NPR Best of the Year

Wed 30 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, Elwin Cotman, LCRW, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

In 2020 like everyone else in the world we rang the changes pretty hard. Our kid has been remote schooled (i.e. at home) since March, we closed Book Moon to walk-in browsing and ran it as a phone, online, and curbside pickup joint, and ran ourselves as hard as we could just to stand still.

Here’s an indented aside on Book Moon: it’s a small, local bookshop with an outsize national and international reach and those two facts kept it alive this year. We have a small staff, 4 smart and hardworking part-time booksellers, me and Kelly, and Kelly’s mother, an invaluable volunteer. We worked either as the 2 of us (plus kid doing school) or either Jed or Amanda alone in the store. On weekends in autumn and winter, Franchie worked outside as a carnival barker — although everyone has mixed feelings about actually trying to attract more people to the store. Having only one person in the store at a time was tough. I’m glad we only have one phone line and appreciate people leaving messages.

Every month at Book Moon has been our best month — but some of that is just us having fun with words. March to October sales were flat flat flat. We took out a small PPP loan which I think will be turned into a grant. Our landlords gave us a truly needed break on the rent — it was the difference between breaking even and losing money. All that aside, sure, these were our best March, April, May, June, July, August, September, and even October yet. November 2020 was 20% up on November 2019. December 2020 beat (THANKS ALL!) our actual best month so far, December 2019 — but woah what a different kind of work all these phone and internet orders are.

Book Moon is part of Bookshop.org. Do I want to only have a Bookshop site? No. Do I think it’s a good thing? People love it and if it gets them off the crappiness that is Am*zon, all the better.

I hoped and expected sales to grow this year. Easthampton has been very welcoming to having its own bookstore. But I also expected to have 1-3 booksellers in the store each day who were not Kelly or me. Covid meaning only us or 1 person at a time in the store has meant squeezing time for Small Beer pretty hard. Will it change? Yes. Soon? No.

So we ran ourselves hard because what we are doing, publishing books, running a bookshop, putting out a zine, is what we really want to keep doing. Do I want 750 Book Moons around the country or to publish 120 books a year? Not really. Do I like this what we’re doing? Yes!

So as purveyors of the written word — be it in printed book form, ebook, audiobook, zine, or T-shirt format — to readers local and far flung we are pretty damned grateful to still be around here at the end of December 2020 and to be (knock on wood, wearing a mask, washing hands) healthy. We’d like to do this for some years to come so we owe you thanks for buying books from us, borrowing them from a library, attending events, picking them up used, reviewing and sharing them.

In 2020 we published one new book (1), one TV tie-in (2), brought two books back into print (3) in new editions (as well as innumerable reprints, but that might be too much for me to go find), and published two issues of LCRW (41 — the free one, 42 — the answer, of course).

1.  Elwin Cotman, Dance on Saturday: Stories
   — Karen Russell, “In addition to being wildly inventive, is also so goddamn funny.”
   — and the reason for the title of this post. It really is an amazing read.
   
2. Nathan Ballingrud, Monsterland
   — if you watch the show on Hulu try and match the stories to the episodes.
3. (i) Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss
   — Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review: <“Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary series began in 2008 with Generation Loss, a startling and addictive novel that introduced a protagonist fueled by drugs and post-punk irreverence.
   — More news on book 2 & 3 in the Cass Neary series in early 2021.
   (ii) Susan Stinson, Martha Moody
   — Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews: “An exuberant, cheeky Western in which sensual hunger steers an offbeat homesteader toward freedom.”

Other things that happened: since a friend talked us into joining the local Hot Chocolate Walk me and the kid have joined 6,000+ people in early December on a walk to raise money for a local shelter organization, Safe Passage. This year there was no walk but of course Safe Passage still needs the funds so we put up our page and it was just beyond inspiring and so lovely to see people from all over the country donate. Thanks, all. I continue to review zines for Xerography Debt and really enjoy the different views of the world represented in zines.

Weightless Books continues along as a half decent DRM-free independent alternative ebookstore. Next year, time willing, Michael and I have a few ideas to freshen it up. But that would be after everything else gets done.

In LCRW news, a story from #40, Michael Byers’s “Sibling Rivalry” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld. We gave away #41 to print and electronic subscribers to provide a moment of joy for one and all. This year has been so crappy, sending out a couple of hundred free zines was a respite.

This was a year in which we writers sent us longer stories that caught us by surprise. From LCRW 42, Sarah Langan’s You Have the Prettiest Mask was excerpted on Lithub and there were 2 long stories in LCRW 41, Rachel Ayers, “Magicians & Grotesques” and David Fawkes’s “Letterghost.”

We have quite a backlog of good things to come for LCRW. Will 2021 be the year we manage 3 issues? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I know we are publishing collections from Alaya Dawn Johnson, Isabel Yap, Jeffrey Ford, Zen Cho, and one more writer late in the year, perhaps there will be space for another LCRW in there somewhere.

 

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Their power to unsettle is unmatched

Tue 22 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap, Tamsyn Muir| Posted by: Gavin

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Plunging you down into the murkiest depths with the gentlest touch

Mon 21 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Cadwell Turnbull, Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

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Sharp and vivid and gritty

Sun 20 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap, Sam J. Miller| Posted by: Gavin

In February we’ll publish Isabel Yap’s debut collection, Never Have I Ever, and everyone will have a chance to read everything at once like Sam J. Miller or parcel it out, one story at a time:

“Isabel Yap’s stories are somehow sharp and vivid and gritty at the same time as they’re timeless and mythic; I’ve been a shameless strung-out addict for years now, and I’m so excited to have this splendid overdose in my hands. And to watch as a whole new audience gets hooked on these stories drenched in heartache and salt water, folklore and monsters and gorgeous prose.”  — Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City

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Playful weirdness and mind-expanding terror

Sat 19 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Charlie Jane Anders, Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

One of the earliest responses to Isabel Yap’s forthcoming debut collection, Never Have I Ever, was this lovely paragraph from Charlie Jane Anders:

“Isabel Yap’s prose is a constant delight and her characters are endlessly rich and fascinating. I’m in awe of her capacity for playful weirdness and mind-expanding terror. These gorgeous stories will help you to glimpse a world that is both stranger and more immense and varied than any you’ve visited before. My head is just full of images and feelings and ideas after reading these wondrous tales. Isabel Yap is a writer to watch out for, and you need to experience her brilliance for yourself.”
— Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night

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Gossip over the breakfast table

Fri 18 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alyssa Wong, Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

In the third morning of advance reader reaction to Isabel Yap’s debut collection, Never Have I Ever, we have an early reactions from Alyssa Wong, the award-winning author of Doctor Aphra:

“Never Have I Ever is a stunning, lyrical debut by one of SFF’s brightest voices. Isabel Yap’s stories are luminous. Intimate and tender, hilarious and cruel, they cut straight to the bone. This collection is full of deft, painful portrayals of Filipino girlhood, queerness, and struggling to find a place in the world. They remind me of being in my lola’s house in Manila, listening to my titas and titos gossip over the breakfast table. Yap’s stories feel like coming home.”

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Shy witches, beautiful elementals, bloody and watery monsters

Thu 17 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Knox, Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

On February 9th everyone will get their chance to read Isabel Yap’s debut collection, Never Have I Ever. This week we have some early reactions:

“These stories of shy witches, beautiful elementals, bloody and watery monsters, miracles and tender-hearted machines, are written with color and crisp precision, and all their startling invention is firmly grounded in our own familiar and endlessly surprising world.
— Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book

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Weird vitality, crossed by ghosts, monsters, and above all, stories

Wed 16 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

In February we’ll publish Isabel Yap’s debut collection, Never Have I Ever. This week we’re going to post some early reactions from those who’ve had a chance to read an early edition:

“Isabel Yap’s fiction channels the wary energy of meeting places: schools, hospitals, offices, hotels. In her work, the spaces of everyday life brim with weird vitality, crossed by ghosts, monsters, and above all, stories.”
— Sofia Samatar, author of Tender

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Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof at the Potluck

Tue 15 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, cooking, LCRW 30, Nicole Kimberling| Posted by: Gavin

This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s fourth column for LCRW and was originally published in LCRW 30. (It’s a different world, the past.)

If in your lifetime you ever make any friends, join any organizations, or have any children, chances are you will be required to attend a potluck. Part minefield, part gladiatorial arena, this bring-a-dish event is a place where home cooks test their recipes against the heartless democracy of fellow eaters. At the end of the meal, you do not want the leaden and congealed uneaten casserole that you brought sitting there as evidence of your culinary failure.

But if this has happened to you, console yourself—not all shunned offerings are the result of bad cooking. Even chefs fail when they forget to consider where they are and what they are supposed to be doing. Here are some guidelines that may help.

Read more

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Mailing Deadlines

Tue 15 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

If you order books from now on and choose free media mail shipping there is very little chance they will arrive before the holidays, or maybe this year. Please add Priority Mail shipping if you’d like there to a chance(!) for them to arrive this year.

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LCRW Prices Rising in 2021

Mon 7 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW, subscriptions, the world| Posted by: Gavin

As announced in November, LCRW print and digital subscription prices will be rising on January 1, 2021, but now I have the actual numbers:

The single issue digital price will be $3.99.
The 4-issue digital subscription price will be $12.99.

The single issue print price will be $6 (USA),  $8 (Canada), and $11 (World).
The 4-issue print subscription price will be $24 (USA),  $32 (Canada), and $44 (World).

Subscribe now to get ahead of the game. Subscribe then for fun. Donate to your fave charity if you can.
Cheers!
Gavin

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Welcome Back, Martha Moody

Tue 1 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Publication day, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

It’s (re)publication day for Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody! Join us on Thursday at 7 p.m. for an online celebration with Susan and Elizabeth McCracken. This is the 25th anniversary of the original edition from Spinsters Ink and we’re delighted to bring this sexy historical novel to a new generation of readers.

We are shipping preorders this week. For the curious, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

One

I was crouched next to the creek baiting my hook with a hunk of fat when I heard a rustling on the bank upstream. I turned my head and saw Martha Moody looking into the water.
She was a heavy woman bound up with dry and perishable goods, the owner of Moody’s General Store. Her red hair was pulled into a bun and she wore a black dress with jet buttons that reflected light.
I was embarrassed to be caught fishing on Sunday with mud on my skirt, so I hid behind a cottonwood. Martha leaned over, unlaced her shoes, and rolled down her stockings. I watched as she tucked them beneath the root of a tree, then bunched her skirt up in one hand and stepped into the water.
Dirt trickled into my collar from the bank, but I stood still. I could see the white blurs of her feet as she waded towards me. She moved with calm propriety: a large, plain, respectable woman from the nape of her neck down to her knees. She dropped her skirt. It floated and plastered itself to her shins, a changed, molded thing.
Martha moved more slowly as her skirt got soaked, but she was not ponderous, the way she was behind the counter at the store. When Martha said, “Don’t lean on the glass,” even the sheriff jumped back. Now she kicked at her hem, splashing herself a little and nearly slipping on a rock.
She stopped within breathing distance of me, at a spot where the water took a drop over rocks. Fish hid in the deep place behind the falling water, and I had been luring them onto my hook. Martha tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, squatted down and went over face first. I put my mouth against the tree bark to keep from calling out as she passed me, covered with white foam and scraping sand. She came up spitting and laughing, and grabbed the bank to hold herself under the falls.
I heard her say, “Frowsy,” then laugh more. She sat in the stream bed with the water rushing down, rushing over her. The sky was blue against the hard edge of the bank. I opened my creel, seized a fish, and threw it back into the water. It skidded past her. She turned her face and another one slapped her neck, then washed on past. She got on her knees, sinking in the soft bottom, and fish after fish swam past her. Big silver, small brown.
Martha stood. I stepped into an open spot on the bank so she could see me reaching into the creel and tossing another fish into the water with a high arc. I straightened the bow at the waist of my old calico, then tilted the creel towards Martha to show her that it was empty except for a few wet rushes on the bottom.
She stared at me, dripping water, as silver flashed over her feet. “Mrs. Linger, why are you throwing fish?” Her tone was cool. I felt like a kid caught with a pocketful of lemon drops I hadn’t paid for.
I walked down the bank to her, wiping my hands on my skirt. I couldn’t think of a good lie. The truth was, I wanted to add those shining bits of life to the picture Martha Moody was making with the water. I knew when a moment was ripe, which was how I came to be fishing when most decent women were getting supper on the table. “Why are you in the creek?”
Martha touched her glistening buttons. “For the poetry of the moment.”
I nodded and reached to help her onto the bank. She grabbed my fingers so hard that I thought she was going to pull me into the water with her, but she just held on and dug her feet deeper into the mud. “I’m not ready to get out, Amanda Linger. Are you coming in?”
I pulled my hand away and stuck it in my dry pocket. I never rose to a dare. Martha stood there like she was a tree that had been bending the water around her since before Jesus walked in his own thunder and waves. I could see the outline of her corset through the fabric of her dress. I picked up my fishing pole. “I have to get to my milking.”
Martha pulled one foot loose from the mud and held it under the fall to rinse it. I could smell the wet fabric of her skirt. Her hair was still knotted away from her face. “Milk. Yes.” Her chin was soft and white. “Good day, then, Mrs. Linger.”
I climbed the bank, inspired. “Good day.”
After I left Martha Moody standing in the water, I hurried to the barn without going to the house. Miss Alice was waiting for me at the fence, bawling and looking at me with her yellow-flecked eyes. Her days had a strict rhythm, and she hated it when I was late.
I walked towards her with a cow swagger, swishing my pole behind me like a tail, bawling in answer. I opened the gate and she lowered her head to butt against my hip. “All right, Alice, yes, Pretty Alice, I know you’re hungry.”
I brought her a bucket of oats, then stood next to her with my hands in my armpits to warm them before I pulled up the stool. I rubbed my face against her hide. She smelled live and pungent.
Miss Alice gave more milk if I had a story to tell. We had been through most of the Bible, with special attention to mentions of kine and golden calves, as I squatted next to her mornings and evenings working her teats. I talked to help Miss Alice let her milk down. If she held back, it soured her bag for the next milking.
That night I told her the history of Martha Moody as I understood it from the conjectures of the ladies of the town.
Before she founded Moody, Martha had been a woman who liked a good apple pie with thick cream, but didn’t have the grass to feed a cow. She had dried milk, but never cream, and she had suffered from grasshoppers and sparseness of joy.
Martha herself had never been sparse. She had been a fat city girl with red hair, acquainted with the Bible but also with the pleasures of ices and store-bought tarts. She had eaten turtle soup. She had dressed in white to shoot a bow and arrow, and had hit the mark. Her prowess in the fashionable sport of archery pleased her father, who was a lapsed Methodist with a gold watch fob and social ambitions. But Martha had met Wilbur Moody in a dry goods store, and he had come around the counter to hand her a bolt of cornflower blue cloth. She was married to him in a dress of that material in the spring. She didn’t miss the grey city she left with Wilbur, toting dry goods, but she did miss cream. She liked the West. She nodded at the big sky. She asked nothing of the mountains, except that they keep her pointed straight away from the city and let her survive the pass. She came a good distance, then said it was enough. She was walking beside the wagon, singing to herself in a dry voice that had carried her across a lot of country. Wilbur was up on the seat, driving the oxen. They reached a creek. Water was news and a reason to stop. There were some small trees, maybe from a seed dropped by some other traveller. Martha looked at the sharp limbs and grey bark, and decided that this was enough to satisfy her need for company. She would winter here. Wilbur was gold-hungry and land-bored. He’d seen enough water in the East, although he filled every container he could find with the stuff. The rest of the party put their wagons in a circle, built fires, and spoke against leaving Martha for dead. But she had provisions, time to dig a sod house before the ground froze, and she had gone as far as she was willing to go. Wilbur knew better than to speak of love, but he did mention family honor. The sound of the water bordered the night.
She took some bolts of material, and the panes of glass she had packed with good quilts for padding, because she thought windows were worth the trouble and cold they leaked. She took a barrel of beans and a barrel of meal, and the dried milk. Wilbur poured half of each packet of seed into its own tin cup and lined them up in front of her on the ground.
“Martha,” he said, “you can’t live on seeds and water, so I hope you can live on your fat.”
“I’ll need Shakespeare and the Bible,” she said. He gave her a hand digging a hole for a shelter, shoring it up with posts that came off the siding of the wagon. The rest of the party was already a morning ahead, so he looked into her brown eyes, wishing they were cornflower blue, gave her a kiss and rode off, rattling.
Martha picked up her shovel, thinking of barrel tables and barrel chairs, without a thought of who she might be cheating in claiming this land or who she might be seeding in her dry goods store by the stream. She didn’t bother with naming, either, but people passing, and those staying, said “Moody” to tell where they were.

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Martha Moody

Tue 1 Dec 2020 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

December 1, 2020 · trade paper · 288 pages · $17 · 9781618731807 | ebook · 9781618731814

New: 11 Questions with Susan Stinson

Read the first chapter.

Susan Stinson in the Kenyon Review On Books and Their Harbors

Lambda Literary: A Conversation Between Susan Stinson & Sally Bellerose

At once, an unexpected love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western embracing the ordinary and gritty details — as well as the magic — of women’s lives in the old west.

Alison Bechdel spotlighted the first line of Martha Moody in an interview with Elle:

This “speculative western” first came out in 1995 but was just reissued. The first sentence is magnificent in the way it’s a microcosm of the whole book, as well as a glimpse at the way Stinson writes so beautifully about fat bodies: “I was crouched next to the creek baiting my hook with a hunk of fat when I heard a rustling on the bank upstream.”

Reviews

“One of Stinson’s triumphs is to make Amanda’s fairy-tale success as a writer seem completely plausible amid the vivid depiction of the grime and hard work of her life as first a farmer’s wife, then a single woman struggling to survive on the small homestead.”
— Margot Livesey, Scotland On Sunday

“A tale of longing and self identification and reconciliation. Amanda Linger pines for shop owner Martha Moody whose girth, sensuous folds of flesh and loving caresses pull Amanda out of the stasis of a loveless marriage…MARTHA MOODY is a tender exquisitely rendered story with strong characters, a sense of love and magic surrounding them, and one incredible cow.”
— Icon Magazine, Toronto

“Susan Stinson’s deceptively svelte-seeming story is a lush comic masterpiece: a totally convincing celebration of the combined erotic power of untrammelled female flesh, forbidden sex and unleashed words.”
— Mail on Sunday, London

“Martha Moody, is a rich and complicated novel, nearly edible in its sensuous physicality.”
— Sojourner

“Stinson’s follow-up to the utterly fantastic Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.”
— Time Out, London

“Here we have a story of love spurned, uncommonly well told, in language that is rich and strange, erotic and fanciful. Set against the backdrop of Western frontier life, it’s a powerful tale of seeming betrayal, and the value of friendships between women. The best book yet from The Women’s Press.”
— Gay Times, London

“Stinson’s celebration of the love and friendship of women deserves a larger audience than one made up of only lesbian feminists.”
— Booklist

“Remarkable story . . . Amanda’s fictional Martha is a wild and magical creature who churns clouds into butter with her magnificent thighs and flies on the back of a fabulous winged cow.”
— Bay Area Reporter

“Susan Stinson writes as though she means every word to be tasted, savoured.”
— Women’s Library Newsletter

“A jewel . . . Martha Moody is magnificent. She is unashamedly fat and she is beautiful, dignified and desirable. She will take her place in modern literature as a truly marvellous role model for large women. Never before have I encountered the large body depicted with such beauty.”
— Shelley Bovey, Yes Magazine, UK

Cover art by Theo Black.
Martha Moody was originally published by Spinster’s Ink.

Previously

Online Launch Event:
December 3, 7 p.m. EST with Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway
Book Moon, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA 01027

About the Author

Susan Stinson (susanstinson.net) is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree and Martha Moody, and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Her work has appeared in The Public Humanist, The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Literary Review, and The Women’s Review of Books. She has taught at Amherst College, been awarded the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and has received a number of fellowships. An editor and writing coach, she was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Against the man baby’s tantrums

Sun 29 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., the world| Posted by: Gavin

On November 3, 2020, the US held their four year general election and in a relatively easy manner the Biden-Harris administration was voted into the White House. I look forward to having actual humanist leaders, even if I know I will disagree with some of their policies and appointments.

The election would have been all over and done with by the next morning had the mailed and early votes been allowed to be counted in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. The “result” wasn’t agreed on (by rational beings) until four (very long) days later — and even yet the president, his lackeys, and his republican party are still trying to pretend it is worth dragging out and fighting.

Four years of Tr*mp and his rotating band of corrupt cronies, unelected family members, acting cabinet members, mealy-mouthed mouthpieces, and quiet and not-so-quiet racist and fascist supporters has been awful and I’d like every one one of those acting cabinet members and family and mouthpieces investigated — so many of them are in jail or have done time that I am sure there are a few of the others who should be doing time along with them.

The republican party, led by the nose by Tr*mp and Mitch McConnell, has been as useful a bulwark against Tr*mp’s small-minded bigotry as expected: they did nothing. A few people quit the party and occasionally Mitt Romney or literally one or two others would speak against his rotten ways but for the most part everyone in the party went along with it — the same way for eight years they followed the party’s instructions to obstruct government rather than work with the Obama-Biden administration.

So when members of the republican party start to say they, too, were anti-Tr*mp let them point to their records, let them show where they stood up against Tr*mp’s oh so terrifying twitter feed. The senators and the house members who somehow never saw the news about this terrible thing and that terrible thing and somehow never managed to answer when queried, they can go fly a kite. The world asked them to stand up as adults against a squealing man baby’s tantrums. They refused. And we won’t forget.

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Tuesday & Thursday: Martha Moody Days

Fri 27 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, online events, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

Next Tuesday is a big day, pun intended, around here: it’s publication day for our new, 25th anniversary edition of Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody.

Martha Moody was a hit the first time around when it came out from Spinster’s Ink and the Women’s Press in the UK — just check out some of the reviews. — Time Out London said “Stinson’s follow-up to the utterly fantastic Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.”

I realize that December in the northern hemisphere may not be running naked through the meadow weather (for most, who knows?), but it is indicative of the joy oozing from this book.

We’ll be celebrating the publication of the book online through Book Moon on Thursday, Dec. 3, at 7 p.m. with the fabulous Elizabeth McCracken. Hope you will join us, it is sure to be a relaxed and fun time and Susan will be signing books. See you there!

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Get Immersed in the Monstrousness

Wed 25 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin

While we’re a bit transfixed by the ongoing democratic paroxysms of effort to get rid of the monstrous occupants of a certain White House, we’ve been working away on a different, much more enjoyable type of monstrousness: Isabel Yap’s Feb. 2021 collection, Never Have I Ever. A few advance readers have sent us reactions which we’ll share next week and the book just received its first strong trade review from Publishers Weekly:

“Yap’s impressive debut collection of 13 fabulist, sci-fi, and horror shorts explores themes ranging from monstrousness, shared trauma, and systemic violence to friendship and the ambiguity of love. Yap is at home with whatever topic she puts her hand to, easily immersing readers in the perspectives of high schoolers, ancient goddesses, androids, and witches. . . . Yap is a powerful new voice in speculative fiction.”

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LCRW 42 & a Price Raise

Tue 24 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

And out it went last week — the 26.79% of subscribers who go for the chocolate option received a range of chocolate bars this time due to me not getting an order in to our supplier. All Fair Trade though, I think and I did try most of them and one I doubted turned out to be delicious, so, thanks, subscribers for giving me an opportunity to try another delicious thing.

You can still read the first section of Sarah Langan’s “You Have the Prettiest Mask” on Lit Hub’s Daily Fiction section. That was great fun to see.

Big news: LCRW subscription prices will be rising on January 1, 2021.

Printing and mailing costs have risen and we raised the pay rate to writers (I’d like to raise that again) and the price of LCRW has been the same since June 2004, when we raised it from $4 a pop to $5.

I really liked the zine being $5 since five dollar bills are easy to handle, change is easy, it’s cheap. But in 2004 LCRW was the same price as The New Yorker (and we still have it beat in weird fiction and delivering chocolate with each issue). Now The New Yorker is $8.99 per issue, so, yep, if we want to pay people a decent amount of money for their work it’s time to add a dollar to the zine cover price.

I expect the new cover and subscription prices will last a few years — and some readers have subscribed for 20 issues (10 years? Wow.) at the current discounted price so that’s a possible deal. Subscribe now, save a few dollars. Subscribe January 2021 and celebrate the new year, sure to be awful in its own way but better than the alternative, as our old friend Bill Desmond used to say.

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Holiday Deadlines 2020

Mon 23 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., holiday, housekeeping, shipping news, usps| Posted by: Gavin

Time for our annual posting of the USPS Holiday Shipping Deadlines.

First: LCRW subscription prices will be rising on January 1, 2021.

Second: the Small Beer office will be closed from December 23 – January 4, 2021. It is unlikely we will ship over that period. Need books? We can still help:

1. Weightless Books is always here for you with DRM-free multi-format ebooks — which can hadily be sent as gifts on the date you specify.
2. Want more ebooks? We can help you with that.
3. Audiobooks: we have them.
4. Bookshop can ship books and toys to you or direct to your family and friends. We’re always adding book recs there.
5. Book Moon will be open.

So here are the last (domestic) order dates for Small Beer Press. (International shipping deadlines.) Along with a reminder that orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.

And the annual reminder:

Media Mail parcels are the last ones to go on trucks. If the truck is full, Media Mail does not go out until the next truck. And if that one’s full, too . . . it could be very late in December before there’s space. So, if you’d like to guarantee pre-holiday arrival, please add Priority Mail:

Domestic Mail Class/Product	Deadline
Media Mail (estimate, not guaranteed)	Dec. 12
First Class Mail (LCRW/chapbooks)	Dec. 18
Priority Mail	Dec. 19
Priority Mail Express	Dec. 23

What are we talking about? Ordering books. (And we always have a few of these around.)

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All Your Questions Answered

Fri 13 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Next week the new issue of LCRW goes out with all your questions answered and, for some people, a chocolate bar. Perhaps we should be sending out LCRW masks but the responsibility of readerly enjoyment is quite enough for us. The responsibility for the lives of our readers is fainting couch material.* Thanks everyone who wears a mask in public.

All your questions? Since everything comes down to What Is The Point Anyway? Yes. We are going with Douglas Adams’s answer, pushing it further from funny to unfunny and perhaps back to funny.

The zine comes out the same as Obama’s A Promised Land. Wonder which one will sell more?

You may have read an excerpt from Sarah Langan’s “You Have the Prettiest Mask” on Lit Hub. It is a huge, dark novella and as ever I am looking forward to hearing what people think of it. Masks being something we give more thought to every day.

The full table of contents is now up:

Sarah Langan, “You Have the Prettiest Mask” [read an excerpt on Lit Hub]
Vandana Singh, “Sticky Man”
Stewart Moore, “Madeline’s Wings”
Jack Larsen, “Bright and Shabby Buses”
Kristin Yuan Roybal, “Separation Theory”

poetry

Holly Day, Two Poems

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Cooking Column: “The Stories We Tell”

The zine will be in the mail at some point next week and the ebook will go out on Weightless on Tuesday. (Not as sure about other ebook sites.) It is very cheering to put a zine out in the middle of the pandemic. To take stories from writers and send them out to readers. To imagine a readership with the mail piled up untouched for 3 days for pandemic/magical thinking reasons, and then taking the zine from the pile, putting feet up, getting comfortable, digging in.

* What makes good fainting couch material is something we often ponder from our chaise lounges. Something soft, something forgiving. Something not made of thinly sliced trees. Something like a hammock or a panda.

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Congratulations, Joe & Kamala!

Sun 8 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

What a relief. Lots of work to do, but let’s have that moment of joy and then head down and back to work and bending that moral arc once again toward justice for all.

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Congratulations, Kathleen!

Wed 4 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Kathleen Jennings| Posted by: Gavin

We are so delighted that among all the crappiness of an uncertain election and millions of people somehow choosing Tr*mp despite the last 4 years there is the lovely news that Kathleen Jennings received this year’s World Fantasy Award for best artist.

Delighted, not only because last year we published Margo Lanagan’s chapbook, Stray Bats, illustrated by Kathleen and Laurie J. Marks’s Air Logic with a cover by Kathleen (which completed a fabulous piece of interlocking art she created over 5 years or so), and recently we published Kij Johnson’s The River Bank with a cover and illustrations by Kathleen as well as Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map with a cover by Kathleen, but because she is a delightful person who adds joy to any day in which you see her. So, congrats to all the winners and especially this time to Kathleen.

      

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Zen Cho

Fri 23 Oct 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin

It’s true, in April we’ll publish a new, expanded edition of Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad and Other Stories. For now you can read more about it here.

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Oct. 21, 7 p.m. Nathan Ballingrud & Elizabeth Hand

Mon 12 Oct 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, events, Nathan Ballingrud| Posted by: Gavin

Good news for those enjoying visiting the literary part of October country, we have an online event coming up with two favorite authors whose books are definitely on the darker and spookier part of the spectrum.

Join us on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. EST  as we welcome Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters (aka Monsterland, a new TV series available now on Hulu) & Elizabeth Hand, author of many fabulous books including her new novel, fourth in the Cass Neary series (which begins with Generation Loss), The Book of Lamps and Banners to the online space occasionally generated on this planet by the gravity of Book Moon for a reading and discussion of their latest books.

Register for this Book Moon event HERE — and please do help spread the word. See you there!

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Catch Monsterland Now on Hulu

Sat 3 Oct 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Hulu, Monsterland, Nathan Ballingrud, TV tie-in| Posted by: Gavin

Catch Monsterland on Hulu and get the book right here from the publishers.
Monsterland? What’s that?
So glad you asked. Here’s a lovely article from Saturday’s Daily Hampshire Gazette.

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Online Events (links TK)

Wed 16 Sep 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, Elwin Cotman, Karen Lord, Nathan Ballingrud| Posted by: Gavin

There are a few online events featuring Small Beer authors planned in the next couple of weeks and there are more TK but here are the first few:

September 16, 7 p.m. PST
Elwin Cotman (Dance on Saturday)
Register here.

September 24, 7:30 p.m. EST
Pre-register for the inaugural event of the Strange Light Reading Series (originally planned to take place at Book Moon) hosted by Alexandra Manglis & Yvette Ndlovu with Karen Lord (Redemption in Indigo 10-year anniversary reading) & Tess

a Gratton (Night Shine).

October 18, 6:30 p.m. EST

Elwin Cotman (Dance on Saturday)
The Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21209
Register here.

 

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 42

Fri 28 Aug 2020 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

November 17, 2020. 60 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731791

LCRW 42. After all this time, here’s the answer?

Or: a fabulous and topical new novella from Sarah Langan with a few more delights added.

This is the latest issue of our twice-annual zine — 25% of subscribers (not too many in warmer climes) choose the chocolate version — in which we have fictions, poetries, a cooking column (extra useful in these times), and sometimes a few odd other things.

Peace!

Reviews

“Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet has been one of my favorite magazines for a long time, always publishing work unlike anything you’ll read else­where. The November issue is largely given over to a novella from Sarah Langan, ‘You Have the Prettiest Mask’. . . . sometimes horrific, sometimes traditional YA, and in the end striking and moving. This issue also has a fine piece from Stewart Moore, ‘Madeline’s Wings’. . . . Another unexpectedly charming piece is ‘Bright and Shabby Buses’, by Jack Larsen.”
— Rich Horton, Locus

“Sarah Langan’s novella ‘You Have the Perfect Mask’ in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #42 is a showstopper. Set among the elite of a near-future New York City, it’s both a thoughtful tale of conscience and an examina­tion of the sociocultural world of 12-year-old/turning-13 girls. Mean Girls meets Socrates, but so much more. The latest pandemic, the Y-Plague, has gruesomely killed 20 million worldwide. Both women of childbearing age and men contract the disease, but only men die from it. The virus is now mostly controlled, but only by various levels (depending on national custom, convention, and, subsequently, law) of female containment. It is now the law – and a celebrated part of popular culture – in the US for girls age 13 and above to wear face masks, even though pubescent girls have been proven to not be carriers. Three girls resolve to resist. That description doesn’t do justice to a nuanced story that is as immersively entertaining as it is reflective. In other words: you have to read it.
“Of the four remaining stories in LCRW, ‘Mad­eline’s Wings’ by Stewart Moore should also be noted. Madeline makes wings. Gregory, an old man, commissions her to fabricate some very special dragon wings. He repays her in coin of the realm and in a much more wondrous way. It’s a delightful little tale.” — Paula Guran, Locus

“Read it slowly and savor the language.” — Sam Tamaino, SF Revu

Table of Contents

fiction

Sarah Langan, “You Have the Prettiest Mask” [read an excerpt on Lit Hub]
Vandana Singh, “Sticky Man”
Stewart Moore, “Madeline’s Wings”
Jack Larsen, “Bright and Shabby Buses”
Kristin Yuan Roybal, “Separation Theory”

poetry

Holly Day, Two Poems

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Cooking Column: “The Stories We Tell”

Made by

Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link
Proofreader: Franchesca Viaud

About

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 42, September 2020. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731791. 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. twitter.com/smallbeerpress · Printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 43 of this issue — or go here — for options). 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. Contents © 2020 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration “Janus-headed bottle,” ca. 1760, Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, Gold Anchor Period, 1759–69, (metmuseum.org). Thank you authors, artists, and readers. In reasons to celebrate an LCRW story will be reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2020 Edition; Sarah Pinsker’s collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories is a World Fantasy Award finalist. Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. No Justice: No Peace.

About these Authors

Joe Biden is the President Elect of the USA. What a relief to have a competent person in this office. Inevitably he will disappoint and make mistakes but I don’t expect him to be corrupt and live a life of daily lies.

Holly Day’s newest poetry collections are A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), I’m in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit.net), and Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing).

Kamala Harris is the Vice President Elect of the USA and the present and future face of the country. What a contrast to the disastrous Pence.

Nicole Kimberling is a writer, creator of the “Lauren Proves Magic is Real!” audio drama podcast and the editor of Blind Eye Books. Her first publication was in the Letters to the Editor section of the Rocky Mountain News. Her first play was staged in a barn by the members of a 4-H Club. She once won the Lambda Literary Award. Her younger sister was born while she attending her sixth birthday party, which was hosted at Shakey’s Pizza by her Aunt Lynette because her mom couldn’t be there.

Sarah Langan holds an MS in Environmental Toxicology from NYU and an MFA from Columbia University, and is a three-time recipient of the Bram Stoker Award. She’s the author of three previous novels, including The Keeper, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and Good Neighbors, forthcoming from Atria in 2021.

Jack Larsen is a writer and student living in Wellington, New Zealand. His short fiction has appeared in a previous issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Saint Jerome watches over him, and so do various mammals.

Stewart Moore has published a nonfiction book, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt (Brill, 2014), and has published short fiction in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow (The Beastly Bride) and Paula Guran (Halloween), as well as in Mysterion, Diabolical Plots, and Pseudopod (forthcoming). He lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter, mother-in-law and an odd number of cats.

Kristin Yuan Roybal (she/they) is most likely somewhere along the West Coast where there are redwoods, possibly Northern California or Oregon. Their work has been featured in places such as Mojo, M-BRANE SF, Subtopian Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Jersey Devil Press, and The Gateway Review, and their debut novel, The Rise of Saint Fox and The Independence, was released in 2018 by Unsolicited Press under the pen name Corin Reyburn. They earned an MFA from Oregon State University, during which they were fiction editor of 45th Parallel magazine from 2019-20. Kristin co-produces the speculative fiction podcast SubverCity Transmit. She enjoys transmuting cosmic energy and the use of unconventional instruments in rock n’ roll music, and of course owns a cat—a chubby Siamese named Isis.

Vandana Singh was born and raised mostly in New Delhi, India and currently lives in the United States near Boston, where she professes physics and writes. Her short stories have appeared in numerous venues and several Best of Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and she is a recipient of the Carl Brandon Parallax award. She is the author of the ALA Notable book Younguncle Comes to Town and the short story collections The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories.

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Dance on Saturday

Tue 25 Aug 2020 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 336 pages · $17 · 9781618731722 | ebook · 9781618731739

Philip K. Dick Award finalist
NPR Best Books of the Year
Locus Notable Books

Planted deeply in the dark, musical fantastic heart of American storytelling, Cotman’s half dozen tales are ripe for the picking.

In the title novella, Cotman imagines a group of near-immortals living in Pittsburgh in an uneasy truce with Lord Decay. Their truce is threatened when one of them takes pity on a young woman who knows their secret. In “Among the Zoologists,” a game writer on their way to a convention falls in with a group of rogue Darwinists whose baggage contains a great mystery. A volleyball tournament devolves into nightmare and chaos in “Mine.” In Cotman’s hands, the conventions of genres from fairytales to Victorian literature to epic fantasy and horror give shape to marvelously new stories.

NPR Best Books of the Year
“Elwin Cotman’s third collection of short fiction is only six stories long, but each story is packed with rich depth, like jeweled fruits glinting in wet loam. Mixing mythic and contemporary, humor and horror, melancholy and optimism, Cotman’s stories range from present-day Pittsburgh to fantasy Africa, with a beautifully flexible polyvocal prose. My two favorite stories make up about half the book: ‘Seven Watsons’ and the title story both deliver all the sophistication and complexity of a novel at a third of the length, and center Black joy and endurance.”
— Amal El-Mohtar, book critic and co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War

Nonfiction

Why Are We Learning About White America’s Historical Atrocities from TV? on Electric Lit

To Be Black in This Country Is to Live a Life of Trespass on Buzzfeed

Read “The Son’s War” on The Offing

Reviews [BookMarks]

“Cotman wields a compelling literary voice packing both a wallop and a deft touch.” — Fred Shaw, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Karen Russell’s cover blurb praises Cotman as ‘a synthesizer … of lewd dialect and high lyricism.’ I’ll speak instead of Cotman’s high dialect and lewd lyricism, of how his fashioning of character voices is superbly disciplined, lit from within, while his lyricism is the realm of bawdy jokes and opacity, a kind of literary trolling. “She was tall and wide like a sonnet,” one character notes — and you’ll just have to trust me on the contrast with the bawdy bits, none of which my editor will let me cite.
“The core of the book is a cleareyed survey of the complexities of Black American experience, distilled in a few lines from the title story: ‘I hated the powers for what they had done. But I learned the pride. That I was of a people who could take all the hate and poison of this world, and laugh, and go dance on Saturday.’”
— Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review

“Cotman utilizes the entire spectrum of fantasy and speculative fiction to write powerful stories on race, power, and human nature. The title novella is particularly stellar, about a group of immortals in Pittsburgh who can extend their life (and limbs) by growing and consuming certain fruit. It’s a timely collection filled with wit and beautiful language.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

“The landscapes of Elwin Cotman are mythical, searching, and stimulated by haunting fanaticism. Among his third and most ambitious story collection are tales of magical scope—they do more than simply spellbind; they seduce, invite, crack open the extraordinary. . . . In the mold of Octavia Butler and Karen Russell, Dance on Saturday is a bold leap of speculative fiction.”
— Jason Parham, Wired, Ultimate Summer Reading List

“Cotman blends humor, emotional clarity, and wild imagination to bring life to stories about identity, power, and human nature.”  — Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed, 29 Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down

“Fantastically weird short stories infused with elements from Black culture. . . . Each story provides a singular and riveting reading experience.” — Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed, 17 Summer Must-Reads For Fantasy Lovers

“Above all, Cotman is not afraid to combine the grotesque and surreal with the mundane and emotional. The result is a collection that rebels against the pigeonhole design of genres and creates something original and enlightening.” — Julia Romero, October Hill 

“It should sit on your shelves.” — Paul Di Filippo, Locus

“Cotman (Hard Times Blues) wields biting wit, powerful emotion, and magic large and small throughout these six superlative stories. From the epic fantasy ‘The Son’s War,’ which wrestles with themes of imagination and greed as a prince creates two automaton companions, one out of diamond and one out of jade, and soon favors one over the other, to the claustrophobic social thriller ‘Mine,’ set at a high school volleyball tournament in Hell as the teen girl players become increasingly cruel and the behavior of the adults around them increasingly inappropriate, Cotman utilizes genre conventions to examine racism, sexism, power imbalances, and hypocrisy. ‘Among the Zoologists’ is a sexually charged fever dream about a zoology conference that blurs the line between humans and animals. The title story is the strongest, imagining a group of immortals with the ability to extend their lives by growing and consuming fruit, in prose that ranges from humorous (‘[She] grabbed the first three Mariah Carey LPs for maximum positive energy’) to lyrical (‘She adored the sight of melons hanging like rotund trapeze artists from their own vines’). Readers will be blown away by this standout tale, which grapples with the responsibility of holding power, and whether that power can, or should, be shared. Cotman’s bold and timely speculative fiction marks him as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fun, inventive fiction that refreshes the fantasy genre with elements of black heritage and culture.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Inventive, incandescent stories, rich in strangeness. Elwin Cotman’s writing is a tonic to ward off drabness and despair.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Table of Contents

Dance on Saturday
Seven Watsons
Mine
The Son’s War [The Offing]
Among the Zoologists
The Piper’s Christmas Gift

Reviews & Praise for Elwin Cotman’s stories:

“Elwin Cotman is one of the most original new voices you will encounter—he is a synthesizer of the domestic and the fantastic, of soaring myth and the grittiest realities, of lewd dialect and high lyricism. His stories are profound engagements with suffering of every stripe—they will also make you hoot with laughter. I was amazed by the force of Mr. Cotman’s pinwheeling imagination.” — Karen Russell, author of Orange World

“Remarkable stories that are as ambitious as they are personal. Cotman is a first-class stylist with a heart and a wit to match.” — Paul Tremblay, author of Survivor Song

“With its intoxicating blend of rock and roll and the supernatural, crazed religion and visionary prose, Hard Times Blues is a wild ride down the same shadowy American sideroads traveled by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Greil Marcus and Samuel R. Delany. A marvelous collection by a strikingly original new voice in contemporary fiction.” —Elizabeth Hand, author of Errantry

“With hyperbolic, technicolor imagery and engrossing characters that radiate intrigue, these modern tales comprise a new book of essential fables for our time—read it, close your eyes, and delight in the words still glowing hot inside your brain.” — Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Starbursts of talent . . . and a knack for biting and imaginative language.” — Lauren O’Neal, The Rumpus

“Proves that magic and grit don’t have to be mutually exclusive.” — Christine Stoddard, Quail Bell Magazine

“Cotman’s interests are wide-ranging: Punk rock intersects with D.C.’s Dominican community, African-American folktale intersects with Greek myth, Goth teen suburban angst in 1990s Ohio sits side by side with racist atrocity in the pre-Civil Rights South . . . Yeah, there’s magic in some of these stories, but the real magic is in Cotman’s words themselves—stark and deadpan one moment, lushly descriptive the next.” — Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship

“This is not always a comfortable book to read, but it is a magnificent one. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP: A Collection of Fantasies is comprised of short stories and vignettes that flow into one another like the Mississippi rushes over the Delta. Elwin Cotman is a writer, an activist, a performance artist and above all, an impeccable storyteller. . . . With raw and sometimes shocking authenticity, Cotman turns the ordinary into the sublime. There is no pretension here, just a million-watt light shining into corners of the human condition that many people would prefer forgotten, with a large helping of fantastic creatures, classical myth, and modern mayhem.” — Erzebet YellowBoy, Cabinet des Fées

“Elwin Cotman’s carefully wrought, gracefully accomplished, and lyrical narratives range in tone and style from picaresque and carnivalesque to elegiac, ironic, and melancholy. Yet, while tonally distinctive and aesthetically vivid, his stories are not so much driven by style or voice, as they are by love in the largest sense. For love does not exclude chaos nor avoid the vicissitudes of history and neither do Cotman’s socially engaged, brilliantly crafted stories.” — Miranda Mellis

Cover art “Actaeon” copyright ©2020 by Christopher Myers.

About the Author

Elwin Cotman is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Dance on Saturday and two previous collections of short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. In 2011 he was nominated for a Carl Brandon Society Award. He has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He is at work on his first novel.

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Generation Loss

Tue 25 Aug 2020 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

Hardcover · 9781931520218 | August 2020 · new trade paper edition · 9781618731746

Generation Loss · Available Dark · Hard Light

Shirley Jackson Award Winner
Believer Book Award finalist

generation loss: the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data, such as sound recordings, video, or photographs.

Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she’s adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

• Read the first chapter.

Reviews

“Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary series began in 2008 with Generation Loss, a startling and addictive novel that introduced a protagonist fueled by drugs and post-punk irreverence.”
— Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review

“The mood here is dark, gritty, and bleak, just like the bitterly cold seaside Maine winter it’s set in. If you enjoy unlikable yet compelling queer characters written without even a whiff of concern about respectability politics, this is the mystery for you.”
— Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle

“One of the most interesting writers working today. Cass is an incredible character who is really smart, really obstinate, really gifted.”
— Sara Gran

“Sharp, clear, and mercilessly lean. Not only did that style fit Cass, it fit Hand: The author, roughly the same age as her character, was also a part of the punk scene in her youth. Generation Loss rasps with gritty authenticity, from the copious references to artists like Iggy Pop and the Ramones to the way Cass’ hardcore attraction to damage and destruction propels her deep into the book’s maze of murder and secrets.”
— Jason Heller, NPR

“Although it moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound. A dark and beautiful novel.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.” — Los Angeles Times

“Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B) — Entertainment Weekly

* “Hand (Mortal Love) explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A riveting page-turner.” — Valley Advocate

“The novel crackles with energy: it is alive.” — Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)

“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.” — George Pelecanos

“Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book.”
— Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain

More Reviews + Quotes

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels, including Mortal Love and, most recently, Curious Toys, and five collections of short fiction, including Errantry, and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books.

• Longer author bio.

On the web:

• Elizabeth Hand‘s site
• Bookslut interview
• Interview on YouTube.
• Authors with tattoos.
• Music for Generation Loss on Largehearted Boy.

Credits

• Hardcover edition cover images © Jacob McMurray.
• Author photo © Norm Walters.
• Download cover for print.
• Download author photo for print.

Generation Loss was originally published in hardcover by Small Beer Press. Harcourt Harvest published it in paperback and now Small Beer will reprint it in paperback.

Note: An excerpt from Generation Loss appeared in 2005 in Gargoyle 50, edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody.

Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
” sister morphine” from Babel by Patti Smith, copyright © 1978 by Patti Smith. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Other covers:

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