In Other Book Clubs

Wed 28 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., book clubs, Sarah Rees Brennan| Posted by: Gavin

Next Tuesday is the official paperback publication day for Sarah Rees Brennan’s novel In Other Lands. The book is on the ALA Rainbow Book List, the ABC Best Books for Young Readers and Bank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year lists, and is a Junior Library Guild selection. It was a nominee for both the Georgia Peach Book Award and the Florida Teens Read Award and a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards. Not bad!

Now it’s coming out in a huge trade paperback edition — extra big not just because of all the shiny gold on the cover, but also because it includes the story that started it all: “Wings in the Morning.”* Sarah originally wrote the novel on her blog as a prequel to “Wings”(!) and then rewrote it for publication.

It turns out that In Other Lands being a reader fave means it’s also turning up in book club recommendations! One bookstore near us, Annie’s in Worcester, MA, has it down for their Rainbow Readers bookclub on Sat., Sept. 14th, and over there in Columbus, Ohio, the Feminist Sci-Fi Bookclub at the fabulous Two Dollar Radio HQ have it scheduled for their Sept. 24th meeting. How awesome!

I’ll add these two book clubs to our events schedule. Do drop us a line any time your book club is reading any of our books and I’ll add it to the schedule.

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Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester, MA

SPECIAL EVENT: Saturday, September 14, 6PM–8PM – Rainbow Readers Discusses IN OTHER LANDS by Sarah Rees Brennan. The Rainbow Readers of Massachusetts is an LGBTQIA book club that meets once a month. All are welcome!

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Feminist Sci-Fi Bookclub: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
7:00pm-8:00pm
1124 Parsons Ave, Columbus, OH 43206, USA
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

Hosted by Haley Cowans, Feminist Sci-Fi Bookclub:
Or, “Word After Word: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Book Club” — “Speculative fiction” (science fiction, fantasy, horror) has always been a vehicle for writers to explore identity, social inequality, the strangeness of the world, and the hopes and fears for the future. In this monthly book club we’ll be reading works of speculative fiction by women and nonbinary writers, discussing the ways these works make us think, feel, and reflect on reality. Read more: https://twodollarradiohq.com/feminist-sci-fi-bookclub

This month’s book is In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

“Four years in the life of an unloved English schoolboy who’s invited to a secret magical school and learns that even in fantasyland, real life is messier than books. . . . But over the course of four years training among child soldiers, Elliot, unsurprisingly, grows up. His slow development into a genuinely kind person is entirely satisfying, as is his awakening to his own bisexuality and to the colonialism, sexism, and racism of Borderlands society. . . . A stellar . . . wholly rewarding journey.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

* Bookclubs are free and open to the public with no signup required. Just read, arrive, and have fun.
* You can find the book at your local library, or available for purchase at Two Dollar Radio HQ and other fine booksellers.
* Our regular food and bar menus will be available.

LOT PARKING: The Columbus Metropolitan Library across the street (1113 Parsons Ave) has generously allowed our use of their parking lot while they are closed only; parking there allowed during the following hours: Tuesday: 8pm – close

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*An aside: “Wings in the Morning” was originally published in the anthology Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales edited by Kelly and me, and it too is now coming out in paperback!

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A Trippy Genre-Hop Featuring a Trace of Fairy Tale, a Touch of Gothic, & More

Fri 23 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kim Scott, readings| Posted by: Gavin

Not this Saturday, but the next one, Kim Scott, the first Indigenous writer to receive the Miles Franklin Award will be traveling to the USA for a series of events in support of his fourth novel, Taboo. It has been a very quick run up for us on this book: it was submitted on January 25th of this year, which makes the publication date of September 3 the equivalent of a sprint in publishing terms. Thank you! to everyone at Consortium and all our sales reps who have brought the book to booksellers’ attention, to the trade reviewers at Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and to all the indie bookstores and others who are stocking it.

Taboo is Scott’s 4th novel. In his afterword, as quoted by Kim Forrester of Reading Matters, Scott calls it a “trippy, stumbling sort of genre-hop that I think features a trace of Fairy Tale, a touch of Gothic, a sufficiency of the ubiquitous Social Realism and perhaps a touch of Creation Story” which rings true to me.

Although Scott has twice won the Miles Franklin award in his home country and Taboo received four literary awards (totalling AU$80,000) in Australia, his voice is one of those mostly missing from literary discourse in North America so I am deeply gladdened that the Australian Embassy is bringing him to the USA.

If you’re in DC on August 31 for the Library of Congress Book Festival, I hope I see you at the 10 a.m panel, “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers.” This will be a near unique opportunity to see these writers in the northern hemisphere.

After a trip to UVA, and before he heads to Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, Scott will come up to Western Massachusetts for a reading at Easthampton’s own White Square Books on Friday, September 6, where I hope we can show him a SRO crowd of enthusiastic, open-minded, and curious readers.

Here’s the full list of events:

Aug. 31, 10 a.m “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers” with Jeanine Leane and Brenton McKenna , Library of Congress Book Festival, Washington, D.C.
Sept. 3, 5:30 p.m. Reading & Signing, Brooks Hall Commons, UVA, Charlottesville, VA
Sept. 5, 6 p.m. “Truth Telling,” Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, UVA, 400 Worrell Dr., Charlottesville, VA 22911
Sept. 6, 7 p.m. White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA
Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m., NYU
Sept. 9, 7 p.m. Community Bookstore with Terr-ann White, 143 Seventh Ave, Brooklyn, NY

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The Mount, signed by Carol Emshwiller

Thu 22 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Carol Emshwiller, Tiptree Award| Posted by: Gavin

The Tiptree Award is going to have an auction that starts August 24 but you can preview it here. Included in the auction is a very rare item, a copy of The Mount signed by the late author, Carol Emshwiller. (Is it rare? I searched on Bookfinder for a signed copy, any edition, and none came up.)

The Mount was a Nebula Award finalist, won the Philip K. Dick Award Winner, and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Locus, Book Magazine, and the Village Voice. More recently MaryKate Jasper and Charlie Jane Anders included it in an io9 list 10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading.

It is a weird and fabulous novel. It’s rare to find one signed and the money goes to an excellent cause. Good luck with your bidding!

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A. B. Young’s Vain Beasts in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

Tue 20 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., A. B. Young, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Today Catapult publishes PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019, edited by three superstars writers, Carmen Maria Machado, Danielle Evans, & Alice Sola Kim.

The dozen debut authors are all winners of the $2,000 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The stories collected here were originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Auburn Avenue, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Epiphany, The Iowa Review, Kweli, Nimrod Journal, The Rumpus, The Sun, and I am delighted to say, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. That story is A. B. Young’s “Vain Beasts” from LCRW 38.

With editors like these, I am very much looking forward to reading this book. Here’s a little more about it:

“Prominent issues of social justice and cultural strife are woven thematically throughout 12 stories. Stories of prison reform, the immigrant experience, and the aftermath of sexual assault make the book a vivid time capsule that will guide readers back into the ethos of 2019 for generations to come . . . Each story displays a mastery of the form, sure to inspire readers to seek out further writing from these adept authors and publications.”—Booklist

Who are the most promising short story writers working today? Where do we look to discover the future stars of literary fiction? This book offers a dozen compelling answers to these questions.

The stories collected here represent the most recent winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes twelve writers who have made outstanding debuts in literary magazines in the previous year. Chosen by a panel of distinguished judges, themselves innovators of the short story form, they take us from the hutongs of Beijing to the highways of Saskatchewan, from the letters of a poet devoted to God in seventeenth-century France to a chorus of poets devoted to revolution in the “last days of empire.” They describe consuming, joyful, tragic, complex, ever-changing relationships between four friends who meet at a survivors group for female college students; between an English teacher and his student-turned-lover in Japan; between a mother and her young son.

In these pages, a woodcutter who loses his way home meets a man wearing a taxidermied wolf mask, and an Ivy League–educated “good black girl” climbs the flagpole in front of the capitol building in South Carolina. Each piece comes with an introduction by its original editors, whose commentaries provide valuable insight into what magazines are looking for in their submissions, and showcase the vital work they do to nurture literature’s newest voices.

Stories by Tamiko Beyer, Sarah Curry, Laura Freudig, Doug Henderson, Enyeribe Ibegwam, Jade Jones, Pingmei Lan, Marilyn Manolakas, Jon Paul Infante, Kelsey Peterson, Erin Singer, and A.B. Young

ABOUT THIS YEAR’S JUDGES

Danielle Evans is the author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which was a co-winner of the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize and the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Alice Sola Kim is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Carmen Maria Machado‘s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She is the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Kim Scott in the Valley

Mon 19 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kim Scott, readings| Posted by: Gavin

We’ve just added a local reading for Australian author Kim Scott, whose novel Taboo, we are publishing next month. Kim will be reading at White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA, at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 6.

Kim is an Australian superstar and we’re hoping to get a crowd together for good nights in Easthampton and Brooklyn. Come on by!

The full list of Kim’s events is:

August 31, 10 a.m “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers” with Jeanine Leane and Brenton McKenna , Library of Congress Book Festival, Washington, D.C.
UVA
September 6, 7 p.m. White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA
September 9, NYU
September 9, 7 p.m. Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

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Laurie J. Marks, Brattleboro, VT Reading

Mon 5 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Laurie J. Marks, readings| Posted by: Gavin

We are happy to announce to say that next Friday (not this Friday), August 16 at 6 p.m., Laurie J. Marks will be doing a reading/signing from the final book in her Elemental Logic series, Air Logic, at Everyone’s Books (25 Eliot St., Brattleboro, VT 05301). The bookstore is getting all 4 books in the series in so it’s a great chance to pick up a signed set. Thanks to the bookstore and all those who worked to set this up!

Air Logic is a Locus Notable Book and here’s the beginning of Katherine Coldiron’s Locus review:

“You might not believe me, but this is the truth: Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic books are as good as Elena Ferrante’s monumental Neapolitan Quartet. They achieve the same depth, the same spellbinding quality, and the same sense of falling entire into a world on the page, tethered to real life by the sure hand of a master writer. They expose a talent as mighty as Le Guin’s for building intricate moral dilemmas inside fantasy universes, for creating characters the reader will remember for decades, and for presenting solutions that amount to much more than throwing soldiers or magic at the problem. These books are a profound achievement in fantasy literature.”

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Friday night: Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

Thu 1 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

You might remember the Kickstarter for Arwen Curry’s documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s been shown at festivals around the world for the past few months and on Friday August 2nd at 8 p.m. it will premiere on PBS American Masters then be available to stream for 28 days. Do not miss.

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