LCRW 39, it’s out there

Mon 15 Jul 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

We were in Portland, OR, last week at the Tin House Summer Workshop — what a feat that is! 250+ people come from all corners of the world to write, talk, and work together. Before it all began (by which I don’t mean 20 years ago, rather a week or so ago), Kelly and I stopped off at Powell’s books and I’m delighted to report that, yes, they still have some good books. Face out in the small & indie press section I was very happy to see the new issue, the 39th of its kind, of LCRW.

Did I take a photo? No. I did not, mostly because I stood there picking through the zines and the place was busy, busy so there was no time for a quiet photo. I picked up some other zines, and, oh a few books. They never have everything I’m looking for, but, oh, they always have some things I wasn’t looking for, such a joy.

Fundraiser this weekend

Wed 3 Jul 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., fundraiser, immigration, RAICES| Posted by: Gavin

This July 4th weekend I hope you will join us in celebrating and supporting Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) as part of the #BookstoresAgainstBorders campaign. We are pledging a donation of 10% of gross sales from July 5 – 7th from sales of books and zines (including subscriptions) from our website.

If you can, please donate (anything from $5 or $500 or more!) directly here — every little bit helps me reach my goal.

Thank you for your support of this fundraiser and your action to help those desperately in need.

Readercon 2019

Tue 2 Jul 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Cons, Michael J DeLuca| Posted by: Gavin

While we won’t be at Readercon this year — Kelly will be back at the fabulous thing that is the Tin House Summer Workshop and I’ll be part of an editor panel — our books will be there at a table run by the mighty Michael J. DeLuca, publisher of the journal Reckoning.

Some of our authors will be there including John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, Laurie J. Marks, Sarah Pinsker, Vandana Singh, and Howard Waldrop as well as innumerable friends and lovely people so I hope you get your books signed by them. We’ll have an ad in the program book, ping me if you see it, and their books will be available at the table — ok, not John’s forthcoming collection — as well as the current LCRW with the monster of gentrification on the cover as well as the zines Kelly and Ursula made this spring.

There will also be copies of all four of Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic novels of which Katherine Coldiron says this in the new issue of Locus:

ETA: Jeffrey Ford & Howard Waldrop will be there.
Note: Laurie J. Marks will be there on the Saturday only and will be signing copies of her book at 3 p.m.

Air Logic Publication Day

Tue 4 Jun 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Seventeen years ago Laurie J. Marks’s first Elemental Logic novel, Fire Logic, was released in hardcover and I, desperately searching for women writers to write about for my monthly BookPage sf&f review, was delighted to find a fantasy from Tor with some blurbs. I enjoyed it quite a bit:

Fire Logic is definitely not a simplistic fantasy where one side is right and the other must be wrong; like real life, it is all about shades of gray. Zanja comes from a highland people who hold themselves happily apart from other nations. She is their avatar, sent out to communicate, trade and learn from the outside world. But the outside world is in turmoil: former refugees have armed themselves and are taking over. The countryside is soon a war zone, replete with horribly familiar acts of war and reprisals. Marks has a wide-angle view and has written an immensely political and unflinchingly optimistic novel. Differences are celebrated as often as scorned, and love can be found even with an enemy without the costs that might be expected in our world.

Less than two years later and an ARC for the second book in the series, Earth Logic, landed, celebrations — and another review in BookPage. Show me the reader who isn’t affected when a book changes the world:

. . . Karis’ group finds a hidden library and an old printing press. They use the press to publish a book that reminds the Shaftali that they unlike the occupying Sainnites are a hospitable and generous people. This is one step on Karis’ path to the nonviolent defeat of the Sainnites. As Emil, the former Shaftali general says, ‘War cannot make peace.’ The nonviolent choice is a strong and difficult one, and not everyone in Shaftal supports it especially those who have lost family and friends in the occupation. However, it is what Karis wants, and in earth logic “action and understanding are inseparable,” so, although it seems impossible to overcome the warring factions, she is determined to make it happen.

Earth Logic is a thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics between two groups of people. Good bread, wine and friendships alone may not save the world, but they make the doing of it much more palatable.

A couple of years later Laurie asked us for advice on publishing the third novel and we slowly talked it over here and with her until we came to realize that we could and would happily publish it. So in 2007 Water Logic was sent out into the world — sometimes with tea! Laurie was Guest of Honor at WisCon, the book received another starred Booklist review and for readers of the Elemental Logic series, all was looking well.

Then slowly the series became one of those unfinished series that seemed like they would stay that way. We knew that Laurie was working away on it — tying up all those stories in one book that made sense of it all was a huge job — but there were family and health complications.

Over the years we’d check in and we were delighted to get a chance to put the first two books out in new editions, at first in ebook, and this year in trade paperbacks, especially as it gave us a chance to work with Kathleen Jennings again who did an amazing multi-part illustration over a number of years that gave a lively fresh visual identity to the series. (Of course, the 4 books still don’t match as we had previous cover of Water Logic stripped off and the books were rebound with the new covers so they have a smaller trim size than the first, second, and fourth Logics. If the books do well and we get to reprint . . . )

And slowly light broke over the horizon and then suddenly the day was here and it is June 4th, 2019, and here we are with the fourth and final Elemental Logic novel out in the world:

Welcome to Air Logic.

Air Logic

Tue 4 Jun 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 400 pages · $17 · 9781618731609 | ebook · 9781618731616

The fourth and final novel in the award winning Elemental Logic series.

Locus Notable Books
Otherwise Honor List for Series

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

Laurie J. Marks returns at last to Shaftal for the long-awaited conclusion to her acclaimed series. Karis and those who love her must figure out, in the aftermath of war and an assassination attempt, how to bring together Sainnites and Shaftali in a country where old wounds and enmities fester and Air magic conceals the treason hidden in the heart of the G’deon’s household. When Medric is taken hostage to force Karis’s hand, a strange boy will guide Zanja to the place where she may yet save him, a mother must remember the son she has been made to forget, and Air children will find what their place in the world may yet be.

“If you’ve been looking for an exciting, thoughtful, queer, diverse, politically aware, complex, timely, beautifully written saga of a fascinating world and set of characters, here it is.” — Delia Sherman

Reviews “Laurie Marks’s epic fantasy world is brilliantly realized, gratifyingly queer, and satisfyingly, humanly complicated. Now that the story of Shaftal is complete, it’s one that every fantasy fan should experience for themselves.” — Electra Pritchett, Strange Horizons

“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.” — Katherine Coldiron, Locus “Not everyone survives, and no one survives unscathed. . . . The discipline of hope relies on communal life and love, doing the hard work of coming together and staying together across differences in culture, belief, conviction. Marks time and time again refuses pessimism or grim acquiescence in favor of insisting that, while some people might be monsters, the far greater portion have the capacity for good. There is real power in the dedicated, intentional, thoughtful project of hope with a steel core. The Elemental Logic series provides a compelling, thorough argument in its favor, one I’ve enjoyed reading from beginning to end and which left me cautiously optimistic about the world in which I’d like to keep striving toward a more survivable future.” — Lee Mandelo, Tor.com

“The entire series is highly recommended to anyone looking for a series that presents not only a queer fantasy world, but also one of the most well-wrought and engaging fantasy worlds out there.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Marks brings her much-loved, long-unavailable Elemental Logic series (most recently 2007’s Water Logic, and all recently republished by Small Beer) to a superb finale. . . an extraordinary fantasy saga that’s well worth revisiting or exploring for the first time.” — Publishers Weekly

“Shaftal is a convincing world, lovingly detailed and fiercely envisioned. Marks’ characters are so real. . . . as the last note in a familiar melody, this book rings true. A final book that stays true to the spirit of the whole, sending readers out of Shaftal on a high note.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Marks (Water Logic) draws a satisfying conclusion to this quartet of novels perfect for readers of K. Arsenault Rivera and previous fans of the series.” — Library Journal

The Elemental Logic series:

Fire Logic Elemental Logic: Book 1
Spectrum Award winner
Romantic Times Reviewers Choice award nominee

The martial Sainnites have occupied Shaftal for fifteen years. Every year the cost of resistance rises. Emil, an officer and scholar; Zanja, a diplomat and last survivor of her people; and Karis, a metalsmith, half-blood giant, and an addict, can only watch as their country falls into lawlessness and famine. Together, perhaps they can change the course of history.

Read an excerpt.
Listen to the author read Chapter 1: part 1 · part 2

Reviews for Fire Logic “Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“Marks has created a work filled with an intelligence that zings off the page.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and elemental magic.” — Robin Hobb

“Marks vividly describes a war-torn land, and the depth of character development makes this novel a page-turner.” — VOYA

“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.” — Nalo Hopkinson

Earth Logic Elemental Logic: Book 2
Spectrum Award winner

The second book of Shaftal. The country has a ruler again, a woman who can heal the war-torn land and expel the invaders. But she lives in obscurity with her fractious found family. With war and disease spreading, she must act. And when she does, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.

Read an excerpt.
Listen to the author read Chapter 2 or “Raven’s Joke”

Reviews for Earth Logic

“Marks produces another stunner of a book. The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart.” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“The struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.” — Publishers Weekly

Water Logic Elemental Logic: Book 3
Amid assassinations, rebellions, and the pyres of too many dead, a new government forms in the land of Shaftal—a government of soldiers and farmers, scholars and elemental talents, all weary of war and longing for peace. But some cannot forget their losses, and some cannot imagine a place for themselves in an enemy land.

Read the first chapter.
Listen to the author read Chapter 1: part 1 · part 2

Reviews for Water Logic

“How gifts from the past, often unknown or unacknowledged, bless future generations; how things that look like disasters or mistakes may be parts of a much bigger pattern that produces greater, farther-reaching good results.” —Booklist (Starred Review)

“Finely drawn characters and a lack of bias toward sexual orientation make this a thoughtful, challenging read.” — Library Journal

“Marks’s characters are real people who breathe and sleep and sweat and love; the food has flavor and the landscape can break your heart. You don’t find this often in any contemporary fiction, much less in fantasy: a world you can plunge yourself into utterly and live in with great delight, while the pages turn, and dream of after.” — Ellen Kushner

Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

On the web:

Credits

Cover image © Kathleen Jennings.
Author photo © Deb Mensinger.
Map of Shaftal © by Jeanne Gomoll.

Laurie J. Marks (website) has published nine fantasy novels, including Dancing Jack, The Watcher’s Mask and the Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic). She has been writing since her childhood in California, inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander. Her books have been shortlisted for the James D. Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and have twice been awarded the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts with her wife, Deb Mensinger, and their Welsh corgi, Serendipity.

Weekend Reading

Sat 1 Jun 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Brit Mandelo is writing a thoughtful series of short essays on Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series on Tor.com. As Andrew Liptak points out in today’s round-up of books to check out this month, the first three novels came out between 2002 and 2007, so it’s been quite a wait for the fourth and final novel, Air Logic.

Last weekend at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin, it was delightful to chat with Laurie about Brit’s first essay on Fire Logic: Living in Hope is a Discipline:

The centering of hope as a practice, of hopeful thought as expansive and dangerous, is vital to the series’ political argument. Nurturing willful, wild, directed hope—even in moments of despair and defeat—is necessary to be able to envision a path out of conflict, in direct contravention of nihilism or the reactionary impulse.

I am so glad Brit is writing these and pulling up these threads. Hope as a practice, while working for peaceful regime change, is where I am in this world at the moment.

In the second essay (which contains spoilers, so heads up if that bothers you — the way it used to me, but now I don’t mind — maybe it’s time passing and the world encrappening but they seem less important to me now. Everybody’s mileage varies here, of course), on the second volume in the series, Earth Logic Rather Than Defeat the Enemies, You Must Change Them: Brit focuses on the hard work being done and attempted:

Renouncing the moral impulse to be (and to have been) right, decisively victorious above all else, in favor of the ethical impulse to create a better future is the philosophical core of Karis’s ultimate treaties . . .

I can’t wait to read what he has to say about the next two volumes over the next couple of weeks. The publication date for Air Logic is this coming Tuesday, June 4th, and what a celebration it is for all the readers of this series. Any number of people came by and chatted at WisCon about the series — with some picking them all up so that they can read it again and some readers who don’t read series until they are finished(!) picking up the first or all four. These books have had a profound influence in many readers’ lives and I am looking forward to following even more readers’ reactions to them over the next few months, the next few years.

Afrofuturism Bundle

Fri 31 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ayize Jama-Everett, bundles| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, there’s a week left to get your hands on the current Afrofuturism collection on Storybundle. Ayize Jama-Everett’s debut novel The Liminal People is part of it as well as nine other books, which together make an essential library of recent hits. If you can get it, don’t miss out.

Free Copies of And Go Like This

Thu 23 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., John Crowley| Posted by: Gavin

Don’t miss this: you have until May 28 to enter to win one of 15 free advance reading copies of John Crowley’s fifthcoming (see below) new short story collection, And Go Like This, on LibraryThing.

This is the third book of Crowley’s we will have published — how amazing that sentence still is — after Endless Things and The Chemical Wedding. And good news for all, the first trade review just came in from Publishers Weekly:

“A compassionate, ruminative eye frames the sepia-tinted worlds of the fifth collection from erudite fantasist Crowley (Ka). The stories are drawn from the last 20 years of Crowley’s long career and span the breadth of speculative and literary short fiction. . . . This collection’s recurring refrains—“pay attention,” Shakespeare, injuries and aging, the agony of making choices—coalesce into a reading experience like a long afternoon spent with an intimate, excellent raconteur.”

Read the full review on Publishers Weekly.

SBP at WisCon 2019

Mon 20 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Carol Emshwiller, conferences, conventions, Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Next weekend I’m happy to say I’ll be back at WisCon for the first time in a while. I’ll be running the Small Beer table in the dealers’ room on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — but I have to leave on Monday morning so do come before then!

I love the future WisCon imagines and present it inhabits, and Memorial Day weekend in Madison — with the farmers’ market and all those great restaurants — is a great place to be.

Twelve years ago we worked with Laurie J. Marks to make sure Water Logic would be available when she was Guest of Honor at WisCon 31 and the great news here is that Laurie is coming back to WisCon, and, if the shipping gods allow it, we will have all four new editions of her Elemental Logic series.

I am not 100% sure whether the rebound Water Logic will arrive on time. Fingers crossed. The rebinding means the trim size will be a tiny bit smaller than the other 3 volumes — just so that nothing is ever quite neat and square — but the choice was either recycling hundreds of books or rebinding.

The good news: we will definitely have Fire Logic, Earth Logic, and lo after these many long years: Air Logic.

We’ll also have the new issue of LCRW, a few books, some zines, and if all goes well the new issue of Reckoning.

On Friday afternoon if I’m not in the dealer’s room, you can find me at the Tiptree Bake Sale.

I don’t do many panels now, given that if I’m away from the table I want to hear other voices speak not mine, but there was one panel I did sign up for that I’m looking forward to. I hope to listen more than speak, am hoping to laugh but may cry:

Carol Emshwiller—A Memorial

Type	Program
Track(s)	Feminism and Other Social Change Movements
Description	Author Carol Emshwiller (b.Carol Fries, April 12, 1921) died on February 2nd, 2019. Please join us for discussion of her work and her importance to the WisCon community.
Location	Conference 4
Schedule	Sat, 4:00–5:15 pm
Panelists	M: Timmi Duchamp. Gavin J. Grant, Margaret McBride, Pat Murphy

4 stars

Fri 10 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Over the years, the first three volumes of Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series each received a starred review in Booklist. I am delighted to say that the fourth and final volume, Air Logic, which comes out next month, has just received a starred review, too!

Fire Logic

“Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!” — Booklist (starred review)

Earth Logic

Water Logic

and now Air Logic

Nuekom Award Shortlists

Thu 9 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Awards, Claire G. Coleman| Posted by: Gavin

These are words to brighten the day: there are two Small Beer titles on the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Debut Award Shortlist:

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis
Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman

Last year, the inaugural year for the awards, Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American and Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map were both finalists for the award with Best Worst American being one of the winners.

Here’s the full press release with all of the finalists, congratulations, one and all!

These 10 Books May Be Telling Us the Future

HANOVER, N.H – May 9, 2019 – Ten books that dare to imagine how society collides with the future have been named to the shortlist of the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

From the challenges of life on a floating Arctic city, to epidemics of forgetfulness and zombification, to an Earth occupied by amphibious aliens, the Neukom shortlist forces readers to grapple with uncomfortable twists to familiar storylines of climate change, social justice and technological innovation.

The second annual speculative fiction awards program will be judged by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Awards will be presented for a debut book and for a book in the open category.

“Artists and writers continue to take on the important role of challenging us with their visions of ‘what if,’ often picking up where scientists and technologists either neglect to or forget to go,” said Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute. “This year’s entries are testament to the extraordinary creativity and thoughtfulness that is finding its means of expression in speculative fiction.”

2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Shortlist of Books:

Open Category

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (Ecco, 2018)

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax (Soho Press, 2018)

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas (Little Brown, 2018)

The Night Market by Jonathan Moore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman (Europa, 2018)

Debut Category

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press, 2018)

Infomocracy by Malka Older (Tor, 2016)

Severance by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Small Beer Press, 2018)

The Book of M by Peng Shepard (William Morrow, 2018)

“It’s been gratifying to play a part in reading and selecting such unique and strong fiction from so many different points of view. We’ve particularly enjoyed encountering writers we had not read before—and it’s especially gratifying to find so many new voices, who we believe readers will be encountering for decades to come. The Dartmouth prize is a much-needed addition to the current slate of science fiction awards,” said spec fic writer and co-judge Jeff VanderMeer.

The winning books will be selected from the shortlist in late May.

Each award winner will receive a $5,000 honorarium that will be presented during a Dartmouth-hosted panel to discuss the genre and their work.

“We’re looking forward to selecting the winners. This is such a strong list and a difficult choice for us but a very good problem to have! It’s wonderful to see so many writers taking chances and showing us other ways to view the world we live in today and what our tomorrows could be,” said spec fic editor and co-judge Ann VanderMeer.

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science is dedicated to supporting and inspiring computational work. The Literary Arts Awards is part of the Neukom Institute’s initiative to explore the ways in which computational ideas impact society.

###

About the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards

The Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards is an annual awards program to honor and support creative works around speculative fiction. Established in 2017, the awards program is an open, international competition sponsored by the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College. The awards aspire to raise general awareness of the speculative fiction genre, as well as the interconnectivity between the sciences and the arts. The awards serve as part of the Neukom Institute’s initiative to explore the ways in which computational ideas impact society.

LCRW: Book of the Week

Wed 8 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Hey! Guess which zine is the library bingo winner this week? LCRW! Zebulon Wimsatt of Concord Public Library wrote up LCRW for the Concord Insider’s “Book of the Week” feature:

“But perhaps the greatest joy of LCRW’s is the rather left-field work on display, even and especially from these established authors. Le Guin contributes poems to LCRW no. 16; to no. 26, Ted Chiang gives an essay on folk biology, memory, and whither science fiction should aspire; to issue no. 6, Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, contributes the story ‘Heartland,’ about a fast-food worker in The Land of Oz. . . . Bonus local flavor: Lady Churchill’s was first sold out of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop (then of Newberry Street in Boston, now of 1 Lee Hill Road in Lee). One of the shop’s proprietors is the novelist Vincent McCaffrey, and his A Slepyng Hounde to Wake (from, you guessed it, Small Beer Press) is available on our shelves. It’s about a bookseller who solves murders.

Read the whole column here and borrow LCRW from you local library through Hoopla here — and visit AVH online or in Lee.

Spring Zines & Postcards

Thu 2 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Ursula Grant, Zines| Posted by: Gavin

I just added the zines Kelly and Ursula made in March to the site: Horoscope Stories, I Hear You’re Working on a Novel, Writing Rules, & Monster Land, as well as the Horoscope Postcards made from Ursula’s illustrations of Kelly’s stories. All the info is on this page:

And Go Like This on Edelweiss

Wed 1 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Edelweiss, John Crowley, Kim Scott, Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Reviewers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers, et al, I just added an uncorrected advance reading copy of John Crowley’s November 2019 collection And Go Like This: Stories to Edelweiss for downloading and reading.

Also available there (at least until the publication date for Air Logic): Laurie J. Marks’s four Elemental Logic novels — Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air — as well as our award-winning September drop-in title Taboo by Kim Scott.

Just Added: Taboo

Thu 11 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Australia, Kim Scott| Posted by: Gavin

Eagle-eyed readers of this website might note we added a new forthcoming title today — woohoo!

And also, hey, wait, it’s a September title being added in April, that’s a bit soon, isn’t it? Yes, it absolutely is! But when Kim Scott’s novel Taboo was submitted to us we started a countdown to get this book out asap because 1) it’s an incredible read, and while 2) Kim Scott is the keynote speaker at this month’s American Association of Australian Literary Studies conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, there are also plans to bring him back to the USA in time for the publication of Taboo.

Taboo is the latest novel from Scott, the first Australian writer of Indigenous Australian ancestry to win the Miles Franklin Award. He received it in the year 2000 for his first novel Benang (a joint winner with Thea Astley’s Dryland) and then again in 2011 for his novel That Deadman Dance. Taboo itself received four major Australian literary awards worth AU$80,000.

Taboo is a tremendous novel, with a full range of voices from contemporary Australia. From rural and small town to inner city life, from prisoners and those recently released to young women and men exploring the world for the first time, Scott gives them all voice and his enthusiasm for this life and this planet we are all living on carries the novel from the first titanic images of a runaway truck barreling through a small town all the way through. It’s a novel that threads hard paths of history and violence between the settlers and indigenous peoples of Australia and their descendants in a way that will bring hope in these days when governments are propounding violence as the answer in itself. It made me laugh out loud and hold my breath in wonder and there are moments when the world in the page is as weird as the world I see around me.

We’re sending out the first review copies this week and will have it out and grabbable by you before you can say, wait, summer’s barely begun!

OP

Wed 10 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., out of print, Sean Stewart| Posted by: Gavin

The rights are being reverted on a couple of novels (i.e. going OP or out of print) by Sean Stewart so pick them up here this week if you’re tempted:

Perfect Circle

and

Mockingbird

One note about the two covers: that’s my hand on Perfect Circle and those are Carol Emshwiller’s hands on Mockingbird!

Tender

Tue 9 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade cloth · 288 pages · $24 · 9781618731265 | ebook · 9781618731272
April 2019: trade paper ·$17 · 9781618731654
Desk / Exam copies

World Fantasy Award finalist
British Fantasy Award finalist
Locus Award finalist
“Fallow” shortlisted for the Nommo Award

NPR Best of 2017
“Most of the 20 sumptuous tales in Sofia Samatar’s collection Tender take place on Earth – although not always the Earth we might recognize. Sprawling in subject from the supernatural power of names to the loneliness of a half-robot woman, Tender redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. Where Samatar’s acclaimed fantasy novels exist in a strange, dreamlike world, her short stories daringly explore the overlap of familiarity and otherness.”

Divided into “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” these twenty stories travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality.

The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized many times including in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.

Tender includes two new stories, “An Account of the Land of Witches” and an expansive novella, “Fallow.”

New

Interview and Podcast: Sofia Samatar’s Arabian Fantasies Get Dosed in Reality

Sofia Samatar, Five Elegant and Moody Fantasies

An excerpt from Fallow introduced by Chris Abani.

Just up on Lithub, a phenomenal heartbreaking story from Sofia Samatar, Meet Me in Iram — first published as a chapbook by Guillotine and selected for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Read a new story from Tender on The Offing: An Account of the Land of Witches

Reviews

Carmen Maria Machado, The Week: “6 Favorite Story Collections”
“When Tender was published last spring, I had been waiting for a short-story collection from Sofia Samatar for what felt like 10 million years. Samatar is a novelist, poet, scholar, and author of science fiction and fantasy stories, and this book combines previously published award-winning short fiction with two new pieces, a novella and a story, that give life to the breadth and width of her astonishing imagination.”

Maria Dahvana Headley, Electric Lit
“This is a short story collection containing wonder after wonder, done with casual intensity. These are all sharp knives of stories, and it’s definitely possible to think oneself unsliced until the blood starts to pour. I encountered Samatar’s short work in 2012, probably, with her short Selkie Stories are for Losers, and was floored on sight. She’s published two novels as well, but the short fiction is my first love. Unlike the rest of the authors on this list, I actually know Sofia, and I’m as moved by her in person as I am by her work. Her wide-ranging and deeply researched interests are fully showcased in her prose, which moves from nonfiction to speculative surrealism, from historical automatons to victims of warfare, all at the same time. There are witch stories, and ripped from the headline stories, stories about longing for other planets, stories about the human condition of pain. They cross all genre divides, and smash them. This collection was edited by Kelly Link, herself a lighthouse of mine, and her work has common ground with Samatar’s, just as both of their work has common ground with everything else on this list. These are all authors whose works are sui generis, but who constitute a tribe of writer warriors as far as I’m concerned. Everyone here is an obliterator of tropes and received myth, a reviser of hierarchy, and a deeply skilled storyteller and maker of worlds. I can’t even believe I get to live in a time in which writers like the ones on this list exist, let alone get to have their brains feed mine.”

Jenn Northington, Bookriot
“A wide-ranging collection by an author who is as at home in a contemporary satire as she is in a beautifully atmospheric fable. For readers who love seeing what a master can do with short fiction.”

Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
“Samatar is a master at not only weaving imaginative tales, but deftly layering them with emotional truths. While some stories are playful, many are sad, and others are disturbing. Many of the stories are suspenseful, not necessarily because of their structures, but from not quite knowing the emotional terrain they’ll tackle. And yet it’s easy to trust Samatar as she takes you into unfamiliar territory with prose that is skillful, controlled, and lovely.”

Pain Is the Heaviest Thing: The Many Meanings of Tender by Sofia Samatar Reviewed by Sara Rauch
“On top of all that Tender has going for it, the poetry of Samatar’s language fairly sings off the page. Tender begs to be read out loud . . . ”

Ilana Teitelbaum, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A relentless, challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar’s Tender transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text, demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a way of getting under your skin.”

Jason Heller, NPR:
“Tender‘s longest story is also a science fiction tale set in the future — and like ‘The Red Thread,’ it toys with the ambiguity between dystopia and utopia. Told from the perspective of a child named Agar Black Hat, who lives in an extraterrestrial colony after cataclysmic climate change and a universal draft have forced a sect of religious pacifists from Earth, the story is a feast of ideas. It’s reminiscent of vintage Ursula K. Le Guin in its combination of social science and hard sci-fi, even as it probes the nature of belonging and belief.
“The book’s beating heart, though, is its title story. ‘Tender’ starts out with a clever play on words — ‘tender’ is used as a noun, as in, one who tends — and employs some tricky unreliable narration and splintered points-of-view. But Samatar’s virtuoso flourishes of form serve a higher purpose: They couch a quietly devastating account of a woman who gave up her life as a career woman and mother to become a cyborg, one who, alone, tends to a radioactive waste facility which she may never leave. While Samatar slowly unspools her character’s reasons for leaving her former life — delivering a primer on the haunting philosophies and damaged psyches of the scientists who gave us nuclear power along the way — ‘Tender’ redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. As does Tender as a whole.”

Lee Mandelo, Tor.com:
“I was also impressed with both of the pieces original to this collection. . . . ‘Fallow’ is the second original piece, a novella, and is by far the longest in the collection. It’s also the best novella I’ve read in quite some time. . . . a heady mix of science and grim hard-scrabble religious life in a dystopic and closeknit society. . . . I’d strongly recommend giving the literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected here a read. It’s as good as I’d hoped, and just as smart too.”

Gary K. Wolfe, Locus:
“Tender: Stories includes two excellent new pieces together with 18 reprints, and one of them, “Fallow”, is not only the longest story in the collection, but also her most complex and accomplished SF story to date. On the basis of her award-winning debut novel A Stranger in Olondria and its sequel The Winged Histories, Samatar’s reputation has been mostly that of a fantasist, and her most famous story, ‘‘Selkie Stories Are For Losers’’ (the lead selection here) seemed to confirm that reputation – although once Samatar establishes the parameters of her fantastic worlds, she works out both her plot details and cultural observations with the discipline of a seasoned SF writer and the psychological insight of a poet.”

7 Standout SFF Short Story Collections to Start Your Summer
“Sofia Samatar has made a name for herself as a fabulist with two critically acclaimed novels and numerous short works. Tender collects many of her shorter endeavors, from a field guide to ogres in Africa, to a story of young women experiencing an unusual event at summer camp, to one of a sapient brass automata’s father-daughter relationship with her creator. While, like all good fabulists, Samatar’s lyricism and atmosphere are pitch perfect, it is her unique grasp of character voices that puts Tender in the top tier.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.”

adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood:
“Sofia Samatar’s stories are just so good. Surprising. Suspenseful at an emotional level — I kept finding myself plummeted into an emotion face first, everything built up so steadily, with such subtle and meticulous storytelling. Samatar earns readers’ trust and uses it to take us into unexpected territory, to make us see ourselves in our power, in our messiness. Tender is the right word, so many of these stories touched into the place of gasping, or tears. Each story had me like, “Oh this is my favorite, I must mention this one.” But then I would read the next story which would be Another Whole Paradigm, similar only in that the writing was astonishing, each word so precise. This collection is an exquisite exploration of what otherness and belonging and place and language and love do to us all. It is visionary fiction. Please accept this as my enthusiastic recommendation to let this book have its way with you.”

Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls:
“Equal parts brutal and beautiful, flinty, and acrobatic, Samatar’s stories explore lesser known territories of the imagination. The results chime with all the strangeness of dream and the dark-hearted truth of fairytale. I loved it.”

Ben Loory, Tales of Flying and Falling
“If a library came alive, and spent ten thousand years walking up and down upon the earth, exploring and dreaming and falling in and out of love, it might write stories like these.”

David Connerley Nahm author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky:
“The stories in Sofia Samatar’s Tender are perfect and profound works of art written with the impossible ease of someone who has unlimited access to the secret knowledge of the exact right order in which words are supposed to go. The stories ring in sympathy with the reader like the favorite stories of childhood or youth or old age: Familiar and strange in the same proportion. These stories give you several new lives to live and with each reading–because you will read all of them several times–you discover new tales and new possibilities hidden within and you are filled endlessly with the pure pleasure of great literature.”

Publishers Weekly:
“The first collection from one of fantasy’s rising stars, showcasing her rich, lyrical language and intricate storytelling in 20 short works.”

Table of Contents

Tender Bodies
Selkie Stories Are for Losers
Ogres of East Africa
Walkdog
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
Olimpia’s Ghost
Honey Bear
How I Met the Ghoul
Those
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals
How to Get Back to the Forest

Tender Landscapes
Tender
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies
Dawn and the Maiden
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold
An Account of the Land of Witches
Request for an Extension on the Clarity
Meet Me in Iram
The Closest Thing to Animals
Fallow [excerpt]
The Red Thread

Praise for Sofia Samatar’s Books

“The excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make you run out and buy the book. Just don’t overlook her short “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” the best story about loss and love and selkies I’ve read in years.” —K. Tempest Bradford, NPR

“An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” —Hello Beautiful

“Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. . . . There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Samatar’s use of poetic yet unpretentious language makes her one of the best writers of today.” —Romantic Times Book Reviews (4.5/5 stars, Top Pick)

“If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language and can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, then read The Winged Histories.”
— Marion Deeds, Fantasy Literature

“Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Beauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story.”—Jason Heller, NPR

“Highly recommended.” —N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review

Previously

February 8 – 11, AWP Conference, Washington, DC
February 9, 10:30 a.m., Book signing, Small Beer Press table, Bookfair
February 11, 4:30 – 5:45 p.m., Panel: “The Short Story as Laboratory,” Marquis Salon 9 & 10, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two
March 24, 6:00 — 7:30 p.m., Virginia Festival of the Book, Panel: “Building (and Breaking) Worlds in Contemporary Science Fiction & Fantasy,” Central JMRL Library, Charlottesville, VA
May 18 – 21, Festival les Imaginales, Épinal, France

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Deactivated

Mon 8 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

The Small Beer Press Facebook page has been deactivated. Here’s my twitter and the opt-in only occasional email newsletter.

In other updates: we’ve acquired a new book, we’re about to acquire another, and we are flooded with submissions — still always open especially for novels and collections by women and writers of color.

Strangers in Strange Lands Bundle

Fri 5 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin

Vandana Singh’s Philip K. Dick finalist Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is one of a dozen books in the latest Storybundle, this one titled Strangers in Strange Lands and dedicated to the memory of the fierce, kind, excellent human being known as Vonda McIntyre. We sold out of Vandana’s book at AWP, and someone just hit me up to have her on their podcast, which is testimony to how far-reaching her writing is. If you’re not sure about picking up the paperback — now in its second printing — here’s an easy way to try the ebook:

AWP 2019, #8046

Mon 25 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Juan Martinez, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Later this week we’ll be one of a million publishers and journals and writing programs taking part in the bookfair at the annual AWP Conference.

I’ll be at Booth 8046 most of the time; Kelly will be there sometimes (see panels below and the next item), and our kid will be with us, swimming, living in Powell’s if she can, reading under the table, or selling zines . . . !

Zines?

Due to shipping snafus on my part — ugh, everything delayed by short term sickness, all gone now, phew — some of our books won’t be on the table until Friday, darn it, so Kelly and Ursula went into overdrive and made some zines:

ziiiiiiiines for AWP pic.twitter.com/rFBvptT5dE

— Karen Carpenter’s The Thing (@haszombiesinit) March 25, 2019

And here are a few things to potentially add to your sched. We will have copies of books by Kelly, Karen, Juan, and Abbey at their table signings.

Say hi if you’re there!

Thursday March 28
1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

R224A. Light is the Left Hand of Darkness: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. (Alexander Lumans, Emma Eisenberg, C Pam Zhang, David Naimon, Kelly Link) “Truth,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, “is a matter of the imagination.” In 2018, one of America’s greatest science fiction writers passed on, leaving behind a library of literary and social achievements. Through her imaginative narratives, she scrutinized politics, gender, and the environment, creating alternate worlds and new societies as a means to convey deeper truths about our own. This panel celebrates her influential work and pays tribute to her legacy.

Friday March 29

11:00 – 11:30am
Kelly Link
Table signing, #8046

4:30 – 5:45 pm
F149, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

F310. Speculative Fiction, Genre, and World-building in the Creative Writing Classroom. (Brenda Peynado, Ploi Pirapokin, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Trent Hergenrader) With more and more writers interested in speculative fiction, magical realism, and genre, how can workshops, teachers, and programs embrace all these forms? Panelists who teach in the Clarion Writers Workshop, UCLA Extension Programs, MFAs, and undergraduate programs discuss specific approaches to teaching, including speculative fiction in literary fiction workshops, classes and programs tailored for genre forms, and guiding students to build sound, imaginative, and diverse worlds.

Saturday March 30

10:30 – 11:00am
Karen Joy Fowler
Table signing, #8046

11:00 – 11:30am
Juan Martinez
Table signing, #8046

1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

S219. Getting Home: Writing & Publishing Debut POC Story Collections. (Ivelisse Rodriguez, YZ Chin, Abbey Mei Otis, Juan Martinez) Finding a home for a story collection is hard. It’s harder still for people of color writing about worlds bypassed by the larger reading public. This panel features debut authors whose collections explore what it means to speculate on racialized experience in the US, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. They discuss how perceptions of identity wind through issues of craft and cultural expectations: What do readers seek in their work? To what degree do authors fulfill or frustrate assumptions?

3:00pm to 3:30pm
Abbey Mei Otis
Table signing, #8046

Everything Falls into the Sea

Tue 19 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sarah Pinsker| Posted by: Gavin

Hey hey, it’s new book day! You have to wait 6 short months for her first novel but today it’s Happy Publication Day to Sarah Pinsker whose debut collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea we have been looking forward to seeing out in the world.

Sarah’s been busy in the run up to publication and you’ll find her all over ye internets today (i.e. interview by A. C. Wise · Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut” · Five Books That Gave Me Unreasonable Expectations for Post-High School Life · 6 Books) and there’ll be more of that in the next few days.

What’s Sarah up to tonight? She is launching her book tonight at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore!

Ok, so I’m not in Baltimore and you may not be either so what can you do?

You can listen to Liberty Hardy and María Cristina talk about the “jawdropping” Sooner or Later on Bookriot’s All the Books (now with T-shirt…!) and catch up with Sarah’s chat with Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan on the Coode Street Podcast.

If you can get to Baltimore in the next few hours you can get to that launch (yay!). If not, how about you catch her on tour:

March 19, 7 p.m. The Ivy Bookshop, Baltimore, MD
March 29, 6 p.m. Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC
— in conversation with Alexandra Duncan
March 30, 6 p.m. Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC
March 31, 5 p.m., The Cave c/o Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
April 24, 7 p.m. Charm City Spec series, Bird in Hand, Baltimore, MD
May 19, 5 p.m. Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
— with Rebecca Roanhorse
May 24-27, Balticon, Baltimore, MD
June 6, Barnes & Noble, NYC (Best of Asimov’s celebration)
July 12-14, Readercon, Quincy, MA
Sept. 18, 7 p.m. KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading, New York, NY

There will probably be some additional readings in there, too. Or if you’re not going to an event, you can read or share a couple of stories:

And We Were Left Darkling
In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind
No Lonely Seafarer
And Then There Were (N-One)

What did other people think? They like it!

— “Pinsker’s stories nestle in the cracks of our world.” — Sara Ramey, The Arkansas International
— “haunting and hopeful.” — Booklist (starred review)
— “delightful and surprising.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
— “in the speculative tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kelly Link.” — Kirkus Reviews
— “none should try to resist.” — Foreword Reviews (starred review)

That’s maybe enough links for publication day. Check it out!

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea

Tue 19 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731555 | ebook · 9781618731562

A wide-ranging debut collection from a writer whose musicality and humor shine through even when plumbing the darkest depths of space.

Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award
World Fantasy Award finalist
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Books of 2019
Booklist: Top 10 Debut SF&F

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is one of the most anticipated sf&f collections of recent years. Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula award wins.

The baker’s dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present. The journey is the thing as Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.

Interviews:
— Story and Song: an interview by Ilana C. Myer
— An interview by A. C. Wise
— Dazzling Debut Includes Infinite Sarah Pinskers interviewed by Ian McDowell in Yes

Read:
— Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (on Powell’s blog)
— Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut on the Library of America site
— Five Books That Gave Me Unreasonable Expectations for Post-High School Life on Tor.com
— 6 Books with Sarah Pinsker: Nerds of a Feather

Listen:
— Sarah on the Coode Street Podcast

Table of Contents

A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide
And We Were Left Darkling
Remembery Day
Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea
The Low Hum of Her
Talking with Dead People
The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced
In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind
No Lonely Seafarer
Wind Will Rove
Our Lady of the Open Road
The Narwhal
And Then There Were (N-One)

Reviews
“Compelling science fiction and fantasy stories, many featuring LGBTQIA characters, some about music. Anyone with a common name will appreciate this collection’s culminating story, ‘And Then There Were (N-One).’”
— Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, Best Books of 2019

We’re only a handful of months into the new year, but I’m pretty sure that Sarah Pinsker’s collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea will be the best book I read in 2019. If I’m wrong, I’ve got something really special to look forward to, because the quality of these stories is simply stellar . . . The point is that each of the stories is unlike the others, yet they make for a cohesive collection because of Pinsker’s narrative voice that runs like a thread from the first story to the last. The language is expressive and beautiful and starkly down-to-earth, and while inventive and curious elements abound, the focus is always on the characters. I love the sense of hope that permeates even the most hopeless of situations. I love the way the characters, their problems, and the settings they move through stay with me beyond the confines of the book’s pages. I love every damn thing about these stories. When I got to the last page I was already looking forward to rereading them. Highly recommended.”
— Charles de Lint, The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction

“Compelling science fiction and fantasy.”
— Des Moines Register

“Sarah Pinsker’s debut short story collection is speculative and strange, exploring such wide-ranging scenarios as a young man receiving a prosthetic arm with its own sense of identity, a family welcoming an AI replicate of their late Bubbe into their home, or an 18th century seaport town trying to survive a visit by a pair of sirens — all while connecting them in a book that feels cohesive. The stories are insightful, funny, and imaginative, diving into the ways humans might invite technology into their relationships.”
— Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

“This was my first time reading Pinsker, and she BLEW MY MIND. . . . These 13 stories are wildly original and, frankly, jaw-dropping. A man’s new prosthetic arm dreams that it is a road in Colorado; the dream children of childless parents sun themselves on the rocks like seals; a rock star washes up on an island, where she is rescued by a recluse. So. Many. Amazing. Stories. My favorite might be the last story, in which a bunch of Sarah Pinskers attend a writer’s conference, where one of them is murdered. Every story was unlike anything I had read before, as well as smart and fun, which is everything I want from a story collection. RUN, DON’T WALK.”
—Liberty Hardy, Bookriot

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea cannot be recommended enough for fans of LGBT+ sci-fi and fantasy. Pinsker’s collection has such a range and depth to it storytelling and emotional resonance that the reader will be left in complete awe after reading any chosen story. Pinsker’s collection invites the reader to truly imagine and be taken by her stories, and to see that, while the future may be full of frightening, there’s still a humanness that can be found in any corner of the universe or multiverse, and that by exploring as much as we can, there’s a way to end the journey more in tune with the space around them.”
— Alexander Carrigan, Lambda Literary

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea is a collection where societal boundaries are both porous and rigid. To an extent, Pinsker is arguing that it’s those who exist outside of clearly designed roles are also the most perceptive about the flaws and mysteries of a given society, whether it’s a longstanding one or a temporary one that will dissipate after a certain event takes place. But, as is the case in “Our Lady of the Open Road,” she also notes that societies and cultures can often overlap, and an outsider in one society might well be an insider in another. Throughout the book, Pinsker demonstrates a virtuosity in creating lived-in worlds, but her real talent on display here is finding the ambiguous and liminal spaces within those worlds. There are no easy answers in these stories, but the questions Pinsker raises can be just as satisfying.”
— Tobias Carroll, Tor.com

“Jawdropping.” — Liberty Hardy, Bookriot

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea is Pinsker’s first collection. It’s a book that every SF reader needs to own. . . . Her impact on the field, already considerable, is only just beginning.” — Don Sakers, Analog SF&F

“One of the year’s most anticipated collections is even better than advertised.”
— Joe Sherrry, Nerds of a Feather

“Pinsker’s style is clean and intimate, rich with emotion, but not a single unearned sentiment. Her characters are lovable portraits of self-frustration: good, flawed people confronted with too much loss and liking none of their options, with a talent for creative destruction.”
— Theodore McCombs, Fiction Unbound

“Sarah Pinsker’s stories nestle in the cracks of our world with strange concepts that resound emotionally with the reader.”
— Sara Ramey, The Arkansas International

“The 13 stories collected here vary in length, from the almost-micro-fiction of ‘The Sewell Home for the Temporarily Displaced,’ to the novella-length ‘And Then There Were (n-1),’ a nominee for both the Hugo and Nebula last year that posits what might happen if an author (Sarah Pinsker) attended a convention for her alternate selves from alternate dimensions, and then one of them started murdering the others. The collection is worth the cover price for that story alone, to be honest; that there are a dozen others, including the moving ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,’ which deals with a woman’s grief at the loss she feels after her husband’s stroke leaves him unable to talk (also a Nebula finalist), is frankly more than we deserve.”
— Jeff Somers, B&N, The Best SF&F of March

“A must-have first collection.” — Rich Horton, Locus

“Like all innovative short fiction writers, and despite her recurrent concerns with memory and music, Pinsker’s cardinal strength lies in her unpredictability. This may be one reason why she opens her collection with two stories unlike any others in their surreality. In ‘A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide’ a Canadian farm boy whose arm has been ripped off by a combine is fitted with a high-tech prototype prosthetic, which inexplicably feeds back to him the impression that he’s on a remote Colorado highway – or may be a remote Colorado highway. The second story, ‘And We Were Left Darkling’, may borrow a bit of its hallucinatory group obsession from Close Encounters of the Third Kind but the disparate group of dreamers here are drawn to a remote beach in California, where their might-have-been dream babies appear by the hundreds out of the surf. It’s an absurdist conceit, but Pinsker’s lovely, elegiac narrative voice makes it oddly convincing. As with so many of the stories here, it’s a voice resonant with feeling and desire. Maybe it’s the voice of a singer. ”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Her first collection showcases a talent that resonates with classic grandmasters of the past — folks like Bradbury, Ellison, and Sturgeon — and also vibrates to contemporary forces, such as Karen Russell, Jonathan Lethem, and Kelly Link. This generous assemblage from Small Beer stands out as one of the best debuts in recent years, and should serve to introduce her to a wider audience than just those folks who fervently follow the genre magazines.”
— Paul Di Filippo, Locus

“Pinsker’s stories have murder houses that speak, dream children that emerge from the sea, and a car shaped like a narwal, but the heart of this debut collection lies in its people. The women protagonists, many of whom love women, are adapting to or resisting new ways of life: a punk musician insists on playing live and driving manually while her world depends on recorded immersive experiences and self-driving cars; a girl adjusts to a robotic grandmother as she and her father leave their home country; in ‘Wind Will Rove,’ a community that left Earth long ago asks why it still holds on so tightly to Earth’s history and art and whether it should let go of it entirely in order to embrace the new. A particular highlight is ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,’ a story primarily about Millie’s impeding loss of her husband, where the sf gem at its core takes a backseat to the tree house George built with his children and to the question of whether he did his best to make the world a better place. This collection from an exciting new voice in speculative fiction is both haunting and hopeful.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker’s best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling. In the opening story, an injured farmer adjusts to living with a cybernetic arm that thinks it is a stretch of road in Colorado. ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind’ tells the story of a woman piecing together her husband’s enigmatic past after a stroke leaves him speechless. ‘No Lonely Seafarer’ pits a stablehand against a pair of sirens as he attempts to save his town from its restless sailors. In all of Pinsker’s tales, humans grapple with their relationships to technology, the supernatural, and one another. Some, such as Ms. Clay in ‘Wind Will Rove,’ are trying to navigate the space between technology as preservation and technology as destruction. Others, such as Kima in ‘Remembery Day,’ rely on technology to live their lives. The stories are enhanced by a diverse cast of LGBTQ and nonwhite characters. Pinsker’s captivating compendium reveals stories that are as delightful and surprising to pore through as they are introspective and elegiac.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In her debut collection, widely lauded author/musician Pinsker zips through road trips, space ships, speculative futures, and parallel presents with stories that are equal parts hard-wired sci-fi theory and hard-traveling rock-and-roll attitude. The 13 short stories that make up this collection range from near novella length—’Our Lady of the Open Road,’ ‘Wind Will Rove,’ and the phenomenal ‘And Then There Were (N-One)’—to the very brief—’The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced,’ which clocks in at a little under three pages. Their subject matter is equally diverse. In ‘A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,’ the main character’s mangled arm has been replaced with a ‘Brain-Computer Interface’ prosthetic which believes itself to be a road somewhere in Colorado; in ‘The Low Hum of Her,’ a family undertakes an Ellis Island-esque immigration accompanied by an AI mechanical replicate of their departed Bubbe hidden in the steamer trunk. With stories that jump from divergent pasts to possible futures and include main characters of all age ranges, genders, and social backgrounds, it would be easy for the book to become disjointed. However, Pinsker’s undeniable talent for familiarizing characters caught in deeply unfamiliar situations (a treehouse that hides an alien race’s architectural salvation; an 18th-century seaport town beset by sirens; folk musicians on a generational star ship whose destination they will not live to see) brings a uniting element of empathy to even the most far-fetched conceit. There are also similarities between the thematic preoccupations of the individual works. Pinsker’s characters are often loners dedicated to idiosyncratic artistic pursuits—like fiddling in space or building scale models of murder houses. They are stubborn adherents to codes of authenticity that their worlds have abandoned, and the stories’ plots tend to center around their revolts against conventional (or fantastical) social norms. Populated by anarchists, punks, survivalists, luddites, drifters, and rock-and-roll queers, Pinsker’s stories romp through their conceits with such winning charm that even the less successfully cohesive among them delight with their nuanced detail. In spite of being hampered slightly by a tendency to invest more in the worldbuilding than in the culmination of plot, Pinsker has delivered a sturdy collection in the speculative tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kelly Link but with her own indomitable voice front and center. An auspicious start to what promises to be one wild ride of a literary career.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Yearning manifests itself into something tangible; it congeals, breathes, and breaks the barriers between dreams and reality. . . . Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is a collection whose musing visions none should try to resist.”
— Foreword Reviews (starred review)

Advance Praise

“This collection of stories is simply wonderful. Each story is generous and original; as a collection, the tales are varied, but with recurring themes of memory and music through-out. Pinsker has emerged as one of our most exciting voices and I’m glad to note that I’m not the only one who thinks so. I love this book completely.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves

“A collection of virtuosic range, imagination, and subtlety. Sarah Pinsker’s mastery works at a deep level, eschewing showy displays or baroque prose. Many of the stories are set in a dystopic, all-too-believable future not far removed from our own, with a tone and focus reminiscent of Alice Munro.”
— Ilana C. Myer, author of Last Song Before Night

“Sarah Pinsker plays genre like a favorite guitar, and I am in awe of her talents. How can a writer so new be so central, so necessary? High-concept and humane, timely and timeless, these stories are 21st-century classics.”
— Andy Duncan, author of An Agent of Utopia

Praise for Sarah Pinsker:

“Sarah Pinsker’s ‘Wind Will Rove’ is a story about the folk process, and memory, and the occasional importance of forgetting. . . . Thoughtful and quite moving.”
—Rich Horton, Locus Magazine

“The last and best story in the issue, in my view, is the piece by Sarah Pinsker.”
—Alastair Reynolds

“A bittersweet tale containing elements of the fantastic, but at the same time, very much rooted in real and relatable loss and pain. There is a beautiful subtlety to this story. It never hits the reader over the head with the speculative element, leaving much of that side of the story between the lines. Pinsker handles the sub- text so deftly that two full stories present themselves to the reader, even though only one is fully outlined on the page.”
— A. C. Wise, SF Signal

“Beautiful, bittersweet tale. Just perfect.” — SF Revu

“This is my favorite Pinsker story to date — a thoughtful, subtle piece about the lures and traps of memory.”
— Rachel Swirsky, Locus

“The fine folks at Uncanny just published their first ever (short) novella in #15, and it’s wonderful. Sarah Pinsker’s story of a convention — SarahCon — for Sarah’s from thousands of alternate reality might be my favorite novella of the last several years, to be honest. It’s smart and funny and thoughtful in perfect proportions. It was enchanting from page one, and it’s a story and concept that has been often on my mind ever since I read it.” —
SF Bluestocking

Previously

March 13-16, ICFA, Orlando, FL
March 16, 7 p.m. Functionally Literate, Orlando, FL
March 29, 6 p.m. Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC
— in conversation with Alexandra Duncan
March 30, 6 p.m. Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC
March 31, 5 p.m., The Cave c/o Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
April 24, Charm City Spec.
May 19, 3 p.m. Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
— with Rebecca Roanhorse
May 23, 6:30 p.m., East City Bookshop, Washington, DC
— with Meg Elison
May 24-27, Balticon, Baltimore, MD
July 12-14, Readercon, Quincy, MA

About the Author

Sarah Pinsker‘s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the Locus, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first novel, Song For A New Day, will be published in autumn 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth she swears will be released someday soon. She was born in New York and has lived all over the US and Canada, but currently lives with her wife in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines. @sarahpinsker

2018 SBP x Locus

Mon 25 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Andy Duncan, Claire G. Coleman, John Schoffstall, LCRW, Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin

Following up on my earlier 2018 wrap-up, I’d meant to post something near the start of February about the 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List but so it goes. The whole issue is worth digging into if you like weird or sff&h or genre fiction at all as between these reviewers they’ve tried to see everything that came out last year. Not everything is included in their write up but many are and I’m proud to say that 4 of our books and 3 stories we published in collections and one in LCRW were included.

I’m going to start with a lovely quote from Gary K. Wolfe and then put some reviews for each title:

It’s worth noting that three of these collections (Singh, Otis, and Duncan) came from Small Beer Press, which has become a reliable source for innovative short fiction collections.
— Gary K. Wolfe

2018 Locus Recommended Reading List

Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
“An Agent of Utopia”, Andy Duncan (An Agent of Utopia)
“Joe Diabo’s Farewell”, Andy Duncan (An Agent of Utopia)

“Dying Light”, Maria Romasco Moore (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #37, 7/18)

Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster

John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
“Requiem”, Vandana Singh (Ambiguity Machines)

Readers can go and vote for their own favorites in the Locus Poll and Survey (deadline 4/15).

Reviews

Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories

“A major short story collection.” — Jonathan Strahan

“An essential short fiction collection in a year that saw many good ones. Singh’s superb work has appeared in a wide range of venues, and it is good to have a representative selection in one place.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

“Other highly recommended titles are Half-Witch from John Schoffstall, a traditional fantasy except that the sun orbits the world and God takes part as a not-very-helpful character . . .” – Laurel Amberdine

“Though billed as YA, had plenty for all to chew on in its vision of a magic-inflected Europe and a protagonist with a direct (if interference-riddled) line to God.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

P.S. We just sold audio rights to Tantor on this title so listen out for that later this year.

Claire G. Coleman · Terra Nullius

“Searing.” — Gary K. Wolfe

Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster

“Abbey Mei Otis publishes in literary journals as well as SF magazines, so many of the weird SF and fantasy-infused stories in Alien Virus Love Disaster will be new and delightful for our readers.” — Tim Pratt

Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia

“Andy Duncan – in what might well be the collection of the year – invoked everyone from Sir Thomas More to Zora Neal Hurston in An Agent of Utopia, which also brought together some of his most evocative tales about the hidden corners of Americana, from an afterlife for Delta blues singers to the travails of an aging UFO abductee.” — Gary K. Wolfe

“. . . a book that showcased why he is a treasure.” — Jonathan Strahan

“An essential introduction to one of the great tellers of fantastic tall tales.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

“Andy Duncan’s charming and affable stories abound with hidden depths, and An Agent of Utopia is no different, with a dozen stories, including a pair of originals that are generating a lot of buzz.” — Tim Pratt

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

“My very favorite story this year may have been another story from a veteran of both SF and Mystery: ‘Dayenu’, by James Sallis, from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. It’s an exceedingly odd and unsettling story, beautifully written, about a veteran of a war and his rehab – from injuries? Or something else done to him? And then about a journey, and his former partners. . . . The story itself a journey somewhere never unexpected.” — Rich Horton

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 39

Mon 25 Feb 2019 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

June 2019. 60 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731579

Fiction, poetry, a little nonfiction (including a lovely recipe for pickled kumquats), and an absurd amount of hope and despair.

This is the issue in which we promised your neighbor’s secrets would be exposed. Your secrets too. The secrets, they have been exposed. Check CNN or your news purveyor of choice right now. Or look under that thing at the back of your fridge. The list of neighborhood secrets should be there on a very small piece of paper we are proud to have folded 12 times. Some people find the 9th through 12th folds difficult, but these wristlets, they really make the difference.

Reviews

“. . . there is some fine work here. ‘The Dynastic Arrangements of the Habsburgs, Washakie Branch’ by Felix Kent is a really odd story set in hotel in which a number of (apparently) cloned samples of European royalty stay, for the entertainment of the paying guests. That doesn’t seem to be a smashing success financially, and it’s a pain for the narrator, who has to keep the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns from causing too much trouble, and then deal with some guests who turn out to be plotting something awful . . . and who has her own personal past driving her. . . . but it’s quite original, and generally entertaining. There’s also a very short, quite effective, charming story by Eric Darby, ‘The Parking Witch’, about, well, a witch who can fix your parking problems.”
— Rich Horton, Locus

Table of Contents

fiction

Rosamund Lannin, The Lake House
Eliza Langhans, A Giant’s Heart
D. A. Xiaolin Spires, Fresh and Imminent Taste of Cucumbers
Anthony Ha, Late Train
Chloe N. Clark, Jumpers
Felix Kent, Dynastic Arrangements of the Habsburgs, Washakie Branch 38
Eric Darby, The Parking Witch
Jordan Taylor, Strange Engines
Audrey R. Hollis, How to be Afraid

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Sugar-Salt Time: A Love Story
Gavin J. Grant Possum, Not Playing

poetry

A. B. Robinson, The Will and Testament of François Villon
Robert Cooperman As They Row to the Killing Ground, Plaxis Considers His Partner, Meres

cover

Cynthia Yuen Cheng, “Gentrification”

Reviews

“The execution is deceptively simple, and leaves echoes of myth and mystery and questions about the nature of man. It is an excellent story.”
— Vernacular Books on Eliza Langhans’s story “A Giant’s Heart”

About

This is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 39, June 2019. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731579. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is (usually) published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress @ gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw · Printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Subscriptions: $20/4 issues. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

About these Authors

Cynthia Yuan Cheng is a freelance cartoonist based in Los Angeles, CA. She strives to share hope and warmth through her illustrations and comics as she explores relationships, identity, and personal experience.

Chloe N. Clark’s work has appeared in Apex, Booth, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. She teaches multimodal communication, writes for Nerds of a Feather, and co-edits Cotton Xenomorph. Her chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is available from Finishing Line Press and she can be found on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.

Robert Cooperman’s latest collection is Draft Board Blues and his next, That Summer, is forthcoming. Cooperman won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry with In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, North American Review, and California Quarterly.

Eric Darby earned engineering degrees from the University of Detroit-Mercy and an MFA from Syracuse University. His writing has appeared in Sentence, Mid-American Review, and several spoken word anthologies. He is currently parked in San Francisco.

Anthony Ha writes about media and technology for the news site TechCrunch. Love Songs for Monsters, a chapbook of his short stories, was published by Youth in Decline in 2014. He lives in Brooklyn.

Audrey R. Hollis, 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, is an MFA candidate at Purdue University. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, the Los Angeles Review, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @audreyrhollis.

Felix Kent lives in Northern California.

Nicole Kimberling lives in Washington state and is the publisher of Blind Eye Books. Her books include Lambda Literary Award winner Turnskin. Her column has been running in LCRW since issue no. 27.

Eliza Langhans is a librarian and writer who lives in Western Massachusetts with her family.

The product of nine years in San Francisco and eight years in St. Paul, Rosamund Lannin has been reading and writing in Chicago for over a decade. These days, you can find her @rosamund most places on the Internet, co-hosting lady live lit show Miss Spoken, or in spirit anywhere magic and reality hold hands.

A. B. Robinson’s enthusiasms are for revolution and poetry, in that order. Their screaming Freudian id is François Villon, who also happens to be a French poet, thief, murderer, exile, grad student and miscreant, born on the day Jeanne d’Arc burned at the cross. A. B. Robinson’s life has not been nearly so exciting as Villon’s. Yet. They live in Holyoke with their dog.

D. A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Eye to the Telescope, and numerous anthologies. Her stories are available or forthcoming in German, Vietnamese or Estonian translation. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

Jordan Taylor has driven across the US three times, and lived in four different cities in as many years. She currently resides in Seattle, WA with her husband, their corgi, and too many books for one small apartment. Her short fiction has recently appeared in On Spec and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can follow her online at jordanrtaylor.com, or on Twitter @JordanRTaylor13.

Life Was So Wonderful

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Laurie J. Marks, Publication day| Posted by: Gavin

In 2004 I was still the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for BookPage and was very happy to see that Laurie J. Marks was about to publish her second Elemental Logic novel Earth Logic. I jumped on the opportunity to review it:

Laurie Marks’s rich and affecting new novel Earth Logic is the second book in her Elemental Logic series which began with Fire Logic (warmly reviewed here in May 2002). . . . Earth Logic is a thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics between two groups of people. Good bread, wine and friendships alone may not save the world, but they make the doing of it much more palatable.

At the end of 2010 Laurie’s agent contacted us with the news that rights to Fire Logic and Earth Logic were available and were we interested in them since we had published the third novel in the series, Water Logic?

Yes!

We started talking with the ever excellent Kathleen Jennings about covers for the whole series and we slowly moved to re-release them, first as ebooks, and now, with the publication of Air Logic in sight(!), in new print editions.

Every time I work on any of these four novels I am drawn once again into the stories within stories. Sometimes readers who don’t read fantasy novels ask why I love to read them and page after page these books provide such a strong answer. Here is a story of power held, relinquished, and shared. A story of families found, lost, made, and remade. A meeting of enemies who must learn to live with one another, or die trying. A story of those at the top, those at the bottom, and those that feed them. These are stories that were relevant when published and even more so now.

So on this cold day here in Western Massachusetts, where the temperature is definitely still below freezing — with all the pre-orders shipped, new review copies all sent out, and the book itself wending its way to your favorite indie bookstore — we raise a cup of tea to the (re)publication of Laurie J. Marks’s second Elemental Logic novel, Earth Logic.

Earth Logic

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

February 19, 2019 · trade paper · $16 · 9781618730930 | ebook · 9781618730947 · Edelweiss

New edition with interlocking cover art by Kathleen Jennings now available.
Elemental Logic: Book 2
Spectrum Award winner

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

A thought-provoking sometimes heartbreaking novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics and power shifts between oppressed and oppressor.

The second book of Shaftal. The country has a ruler again, Karis, a woman who can heal the war-torn land and expel the invaders. But she lives in obscurity with her fractious found family. With war and disease spreading, Karis must act. And when Karis acts, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.

Read an excerpt. Listen to the author read Chapter 2 or “Raven’s Joke”

See the Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

Reviews

“With this follow-up to Fire Logic, Marks produces another stunner of a book. The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart. Definitely for the thinking reader.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“The sequel to Fire Logic continues the tale of a woman born to magic and destined to rule. Vivid descriptions and a well-thought-out system of magic.”
— Library Journal

“Twenty years after the invading Sainnites won the Battle of Lilterwess, the struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel to Fire Logic. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Rich and affecting. . . . A thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel.”
— BookPage

“Intelligent, splendidly visualized, and beautifully written. Laurie Marks’s use of language is really tremendous.”
— Paula Volsky

“A dense and layered book filled with complex people facing impossible choices. Crammed with unconventional families, conflicted soldiers, amnesiac storytellers, and practical gods, the story also finds time for magical myths of origin and moments of warm, quiet humor. Against a bitter backdrop of war and winter, Marks offers hope in the form of various triumphs: of fellowship over chaos, the future over the past, and love over death.”
— Sharon Shinn

“A powerful and hopeful story where the peacemakers are as heroic as the warriors; where there is magic in good food and flower bulbs; and where the most powerful weapon of all is a printing press.”
— Naomi Kritzer

“Earth Logic is not a book of large battles and heart-stopping chases; rather, it’s more gradual and contemplative and inexorable, like the earth bloods who people it. It’s a novel of the everyday folk who are often ignored in fantasy novels, the farmers and cooks and healers. In this novel, the everyday lives side by side with the extraordinary, and sometimes within it; Karis herself embodies the power of ordinary, mundane methods to change the world.”
— SF Revu

“It is an ambitious thing to do, in this time of enemies and hatreds, to suggest that a conflict can be resolved by peaceable means. Laurie Marks believes that it can be done, and she relies relatively little on magic to make it work.”
— Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

Praise for Fire Logic, Elemental Logic: Book 1

* “Marks has created a work that is filled with an intelligence that zings off the page. . . . This beautifully written novel includes enough blood and adventure to satisfy the most quest-driven readers.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict.” — Robin Hobb

Fire Logic and Earth Logic both received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

Cover art by Kathleen Jennings.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Stars

Mon 18 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sarah Pinsker, starred review| Posted by: Gavin

Such good news for next month’s release of Sarah Pinsker’s collection: a third starred review! This lovely review is courtesy of the fine folks at Booklist:

Feb. 20: Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, & Jordy Rosenberg

Wed 13 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, Northampton & environs, readings| Posted by: Gavin

(from Forbes Library’s press release)

The third reading in the Forbes Library Writer in Reading Series “Our Work And Why We Do It” is Wednesday, February 20th, from 7-9pm in the Coolidge Museum at Forbes, featuring three brilliant fiction writers:

Kelly Link
author of “Get in Trouble”, “Magic for Beginners”,
“Stranger Things Happen” and more!

Abbey Mei Otis
visiting from Ohio and author of “Alien Virus Love Disaster”;
first reading from this collection in the area!

Jordy Rosenberg
author of “Confessions of the Fox”
(a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection)

~this event is FREE and Wheelchair Accessible~

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the event!

(You can read more about the writers here on the library’s website and here on Facebook!)

This series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is interested in exploring how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. The series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

I’ve been calling this reading In The Offing, an attempt to name a theme I feel captures the character these writers share. While diverse in formally adventurous ways, each carves a unique path toward futures portended in the murk and bright of the present or dredge different possibilities for histories buried in the past. They contain, in the richness of their visions and the lyricism of their articulations, a spirit that echoes Ernst Bloch in his demand for utopia: “that is why we go, why we cut new metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears…”

To learn more about the writers and their worlds, you can find a brief interview with Kelly Link from the MacArthur Foundation here, the title story from Abbey Mei Otis’ collection here (with an introduction by Dan Chaon), an interview with Jordy Rosenberg here, and an excerpt from his novel here.

Also, on February 7th, Jordy will be reading at UMASS Amherst as part of their Visiting Writers series! More info here.

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