Monstrous Affections

Tue 9 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

An Anthology of Beastly Tales

9780763664732 · Published by Candlewick Press in a beautiful trade cloth edition, audio, and ebook.

Predatory kraken that sing with — and for — their kin; band members and betrayed friends who happen to be demonic; harpies as likely to attract as repel. Welcome to a world where humans live side by side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you’ll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these and a few monsters that defy categorization, some of today’s top young-adult authors explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and avenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders.

World Fantasy Award winner.

Cover art by Yuko Shimizu.

More.

Reviews

Luminous… There are wonderful stories… M. T. Anderson’s “Quick Hill” is a tour de force of contemporary short fiction. It does, as well as anything I’ve read recently, what scary stories are supposed to do: It says what we feel, but cannot say.
—New York Times Book Review

From vampires to ghosts and from strange creatures made of mercury to half-harpies, these beasts will broaden readers’ perspectives. Teens will never think about monsters in the same way again. Long after the last page is turned, these tales will linger in readers’ brains, in their closets, under their beds, and in the shadows.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Link and Grant present an engrossing, morally complex anthology of 15 stories centered on the seemingly antagonistic concepts of monsters and love. … All of the entries are strong, and many are splendid.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The authors of these tales brilliantly intertwine morally charged issues with elements of horror writing that engage the reader. … This is a must-read for anyone who enjoys horror fiction.
—Library Media Connection

A deliciously gory collection of fifteen original stories… While the theme is certainly familiar, the diversity of interpretations of monsterhood is an asset, and the book sets a fresh and amusing note with the opening pop quiz that assesses readers’ views of monsters. … Fans will be happy to find a well-edited, sharp collection of new stories about their favorite topic that covers both the creepy and alluring elements of monsters.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Short stories with otherworldly creatures may be a dime a dozen, but rarely do they offer such nuanced scope. Link and Grant … know their way around excellent short fiction, and their editorial skills are on display here. From the light(ish) and delightful to the subversively unromantic, from humor to horror, each entry both tells a good story and says something about monstrousness. … An anthology of riches, even if they aren’t always fair of form.
—Kirkus Reviews

Link and Grant clearly spent a lot of time building this collection, which includes a graphic entry, and consequently none of the stories disappoint. Authors such as Cassandra Clare and Patrick Ness—along with the monster dripping blood on the cover—will draw in readers eager for creepy, atmospheric tales.
—Booklist

A delightful (often frightful) anthology of short fantasy fiction. … The strong writing brims with misdirection, humor, horrors and twisty endings. … This substantial volume will provide older teens–and adults–with hours of thoroughly enjoyable reading. A monstrously entertaining anthology.
—Shelf Awareness

Provocative. One would expect no less from veteran anthology editors Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. … Beautiful language.
—Boston Globe

For those who like a mix of fantasy and science fiction, “Monstrous Affections” is a stunning collection of original tales whose title explains it all. Who cares if it’s nominally a young adult book — it’s the best collection of monster stories of the year, with some unusual ideas as to what really makes a monster.
—Chicago Tribune

Table of Contents

Introduction
Paolo Bacigalupi, “Moriabe’s Children”*
Cassandra Clare, “Old Souls”
Holly Black, “Ten Rules For Being An Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)”**
M. T. Anderson, “Quick Hill”
Nathan Ballingrud, “The Diabolist”
Patrick Ness, “This Whole Demoning Thing”
Sarah Rees Brennan, “Wings in the Morning”
Nalo Hopkinson, “Left Foot, Right”
G. Carl Purcell, “The Mercurials”
Dylan Horrocks, “Kitty Capulet and the Invention of Underwater Photography”
Nik Houser, “Son of Abyss”
Kathleen Jennings, “A Small Wild Magic”
Kelly Link, “The New Boyfriend”
Joshua Lewis, “The Woods Hide in Plain Sight”
Alice Sola Kim, “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying”***

* Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine, edited by Jonathan Strahan
** Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine, edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad
*** Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine, edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015,edited by Paula Guran

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Wildcrafted Cider

Fri 5 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Literary Beer| Posted by: Michael

(Or, How to Drink Well After the End)

Herein will I tell how I made really delicious alcoholic cider using only time, sweat, $2 worth of yeast, $18 worth of rented local cider mill, and a small mountain of fruit I wild-harvested entirely within biking distance of my house in Southeastern Michigan in the fall of 2013.

The result is in the running for the most delicious fermented beverage I’ve ever made. It has by far the lowest carbon footprint of any fermented beverage I’ve ever made. And it has the lowest cost of any fermented beverage I’ve ever made or tasted ($2 a gallon). It was also fun. And it filled me with profound satisfaction akin to nothing so much as seeing a piece of fiction I wrote appear in print.

Read more

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Get a couch for two bucks

Thu 4 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Parzybok, sale| Posted by: Gavin

No offers of deer, dear, please. No kids on bikes riding threateningly around our town. Just Benjamin Parzybok’s debut novel Couch $1.99 on both bn.com and Weightless today — and, Couch now has a sneak peek of Ben’s forthcoming droughty Portland novel Sherwood Nation.

BTW, if you’re on the west coast you can go see Ben at one of these readings:

Sept. 16, 7:30 PM Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland, OR
Oct. 15, 7 PM Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122

I think both bookstores have pretty comfy chairs. You probably don’t need to bring your own couch . . .

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People read books

Tue 2 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Parzybok| Posted by: Gavin

We have a lot of things coming up for Benjamin Parzybok’s forthcoming novel Sherwood Nation — although just to be absolutely clear: we have nothing to do with any droughts anywhere! Just in time for pub date (next week!) Booklist drops a great review:

“Parzybok is riffing on the Robin Hood story, to be sure, but he also layers on some astute social and political commentary, and he’s built a fully functioning and believable future world. Give this one to fans of Adam Sternbergh’s Shovel Ready (2014).”

We’ll also have fun news tomorrow about how you can pick up a very affordable copy of Couch — both in ebook and print! Until then, conserve that water!

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Limiteds limitations reached

Thu 28 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Hal Duncan, Kelly Link| 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.

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Bookslinger: Up the Fire Road

Fri 22 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bookslinger, Eileen Gunn| 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

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Sofia Samatar: Overnight Success

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

On 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.

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Help a neighbor out?

Wed 6 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., fire, office, Small Beer Press| 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!

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LCRW 30 Table of Contents

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

Moving 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

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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

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

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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.

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LCRW subscriptions rising, rising

Mon 28 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW, subscriptions| Posted by: Gavin

Some of the fancier LCRW subscription options will be going up in price next month — wait, is that really later this week? Wow. Well, it will be before mid-August.

So get your sub in before the chocolate, mug, Bentley (hey, if you want a Bentley with every issue we are happy to oblige) etc. levels catch up with the rising postage prices. As always, we recommend international readers stick with the just the zine option as mailing the chocolate bars abroad gets silly expensive really fast.

I am loathe to put the forthcoming issue #30 table of contents here as I am sure, sure, that I am going to squeeze another something in there somehow. So, yes, should be out next month!

 

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A Summer of Peter Dickinson

Thu 17 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

We’re celebrating the release of our latest Peter Dickinson reprint, A Summer in the Twenties, this week in a couple of ways:

First, we’ve just posted the first three chapters for your reading enjoyment. That should take care of what to read at lunchtime while ignoring twitter. If instant gratification is your thing, you can pick up the DRM-free ebook (epub/mobi/pdf) at Weightless right now.

While you’re on Weightless thinking about all those lovely books, how about adding another Peter Dickinson title to your library? Today only his strange and fascinating novel The Poison Oracle is the Weightless Weekly One Book sale title and is just $1.99. It’s a very different book from A Summer in the Twenties, which is one of the things Kelly and I love about Peter Dickinson.

As Nancy Pearl recently said on NPR about our first Dickinson mystery reprint, Death of a Unicorn:

“Death of a Unicorn has nothing to do with unicorns or fantasies. … This is a mystery by Peter Dickinson. (Small Beer Press, a small publishing company in Massachusetts, is reprinting … Peter Dickinson’s books, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift to mystery readers who are yearning for that kind of old-fashioned British mystery where it doesn’t move quickly, you get engrossed in the time period.) …

“The thing about Peter Dickinson is that his books, one from the other, are totally different. … And this is a novel, a mystery, where the mystery doesn’t really happen. The event that is mysterious, the death — if you will — doesn’t really happen until probably two-thirds of the way through the book. And it’s written from the point of view of a young upper-class … woman in England and her relationship with the [financier] of a magazine very much like the New Yorker. …

“I think that this is one of those books that I hope will … introduce people to Peter Dickinson and then they’ll go and pick up all the rest of his books. … But I have to stress these are not for people who want fast-moving thrillers. These are not mysteries in the style of American private-eye stories. These are really character studies and studies of society at a particular place in a particular time.”

That last paragraph really applies to A Summer in the Twenties. It’s definitely not a traditional murder mystery, but it has something of the thriller to it. I’ve been re-reading some Dorothy Sayers recently (in part because I know I haven’t read them all so I have to go back and re-read everything just in case, see?) and it isn’t too hard to imagine Lord Peter Wimsey passing through this novel — although I’ll leave that to better fanfic writers than me! The novel is really about choices and consequences and long after you’ve put it down you’ll be thinking about which choices led where and who might be happy. Might!

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An excerpt from A Summer in the Twenties

Thu 17 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Novel Excerpts| Posted by: Gavin

Read the first three chapters from A Summer in the Twenties by Peter Dickinson:

1
Hendaye, 6th April, 1926

‘EVERYTHING’S CHANGING so fast,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it stunning to wake up every morning and feel that the whole world’s brand-new again, a present waiting for you to unwrap it?’
For emphasis she stabbed her foot-long cigarette holder towards the Pyrennees, to declare them part of the present, with the snow-glitter along the peaks a little tinsel to add glamour to the gift.
‘It’s all yours,’ he said, generously including in his gesture not only the mountains but the nearer landscape, and the cubist spillage of roofs down the slope below the terrace and the two crones in black creaking up a cobbled alley, and nearer still the elderly three-piece band nobly attempting a Charleston while their souls still pined for the Vienna Woods, and even the braying group of young French rich, already into their third cocktail at half past three. Read more

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A Summer in the Twenties

Tue 15 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

paper · $16 · 9781618730848 | ebook · 9781618730855

A young man has to choose who to love, who to leave in the 1926 General Strike in Britain.

“Small Beer Press, a small publishing company in Massachusetts, is reprinting … Peter Dickinson’s books, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift to mystery readers who are yearning for that kind of old-fashioned British mystery where it doesn’t move quickly, you get engrossed in the time period.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR

Read an excerpt.

In 1926 the British government was worried about revolution. Two million people are about to go on strike and class warfare is about to erupt. Tom Hankey is caught between his love for Judy, a bright young thing, and Kate, a fireball agitator. Brought home from Oxford by his father, Tom volunteers to drive a train in the General Strike. When the train is ambushed, Tom is thrust into the darkest and most threatening regions of English politics. Gritty yet sparkling and full of unexpected turnarounds, A Summer in the Twenties resonates and captivates.

“In A Summer in the Twenties, Mr. Dickinson, who is best known in the United States for his mystery thrillers and in England for his award-winning children’s books, tells a story of confrontation between the rich rich and the poor worker, set against the background of 1926, the year of the General Strike. The very rich are facing the rise of a force they can barely understand. Politics, here, is everything. . . . A Summer in the Twenties shows the body politic balanced at a precarious moment of tension.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Dickinson shows us the daily lives of both the upper crust, with their carpeted manor houses and petty intrigues, as well as the working poor, who live in noisy, crowded conditions. Intergenerational strife abounds, as children of all classes disappoint their elders by not becoming what they were brought up to be; the exchanges are witty yet full of meaning, illuminating the shift of power away from the old class system toward something new and unproven. Dickinson conveys a lot of excellent historical material in a thoroughly engaging narrative with enough suspense to keep readers entertained on multiple levels.”
— Historical Novel Review

“Imagine if Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse had been called in to doctor a “Downton Abbey” script . . . . There’s sharp dialogue, wonderfully grotesque characters, a love story or three. (Judy or Kate? What shall our hero do?) The wit is droll and British.”—Wilmington StarNews

“A lovely smooth read.”—The Washington Post

“A witty, affectionately nostalgic masterpiece.”—The Columbus Dispatch

“As absorbingly readable, as well-written as anything Peter Dickinson has written.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“Dickinson (author of engagingly offbeat thrillers and children’s books) does splendidly here with atmosphere, with the eccentric supporting characters, with the occasionally bizarre comic touches.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the jacket:

Peter Dickinson . . .

“has an unusual kind of mind.” — New York Times Book Review
“is the best thing that has happened to serious, sophisticated, witty 
crime fiction since Michael Innes.” — Sunday Times
“defies categorisation and summary.” — Morning Star
“is a delight to read.” — Times Literary Supplement
“goes in a bit for the high fantastical.” — Evening Standard
“is the best crime writer we have, always absorbingly original.” — Marghanita Laski
“is now the best writer of crime-stories working in this country.” — Birmingham Post

“What makes reading Dickinson a pleasure is that the characters are well drawn and above all human. They make mistakes, have prejudices on both sides of the question, and manage to change, grow, and rise to the occasion as needed. . . . He is also the brightest of writers, capable of real humor and rare intelligence. . . . As a portrait of a unique time and a picture of good people trying to resolve the differences that divide them, coming together for a common good, and facing the very real class divisions that separate them A Summer in the Twenties is a solid smart read.”—Mystery File

Praise for Peter Dickinson’s mysteries:

“The works of British Mystery Writer Peter Dickinson are like caviar-an acquired taste that can easily lead to addiction. Dickinson . . . does not make much of the process of detection, nor does he specialize in suspense. Instead, he neatly packs his books with such old-fashioned virtues as mood, character, and research.”—Time

“Dickinson (author of engagingly offbeat thrillers and children’s books) does splendidly here with atmosphere, with the eccentric supporting characters, with the occasionally bizarre comic touches.”—Kirkus Reviews

Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger. He 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, The Dancing Bear, and Emma Tupper’s Diary. His crime novels include Death of a Unicorn, The Poison Oracle, and many more. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.

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Drink Local! A Detcon1 Beer Guide

Mon 14 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Literary Beer| Posted by: Michael

Detcon1, this year’s NASFIC convention in Detroit, happens next weekend, July 17 – 20, 2014. Along with fellow Fermented Adventurer Scott H. Andrews, I’m on a panel about beer in fiction that Saturday afternoon, whereat, or perhaps immediately thereafter, I may or may not happen to have a very few bottles of homebrew available for sampling. I’ve also been scheduled to take part in a group reading of Michigan writers–the implication being, I suppose, that I speak for the region. Which–though Detroit does feature briefly in my story in this month’s Ideomancer–I am really not trying to do in my fiction; I’ve only lived here four years, after all.

I am, however, rather more prepared to take up that banner for Michigan beer. I have traveled, I have tasted, I have brewed. So, for those of you making the trip maybe for the first time, I thought I might be of help and interest with a brief beer guide to Detroit.

Read more

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Bookslinger: The Ugly Chickens

Fri 11 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bookslinger, Howard Waldrop| Posted by: Gavin

New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is Howard Waldrop’s Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning story “The Ugly Chickens” from our ebook edition of Old Earth Books’s Waldrop anthology Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005.

Previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger:

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

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World Fantasy Award nominations!

Thu 10 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Nathan Ballingrud, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

What great news! Congratulations to both Sofia Samatar and Nathan Ballingrud who last night received the lovely news that their books were both finalists for the World Fantasy Award. Yay! Sofia is also a finalist in the short story category for her Strange Horizons story, “Selkie Stories Are for Losers.”

It is an honor to have books nominated and we will be celebrating this weekend at Readercon, and, hey, why not, all the way to November when the awards will be given out at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. And, as always, congratulations to all the finalists!

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In which we go to Readercon!

Tue 8 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Chris Brown, Cons, Delia Sherman, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Kushner, Greer Gilman, Kelly Link, Readercon, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, are you going to Readercon this weekend? We are! Well . . . Kelly will be there Friday and then she is flying off at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday for beautiful Portland, Oregon, where she’ll be one of the fab faculty at the Tin House Writers Workshop. OK, Tin House first: it’s held at Reed College, Oregon, and Kelly is doing a seminar:

Wednesday July 16th, 3pm, Vollum Lecture Hall
Nighttime Logic: Ghost Stories, Fairy Tales, Dreams, and the Uncanny, with Kelly Link
The writer Howard Waldrop distinguishes between the kinds of stories that rely upon daytime logic and stories that use nighttime logic. What does he mean by this? We’ll examine writers, stories, and techniques that dislocate the reader and make the world strange. 

and a reading:

Thursday, July 17th, 8pm
Reading and signing with Kelly Link, Mary Ruefle, Antonya Nelson

Kelly is not on programming at Readercon. But, many, many Small Beer authors are! Some of them may be familiar, some will have travelled many miles to be there. Check out the program here to see where these fine folks will be:

All the way from Seattle: Eileen Gunn!
All the way from Austin! Chris Brown
Shirley Jackson Award nominee Greer Gilman [fingers crossed for both that and for an appearance by Exit, Pursued by a Bear]
Up from NYC: Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman
Down the coast from Maine: Elizabeth Hand
Al the way from California, Crawford Award winner Sofia Samatar

— which all means we will have signed copies to go out from next Monday onward. (Want a personalized book? Leave a note with your order!)

I (Gavin) have two things scheduled:

Friday
4:00 PM    CL    Kaffeeklatsch. Gavin Grant, Yoon Ha Lee.

Saturday
10:00 AM    G    Books That Deserve to Remain Unspoiled. Jonathan Crowe, Gavin Grant, Kate Nepveu, Graham Sleight, Gayle Surrette (moderator). In a 2013 review of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed, Stephen King stated, “While I consider the Internet-fueled concern with ‘spoilers’ rather infantile, the true secrets of well-made fiction deserve to be kept.” How does spoiler-acquired knowledge change our reading of fiction? Are some books more “deserving” of going unspoiled than others? If so, what criteria do we apply to determine those works?

If you have big opinions about spoilers, tell me! Wait, don’t spoil the panel! Wait! Do!

We will have two tables in the book room, where, besides our own best-in-the-world-books we will also help DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION, yay! We will have copies of the limited print edition of one of the most interesting (and huge, it is $30, has color illustrations, plus an additional story) anthologies of recent days: Women Destroy Science Fiction edited by Christie Yant and with a pretty incredible Table of Contents.

Come by and say hi!

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Bookslinger: A Dozen Tough Jobs

Tue 1 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bookslinger, Howard Waldrop| Posted by: Gavin

New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is Howard Waldrop’s “A Dozen Tough Jobs” from our ebook edition of Old Earth Books’s Waldrop anthology Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003.

If you look at the previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger, it’s sort of like we are slowly building a virtual anthology:

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

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Summer in the Twenties Giveaway!

Tue 24 Jun 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Free books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, did you see the lovely Nancy Pearl note on NPR  that we are “reprinting … Peter Dickinson’s books, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift to mystery readers”! If you’d like to check out our latest reprint — coming next month — our distro, Consortium, has arranged for another giveaway on Goodreads. This time we have 10 copies of Peter’s A Summer in the Twenties. The glorious thing about Peter’s books is that they’re all different from one another:

Book Giveaway For A Summer in the Twenties

A Summer in the Twenties
by Peter Dickinson
Release date: July 15, 2014

Wildcat or bright young thing?
A young man has to choose who to love, who to leave in the 1926 General Strike in Britain.

“A Summer in the Twenties shows the body politic balanced at a precarious moment of tension.”
—New York Times Book Review

Enter to win

Giveaway dates: Jun 23 – Jul 07, 2014
10 copies available, 150+ people requesting
Countries available: US and CA

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Announcing an Exit . . . Pursued by a Bear!

Thu 12 Jun 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bears, Ben Jonson, chapbooks, Greer Gilman| Posted by: Gavin

We have very good news for Ben Jonson fans, and even better for Greer Gilman’s! Greer is back with a new novella, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, featuring none other than Jonson and Henry Stuart, heir to the throne and, sadly, tone dead in his dealings with the Unseen World.

Once again Kathleen Jennings — who won a Ditmar Award for her art this past weekend! — has provided the art, but this time for the front and the back cover. Exit will be available in print and ebook editions this September, but don’t be too surprised if we have earrrrly copies at Readercon in July since Greer will be there and can do a reading.

 

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And now, congrats to the British Fantasy Award nominees!

Mon 9 Jun 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Nathan Ballingrud, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

Congratulations to all the nominees for the British Fantasy Awards, especially to our two debut authors: Nathan Ballingrud, whose collection North American Lake Monsters is a nominee in the collection category and Sofia Samatar whose A Stranger in Olondria is a nominee in the novel/Robert Holdstock Award category.

The awards will be “announced at an awards ceremony at FantasyCon 2014 in York on 6 or 7 September 2014, depending on the convention’s scheduling.”

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Congrats to the Shirley Jackson Award nominees!

Sun 11 May 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Greer Gilman, Nathan Ballingrud, Shirley Jackson Awards| Posted by: Gavin

Congratulations to all the finalists for the Shirley Jackson Awards, especially to Nathan Ballingrud whose debut collection, North American Lake Monsters, is a nominee in the single author collection category, and to Greer Gilman whose Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, is a nominee in the novelette category.

The awards will be presented on Sunday, July 13, 2014, at Readercon 25, in Burlington (outside Boston), Massachusetts. Kelly was one of the jurors this year, so, as the site says: “Where a conflict of interest arises for a juror, the juror recuses himself/herself from voting for the particular work.”

Come say hello if you’re at Readercon! We will have stacks of these books — and more goodies, of course. And by the end of the week we should have another piece of very exciting news for fans of Greer Gilman!

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

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Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003

Tue 29 Apr 2014 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

April 2014 · ebook · $9.95 · 9781618730800

Available in trade cloth and trade paper from Old Earth Books.

Seven novellas that cover ground the way that only Waldrop can featuring Wagner, Fats Waller, Picasso, Thomas Wolfe, and more.

In 2007, Old Earth Books, an independent press located in Baltimore, Maryland, brought out Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader, a comprehensive volume that features selected short fiction from 1980-2005 by the Nebula Award-winning and often anthologized writer. This is a book that belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in science-fictional and fantastic short fiction at its best. Old Earth has now followed that earlier and welcome volume with an equally fine companion, Other Worlds, Better Lives, which features longer stories written between 1989 and 2003 and displays Waldrop s mastery of the novella form.

Among the stories here is “You Could Go Home Again,” in which Thomas Wolfe, having survived the brain disease that killed him in our world, returns from the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, aboard an airship where fellow voyager Fats Waller provides musical interludes, to a U.S. governed by technocrats. “Fin de Cyclé” is the story of how a movie made by Georges Méliès, assisted by Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust, and Pablo Picasso, rouses the French public to demand justice in the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and helps to free him from Devil’s Island. Various young characters from late 1950s and early 1960s TV programs and science fiction movies confront the Cuban missile crisis in “The Other Real World,” while Richard Wagner abandons his operatic ambitions to become one of the forefathers of the Peoples Federated States of Europe in “A Better World s in Birth!” “Flatfeet!” combines reflections on Osvald Spengler’s classic The Decline of the West and American artist Thomas Cole’s series of paintings titled The Course of Empire with a number of historical parallels and Keystone Kops-style antics in what the author calls in his afterword “one of the most jam-packed stories I ever wrote.” In “Major Spacer in the 21st Century” Waldrop manages to cover the history of much of twentieth century communications technology in realistic detail.

The longest story in the collection is “A Dozen Tough Jobs,” a Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist; here, Waldrop takes the mythological figure of Hercules and sets him down in early twentieth-century Mississippi along with an African-American sidekick appropriately named I.O. Lace. Readers unfamiliar with Greek mythology (although even the completely uninformed might still have been viewers of the 1990s TV series featuring Kevin Sorbo as Hercules) can read this novella straight as a tale of race relations, rural poverty, and class distinctions centered on the convict Houlka Lee; those who know the old myths will delight in the meticulously worked-out parallels between Waldrop s story and the fabled Twelve Labours of Hercules.

“If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino.”
— Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

“One trap in writing alternative histories is the gratuitous story, the what if Attila the Hun had howitzers kind of tale. A somewhat better alternative, in an age when ignorance of history abounds, is concentrating on major historical figures and events, ones familiar to most people, or at least likely to be known about by many readers. Howard Waldrop usually ignores these alternatives in favor of focusing on more obscure, although still important and influential, cultural figures and social movements. In the process, he offers insight into some of history s more overlooked streams and also manages to draw parallels between his imagined worlds and reality, while capturing both the undertone of regret and the sense of precariousness that seem essential elements of alternate history.”
— Pamela Sargent, SciFi Weekly

Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His books include Howard Who? and Horse of a Different Color. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”

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Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005

Tue 29 Apr 2014 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

April 2014 · ebook · $9.95 · 9781618730794

Available in trade cloth and trade paper from Old Earth Books.

In this Locus Award finalist, Howard Waldrop selects sixteen of his own short stories (with help from Michael Walsh and Jonathan Strahan). At some point Hollywood will discover the one and only culture mashup genius brain of Howard Waldrop. He’s their biggest fan and movies will be made . . . get in on the ground floor! From the extinct to the pinpoint of the zeitgeist, Waldrop mixes and matches pop culture until you’re never sure if it’s history or fiction you’re reading. Either way, the deeper you delve, the better it gets.

Waldrop’s unique introduction (“Welcome to the shattered remnants of what I laughingly refer to as my career.”) and afterwords (“You can imagine my horror and intellectual fear when a fantasy story came to me.”) give naked insights into his life as a writer: from living on $7,000 (on a good year) to killing magazines — including his “pride and joy? I killed Amazing. TWICE!!”

“The 16 stories in this retrospective volume from World Fantasy Award–winner Waldrop tend to be more sober and less zany than those in his previous collection, Heart of Whitenesse (2005). Highlights include “The Lions Are Asleep This Night,” a touching alternate history of a would-be playwright set in Africa; “French Scenes,” in which Francophiles make movies using computers; and “Household Words or the Powers That Be,” a tale Dickens fans are sure to love.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Waldrop has chosen 16 of his best short stories and written a new afterword to each. The book opens with the multiple award-winner “The Ugly Chickens,” in which a chance remark on a bus leads a young researcher into backwoods Mississippi to discover the real fate of the dodo. It closes with a tale of alternate realities, “The King of Where-I-Go,” somehow combining the polio epidemic of the early 1950s, the famous ESP experiments at Duke, and a man’s love for H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. . . . The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful. What if robotic versions of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, designed for an amusement park, were the last creatures on Earth? What if the Martians landed in Pachuco County, Tex., back in the late 19th century, and a kind of Slim Pickens character was the sheriff in charge of keeping the peace?”
— Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Ugly Chickens
Flying Saucer Rock and Roll
Heirs of the Perisphere
The Lions Are Asleep This Night
Night of the Cooters
Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?
Wild, Wild Horses
French Scenes
Household Words; or, The Powers-That-Be
The Sawing Boys
Heart of Whitenesse
Mr. Goober’s Show
US
The Dynasters
Calling Your Name
King of Where-I-Go

“Howard Waldrop is the Studebaker Golden Hawk of genre fiction, a classic of structure and design. His unique stories autopsy the entrails of our eccentric past and reveal, often in oracular fashion, insanities to come.”
— Lucius Shepard

“The only problem with THINGS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME is that it’s not nearly long enough. Sure, sure, it’s chock full of great stories by the best short fiction writer of his generation, modern classics like “The Ugly Chickens” and “Flying Saucer Rock n Roll” and “Heart of Whitenesse” and many more . . . but there are two or three times as many terrific Waldrop stories, equally good and sometimes even better, that have been left out for want of space. There’s only one solution. Read this book . . . and then go out and track down all of Waldrop’s other collections and read them too.”
— George R. R. Martin

“Howard Waldrop doesn’t have e-mail. He doesn’t have a word processor. He doesn’t surf the Internet. I guess that means he spends most of his time writing. From my point of view as a devoted Waldrop reader, I’m eternally grateful to the Luddite in him.”
— Janis Ian

“You want funny? Howard’s got funny. You want weird? Howard’s got weird. You want mind-bending? You’re about to get it.”
— Cory Doctorow

“There’s no better writer alive than Howard Waldrop, and here are all his best stories, with funny and fascinating afterwords — you need this book.”
— Tim Powers

“It always feels like Christmas when a new Howard Waldrop collection arrives, and this one is as crammed with wonderful presents as Santa’s sack.  This is even better than getting a BB gun!”
— Connie Willis

“You don’t have to know a lot to read Howard Waldrop’s fiction, but it helps. His stories are packed with inside jokes, allusions, historic and pop-cultural references which sometimes leave you wondering if you got everything out of it he put into it. That’s why this collection of his short fiction is such a treasure: each story has an afterword written by Howard himself explaining (some of) the punch lines you may have missed, the premise he based it on, the circumstances under which he wrote, and anything else he felt his readers should know. (The continuing saga of how he single-handedly shut down a number of publications just by having a story accepted is truly amazing.)”
— Judy Newton, SFRevu

— “Enthusiastically recommended for science fiction and fantasy buffs everywhere.”
Midwest Book Review

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Reading like its 1971

Wed 16 Apr 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

I turned one in 1971 and while I like to think I was enjoying some pretty great books (who can tell, they’ve all been eaten by me, my siblings, and time) I know of one good book that came out that year that I didn’t read: Peter Dickinson’s Emma Tupper’s Diary.

I don’t think I even read this book growing up*, which is a shame, as from the age of 9 or 10 on up it would have been a scarily good fit: I lived in the West Coast of Scotland among beautiful hills and lochs and would have eaten up a novel about an odd family (cough) whose cousin comes to visit from Botswana (we had cousins come from South Africa . . .). The only parts that are missing are

1. the family business — teaching vs. their McAndrew’s Infallible Liniment
2. the family minisubmarine — my family’s lack, that is, as far as I know . . .
3. my father (sadly) did not go off abroad leaving us nominally looked after by a beautiful kleptomaniacal governess while we gallivanted about, pulled the wool over the eyes of the BBC, etc. (Also, my mother, unlike in many books for kids, is still alive. And still a great reader!)
4. and, lastly, despite our searching, no proof of any monsters in any of the local lochs.

I am still sometimes confused by Lee S Rosen Etsy that time only seems to move in one way. I certainly feel different ages a lot of the time (although happily not 1-year-old) but I don’t seem to be able to go back in time and hand me this book. Shame! But at least since we reprinted it, it has been finding new readers:

Gayle Surette at SFRevu writes: “a great adventure story with characters that seem very real and as relatable today as there were then. It’s got a great location, adventure, great by-play and witty conversations, as well as an ecological and humanitarian conundrum with real implications for the future of the area and its denizens.”

and the Midwest Book Review notes that it is “Updated with a new cover and illustrations, this remains a great, now classic, summer read.”

Kathleen Jennings provided us with that new great cover of Emma writing her diary with a certain something in the background and we also got to use her sketches throughout the book.

Emma Tupper’s Diary is full of prickly people who rub each other the wrong way. Oh how I do wish I’d read it when I was a kid! But at least Kelly had it when I met her and eventually I got to read it and at some point we realized it would be a whole lot of fun to re-release this book back into the world. It’s a book that’s paced differently from many books for kids (aka readers of all ages!) and as noted by the Midwest Book Review, it also hearkens back to summer holidays when kids (of a certain class and in certain places) got bored and sometimes ran around and did stuff. In that way it is mildly, mildly reminiscent of another classic children’s book that will whisk you away on a summer’s day: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, which, happily, the fine folk at Godine always have in print.

More suggestions of mucking around in summer books welcome. Especially as we woke up to snow and a reminder from Mother Nature that she’s the one who decides when spring comes, ok? Ok!

Get Emma Tupper’s Diary here and the ebook here.

* I’m not one of those people who can remember every book they’re read. I know (barely**) what I’m reading now and the last two books I read. But, before that? Erm. And what was I reading in 1980? Um. All I can say is lots and lots. Anything, everything. I was often the kid who got to pick the books from the mobile library for the school library refresh. You know, one of those. Inject your own tales of biblioscarcity and scavenging here!

** I was asked this morning and could not remember the title. Um.

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LCRW low stock updates

Fri 28 Mar 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

While doing some counting and sorting (and preparing for the next issue, #30!), we found we’re running short of a couple of back issues of LCRW. So! We just switched numbers 15 & 16 to out of stock and this is the official notice that issues nineteen* and twenty-two will be next.

The good news: the ebooks are still available on Weightless (etc.) and selections from all these issues (er, up to #19) are also available in Del Rey’s lovely anthology The Best of LCRW: Some of the Best Parts from the First Ten Years of This Here Zine.

* Isn’t that easier to click than that fiddly 15?

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The Unreal and the Real wins the Oregon Book Award!

Tue 18 Mar 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Lovely news from Ben Parzybok on twitter from Oregon last night. Among the winners (congrats to all!) of the Oregon Book Award, was Ursula K. Le Guin, whose two-volume Selected Stories received the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.

Even better, Luis Alberto Urrea (who posted the accompanying photo yesterday) was the the master of ceremonies and, well, Jeff Baker gave it a lovely write up for the Oregonian:

“. . . Le Guin won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction for “The Unreal and The Real: Collected Stories Vol. 1 and 2.” At 84 Le Guin is perhaps the most decorated author in the state; her many honors include a National Book Award, every major science fiction award and an Oregon Book Award in 1992 for “Searoad.”

Luis Alberto Urrea, the master of ceremonies, began the evening with a humorous, heartfelt tribute to Le Guin. Urrea said he was “a poor boy from Tijuana” who wrote a story based on a family experience that somehow made its way to Le Guin, who asked him to join a workshop she was teaching and befriended him. She chose the story for an anthology she was editing, Urrea’s first sale, and his friends all bought the book and asked him to sign it. Urrea said Le Guin “smoked a pipe back then” and he accompanied her to her first viewing of “Star Wars,” during which she explained all the science errors to him.

“Everything good in my life comes from writing,” Urrea said. “Everything good in my life comes from Ursula. I’m here tonight for Ursula, the queen of America.”

Le Guin accepted her award graciously and first cautioned the audience that they should pay attention to Urrea when he’s writing, maybe not so much when he’s speaking. She remembered that in 1987, the year the Oregon Book Awards began, the award she received was named for H.L. Davis and she presented it to the winner. She touted Davis’ novel “Honey in the Horn” as the best written about Oregon and rued that it is out of print. She remembered the founders of Literary Arts, the organization that sponsors the Oregon Book Awards, particularly Brian Booth, and talked about her feeling for the state.

“I came to Oregon by luck,” Le Guin said, “and lasted 55 years. No plan can beat good luck.”

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