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.

 

---

Their power to unsettle is unmatched

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.”

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---