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.


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.


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.

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:

Credits

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:


Questionable Utopias?

Thu 6 Aug 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

An Agent of Practices? An Agent of Utopia! Questionable Practices! Get these fabulous collections by Andy Gunn and Eileen Duncan Andy Duncan and Eileen Gunn as well as 8 more books by Chesya Burke, Tenea D. Johnson, Larissa Lai, JD Scott, Ginn Hale, Maurice Broaddus, and an anthology edited by Bill Campbell & Francesco Verso in the latest StoryBundle deal: the Innovative Worlds Bundle curated by Tenea D. Johnson:

Innovation can mean the difference between progress and stagnation, wonder and woe, seeing the return of dim days or a new age of enlightenment. An innovative world is one where you can immerse yourself and learn something new, see a trope turned on its head, meet characters that will frequent the passages of your mind, navigating by the spark of newness they carry through the gloom.
Innovative worlds can shine as an example of what to be or provide respite from what, if only temporarily, is. Or they can make you appreciate what ain’t broke.
One could make a strong case that innovation and its possibilities are in short supply at the moment.
But not here.