifka.com.

Anne Sheldon is a school librarian and storyteller whose work has appeared in The Dark Horse, The Lyric, Talebones, and other magazines. Aqueduct Press published her most recent collection, The Bone Spindle.

Robert E. Stutts works at a small liberal arts college in South Carolina, where he teaches courses in fairy tales, creative writing, and young adult literature. His work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Scheherezade’s Bequest, among others. His website is robertestutts.com.