Shipping, some free books, Janelle Monae, a big blue cat

Wed 15 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Reconstruction: Stories Cover ImageDespite the pull of the couch and the shiny shiny kettle suggesting that it is time for tea and biscuits, we’re still shipping here books from Book Moon and from our distributor, Consortium. Ordering on this site means includes free media mail shipping — great if you are not bothered about books in time for the holidays. If you do want them to arrive in time, choose priority mail or ground shipping at Book Moon. The Post Office says they might get there in time but maybe take that with a pinch of salt and a deep relaxing breath letting the shipping gods know that you know they’re in charge and we mortals are not in the know and ok with it.

To make up for that possibly slow shipping, we’re throwing in a free backlist title with each new book order. Get some for yourself, your Little Free Library, your good friends, your friends who are not so good and maybe worry you a little but they’re fun and as long as they can keep it together (cf Eddie Murphy, Bowfinger) one day they’ll get a Nobel prize or a first look deal with Netflix.

All copies of LCRW are being delivered by a big blue cat, so please forgive that cat if it gets distracted by a shiny thing on the way and it is delayed.

Not sure which book to order? How about some short story collections?

Janelle Monae just picked Alaya Dawn Johnson to co-write the title story of her forthcoming first short story collection, The Memory Librarian. (That sentence is just amazing to write. Wow.) See why she picked Alaya by picking up Alaya’s wide-ranging and lauded collection Reconstruction: Stories.

I just heard the excellent news that Elwin Cotman sold his debut novel The Age of Ignorance to Scribner at auction so while looking forward to that I’m going to throw his collection Dance on Saturday onto this list.

Recently Samantha Cheh interviewed Zen Cho for Electric Lit about her novel Black Water Sister and her joy-filled expanded debut collection, Spirits Abroad. I just listened to Zen’s novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and loved it so that gets a recommendation here, too.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 44 cover - click to view full sizeIsabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever has a couple of new long stories which are not to be missed, the meet cute “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls” — the latter, about older males in positions of power over young women at a camp is a sharp distillation of what has gone wrong in so many fields over the years. The reaction is harsh, effective, disturbing, and deserved.

And lastly one day I’ll sit on an uncomfortable chair in a convention hall or hotel and have the happy experience of listening to Jeffrey Ford read a story. While I can’t do that, at least I have his latest collection, Big Dark Hole.

Anyway, order a book — or a box of books — and we’ll throw in a freebie and all our thanks for helping keep the wolves from the door for another year for this small press.

 

 


Caught up in the Supply Chain

Thu 2 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeDespite all the warnings I had thought I was in the sweet spot with our next book, Richard Butner’s debut collection, The Adventurists. Little did I know I was walking through the letters p, r, i, d, and e, and what do you know, down I go.

The new date for the book is March 22, 2022, a lovely palindromic date in anywhere the date is sensibly written day/month/year, 22/3/22. Maybe that’ll give us more time for the pandemic to burn itself out as we all get our next boosters and mask up and we can actually get Richard out to some bookstores.

In the meantime, here’s one of Richard’s stories, Circa, on Interfictions.


Kate Challis RAKA 2021 Commendation

Fri 19 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Taboo cover - click to view full size“The Kate Challis Ruth Adeney Koori Award, or RAKA, which means ‘five’ in the Pintupi language is awarded to an Indigenous artist in one of five categories annually, including: creative prose, poetry, script writing, drama and visual arts” and this year’s winner is Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield, a novel I read and highly recommend. Although I think all the awards it has piled up — including the Miles Franklin Award, sort of like the Australian Booker Prize — might be strong enough rec. Of the award, Ms. Winch says:

I’m a Wiradjuri woman, who grew up on Dtharawal country. I want to acknowledge the Country on which you read these words, and acknowledge my fellow writers whose beloved work was published in the last five years. I also want to recognise those writers commended, my mentors, colleagues and friends — Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott. I feel as if I’m only still at the beginning of my career as an interrogator and questioner of the past, present and future of ourselves and our nation, so it is a distinction that I will endeavour to work to, and pay respect to, in my ensuing works and years.

Kim Scott’s novel Taboo is one of three commended novels. We published Taboo in North America and I was lucky enough to attend the Library of Congress National Book Festival and spend some time with Kim, one of the highlights of pre-pandemic time. Here’s a short video of him reading from Taboo during the panel.

The full commendation for the three novels can be found here and here’s an excerpt from the note on Taboo:

‘Takes the reader along a spiritual path deep into the land and its stories, with characters as earthy, as real, as stumbling, as flawed and enlightened, and as courageous as any characters you would want to find in an epic tale.’


Second Interview in New Series

Thu 18 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Alaya Dawn Johnson, photo by Armando VegaWe recently posted a new interview with recent World Fantasy Award winner Alaya Dawn Johnson in our occasional Book Moon Small Beer author interview series. As with the first, the interview was carried out by the inimitable Franchesca Viaud.

Reconstruction: Stories is Alaya’s first collection of stories collecting stories from as far back as 2005 and as new as the eponymous title story that first appeared in the collection. “The Mirages” was going to be published for the first time in the book but the pandemic got the better of us, the book was moved to January of this year, and the story first appeared in Asimov’s last issue of 2020. In between those times Alaya has published many stories and novels, started a band, and moved to Mexico.

Alaya’s first novel, Racing the Dark, was published in 2007 by Agate and her latest, Trouble the Saints, that World Fantasy Award winner mentioned above, was published in 2020 by Tor with the paperback edition coming out just this past August. We have some signed bookplates at Book Moon will be included free with any of her books ordered from there.

Read the interview here.

Author photo by Armando Vega.


An Essential Travelers’ Guide

Wed 17 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Received by packet mail over the internet from a writer who knows a good travel book from the inside out — besides his award-winning fiction he is also the author of Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff — this note about Richard Butner’s The Adventurists:

The Adventurists cover - click to view full size“Richard Butner has taught me so much about the art of short fiction, and The Adventurists is an essential travelers’ guide to packing a small space with all the wit, craft, invention and heart needed for the journey. Thank you, Richard Butner — once again!”
— Andy Duncan, World Fantasy Award-winning author of An Agent of Utopia


Full of love and pain

Tue 16 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Never Have I Ever cover - click to view full sizeIsabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever gets a shout out in this Book Riot very solid list of Out of This World SFF Short Story Collections:

Last but not least, this is another collection that mixes the magical and the horrific. It is full of urban legends, Filipino folklore, and immigrant tales that explore the lives of women and girls. Yap’s unique voice is oft-praised for a reason — her stories are unique and lyrical. Full of love and pain. They also include things like ghosts, vampires, androids, and elementals to name a few. Watch out especially for “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Good Girls,” and the heartbreaking “Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” which talks about the Philippine drug war.

Every reader pulls different favorites from a collection — for instance this reader highlighting Asphalt, River, Mother, Child. I’d like to highlight the three stories that appear in Never Have I Ever for the first time, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Syringe,” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls.”

“Syringe” — as the title promises — is a short sharp shock while the two other stories are much longer, albeit very different. They’re both stories about friendship, love, and magic but while the first is a sweetly seductive story the second is a much darker story that will stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.


Hot Chocolate

Fri 12 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Me & our kid have just signed up again for the annual Hot Chocolate Run Walk fundraiser for Safe Passage. Is it true we only walk a couple of miles on a cold December morning so that we will get a mug of hot chocolate. No? No! We raises the money for the programs and we get hot chocolate. Win? Win!

We’ve been doing this fundraiser for the last few years — except 2020, which must have been virtual. I can barely remember although I just checked and Ursula raised $585 which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who donated for that. Ursula has turned into a powerhouse fundraiser over the years — I am so glad she is older and I do not have to carry her part of the way anymore. Little does she know that soon she’ll have to carry me.

Anyway, back to posts about books and supple chains (pretty sure that’s what’s all over the news), and thanks again for support in the past and any and all donations for Safe Passage are welcome, thank you!


Holiday Deadlines 2021

Wed 3 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

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

I usually post these later but you may have seen in the news that all the manufacturers are expecting holiday shipping to be slow, more expensive, and unreliable this year. So far our experience at Book Moon has proven that to be correct. If you can order early for the holidays, go for it!

As usual, the Small Beer office will be closed from December 23, 2021 – January 3, 2022. However, we can still get books to you because what we most want to do, book-wise, is get books to readers:

  1. Weightless Books is always there, 100% solid, 100% independent with DRM-free ebooks in the format of your choice. They can also be sent as gifts on the date you specify.
  2. How about just any about old ebook in any genre? Got them here.
  3. Audiobooks: we have them. (I love Libro.fm — it’s very simple to use and they have pretty much everything.)
  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.) Along with a reminder that orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.

And this year this annual reminder should probably just be bolded:

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. 5
First Class Mail (LCRW/chapbooks) Dec. 17
Priority Mail Dec. 18
Priority Mail Express Dec. 23

Here are the books we published this year:

 


Trifecta

Tue 2 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Dropping today like a bear into a bookshop near you today is Elizabeth Hand’s third Cass Neary novel, Hard Light — Cass is in England, there’s murder, photography, bad behaviour (UK spelling this time, of course) and now all three have matching covers. If winter is coming down on you like a henge stone tipping over in a thousand-year storm these are the books to step into and escape.

TL;DR?

riveting tour-de-force . . .  mysterious death . . . Helsinki . . . stunning images . . . Reykjavik . . . corpse . . . vortex . . . ancient myth . . . betrayal, vengeance . . . Icelandic wilderness.

Here’s a picture of all three of them on the bench in Book Moon where all 3 of them are sitting on the shelf looking beautiful and appropriately scary. Come by or order them online today!


Hard Light

Tue 2 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731920 | ebook · 9781618731937

Third in the Cass Neary series: Generation Loss · Available Dark · Hard Light

Punk photographer Cass Neary, “one of noir’s great anti-heroes” (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love), rages back in the series that began with Generation Loss and Available Dark. Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.

Only Quinn doesn’t show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party’s host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.

Forced to run Mallo’s contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England’s Land’s End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history―if she survives.

Strobe-lit against an apocalyptic background of rock and roll, rave culture, fast drugs and transgressive photography, Hard Light continues the breathless, breathtaking saga of Cassandra Neary, “an anti-hero for the ages. We’d follow Cass anywhere, into any glittery abyss, and do.” [Megan Abbot, author of The Fever]

Watch: Elizabeth Hand & Hannah Pittard & Library of Congress Book Festival
Elizabeth Hand presents Hard Light and Hannah Pittard presents Listen to Me in a panel discussion on suspense thrillers with Maureen Corrigan from NPR at the 2016 Library of Congress Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

“Hand’s supernaturally inflected Cass Neary crime novels make mincemeat out of the assumption—still held by many an unwary reader—that mysteries are mere diversions, designed to pass an empty hour and then be forgotten. No way that’s true of Hard Light: This third novel in the Cass Neary series fades away as stubbornly as a bloodstain.” — Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post

“Nerve-jangling and addictive, Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light offers up a signature Cass Neary tale of moral ambivalence, keen betrayal and a dark lushness that leaps off the page. And with Cass―relentless in her dangerous curiosity, her ruthless art of survival―Hand has created an anti-hero for the ages. We’d follow her anywhere, into any glittery abyss, and do.” —Megan Abbott

“Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels, rightly praised for their icy tension and remarkable darkness, are threaded, like the best of punk in any medium, on a bloodied yet admirably stubborn humanism.” —William Gibson

“As a huge mystery and noir buff, I love Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels―they’re tough-minded, beautifully written, and unique. One of the best series out there. In Hard Light, Hand has created another fascinating puzzle―and another instant classic. If you’re a fan of intelligent page-turners, this one’s for you.” —Jeff Vandermeer

“Brutal, elegant, rich and strange, Hard Light is noir at it’s very best. This fast paced marvel of a book beats with the exultant energy of Punk rock and hums with the mysterious beauty of a Delphic hymn. Elizabeth Hand is not only one of the great American novelists, her influence on a generation has changed the face of Literature. This novel will haunt your dreams.” —Cara Hoffman, author of So Much Pretty and Be Safe I Love You

“Brilliant! A punk-scene runaway train. Welcome to Liz Hand. Buy this book.” —Sarah Langan, author of The Missing and The Keeper

“Elizabeth Hand is quite simply one of our best living writers. Her Cass Neary books are the ne plus ultra of modern noir, and Hard Light is the best one far: A riveting story that gets going at nosebleed pace and never slows down, anchored by the voice of the iconic Cass Neary, the greatest main character in modern detective fiction. I never knew I had a thing for Scandinavian punk rock noir until Liz Hand showed me what’s up. Now I want more.” —Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game and Midnight Picnic

“Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light is a pitch-perfect punk noir that makes a speed-fueled, mad-dash tour through an avant garde underbelly London and the lost landscape of rural England. It’s about the lost, the heartbreakingly ephemeral, and the melancholy timelessness of art and love and murder. It’s a tour de force. It’s a great goddamn book. If you haven’t met Cass Neary yet, do so before you get a well-deserved steel-toe to the knee.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep

“Beloved scrapper, fight-picker, and trouble-finder Cass Neary returns for another installment in Elizabeth Hand’s gorgeous, searing, speed-fueled bender of a series. Both fearless and vulnerable, heroic and haunted, Neary is a heroine like no other: a punk-rock valkyrie whose fierce intelligence and harrowing quests, rendered in Hand’s flawless, ice-clear prose, have redefined a genre. Hard Light is Hand at her best, and I cannot think of any higher praise.” —Sarah McCarry, author of The Metamorphoses Trilogy

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction 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.


Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 44

Sat 30 Oct 2021 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

December 2021. 64 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732033

Who is ready for the fourty-eleventh issue of LCRW? It has stories, poems, a cooking column.

Cometh the hour
cometh the zine
but wait
it is written
that a zine
must sometimes be delay’d

Reviews

“All are very well written.” — Paula Guran, Locus

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

fiction

ArLynn Leiber Presser, “Napier’s Constant”
James Blakey, “The Last Mission”
Kate Francia, “A Minor Demon in Adams B-12”
Jen Sexton-Riley, “All I’ve Ever Learned from Love”
Laurie McCrae, “A Kindling”
Richard Butner, “Holderhaven”
James Moran, “A Story Isn’t a Story Until it’s Heard by Someone Else”

poetry

Brady Rhoades, Three Poems
Ben Corvo, The Slipper Ships

nonfiction

Raymond J. Barry, “I Had a Meeting Then with My Agents”
Nicole Kimberling, “Hot & Cold: Meatballs & Mash”

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 44, December 2021. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732033. 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: $24/4 issues. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c. Contents © 2021 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration “Mother Cat” © 2021 by Ashley Wong (ashlwong.com). Thank you authors, artists, and readers. Celebrating! Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria appearing on NPR’s 50 Favorite SF&F Books of the Past Decade; Kim Scott’s Taboo receiving a Kate Challis Ruth Adeney Koori Award (RAKA) commendation; and Vandana Singh being selected as a Climate Imagination Fellows by ASU’s Center for Science. Petra Mayer, RIP. 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.

About the Authors

Raymond J. Barry’s career began during the sixties and seventies when he became a member of three of New York City’s major, avant-garde theater companies: the Living Theater, the Open Theater, and the Wooster Group. He also performed in numerous productions both Off Broadway and Broadway, including two dozen productions at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. After twenty-three years of New York theater, he embarked upon his film career, performing approximately fifty major films and dozens of television roles, including Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon; Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July; Neil Burger’s Interview with the Assassin; Falling Down; Flubber, and, of course Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, directed by Jake Kasden, among many others. He also played roles in dozens of television series, highlighted by his six-season role as Arlo on the FX Series, Justified. He is the author of a memoir, Never a Viable Alternative, and a volume of plays, Mother’s Son and Other Plays, and his paintings can be viewed on his website, raymondjbarry.org.

James Blakey lives in the Shenandoah Valley where he writes mostly full-time. His story “The Bicycle Thief” won a Derringer Award. When James isn’t writing, he can be found on the hiking trail—he’s climbed forty of the fifty US state high points—or bike-camping his way up and down the East Coast. Find him at JamesBlakeyWrites.com.

Richard Butner’s story “Holderhaven” was first published in Crimewave and was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. His first collection, The Adventurists: Stories will be published in early 2022. He has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, and Urban Garden Performing Arts. His nonfiction, on topics ranging from computers to cocktails to architecture, has appeared in IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, The News & Observer, Triangle Alternative, and Southern Lifestyle. He lives in North Carolina, where he runs the annual Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference. He and Harry Houdini have used the same trapdoor.

Kate Francia is a writer in the New York area. Her stories have appeared in Electric Lit, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Speculative Fiction. You can find her at katefrancia.com.

Nicole Kimberling has only just now started cooking dinner for guests again after almost two years without offering anyone except her wife a plate of food. She’s barely able to contain her excitement about it long enough to function in her day job as editor of Blind Eye Books. She also written several novels and even an audio drama podcast called “Lauren Proves Magic is Real!” which, like her column in this zine, is also about food and cooking—just on the supernatural level.

Too restless for his own good, Laurie McCrae is a Canadian immigrant to Scotland by way of England and Ireland. He lives by the sea with his partner and their young son.

James Moran is a professional astrologer and author who regularly publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His published work can be found at jamesmoran.org and he can be found on instagram @astrologyjames.

ArLynn Leiber Presser comes from a long line of writers, including notable science fiction and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber who devised the first modern Dungeons & Dragons game. She is the author of thirty-seven books, almost all romances. The most recent is This One Last Palmer’s Kiss which combines elements of true love, phlebotomy, guns, and otherworldly murderous intentions.

Brady Rhoades’ work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Antioch Review, Faultline, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, William & Mary Review, and other publications. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. Rhoades is a journalist who works and lives in Fullerton, California.

Jen Sexton-Riley’s short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, on Cape Noir Radio Theater, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and she writes a monthly comedy/horror advice column, Dear Agony, for the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. She can be found at jensextonriley.com, on Twitter @sextonfleur, and on Instagram @jensextonriley.


Soaked in Myth

Wed 27 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

The Silverberg Business cover - click to view full sizeWe are happy to announce a new novel — Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Silverberg Business, coming in trade paperback and ebook in 2022 — and reveal the cover today. The cover art is by a long time favorite of ours, musician and artist Jon Langford, whose art is a perfect fit for this novel of 19th-century Texas where everything is weirder than it first seems.

We have long admired Robert’s stories since we first published his story “Suspension” in the eighth issue of LCRW. One of the early readers of the novel, Daryl Gregory, author of Revelator, had this to say:

“The Silverberg Business hits like a hurricane—there’s strangeness and beauty on every page. The novel is that rare thing, a weird western that’s truly weird, set in a Texas that’s simultaneously gritty, violent, and real, yet soaked in myth. Don’t miss this.”

There’ll be lots more posted about it before, on, and after the publication date, August 22, 2022, and in the meantime, hey, Jon Langford!


Meet the new boss

Mon 25 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Quite different from the old boss. Cass Neary, allergic to bosses, sensitive as a brick through a window, deeply intimate with the relationship between light and dark and the photography of same, is coming back. Hard Light comes out on November 2.


Early Adventurer Says

Thu 21 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeHere’s an excuse to post the near-final cover of Richard Butner’s forthcoming collection — John Kessel sent us this report from perusing The Adventurists:

“Richard Butner’s stories are funny, scary, personal, dispassionate, satirical, and heartfelt, if those incompatible adjectives can be assembled to describe the same work. He writes about the subtle losses we suffer (often without noticing) as we get older, about love and loyalty, about how the past is never completely past and can come sweeping back over you at the slightest opportunity like a tidal wave, so you’d better be ready lest you drown.”

Ready to adventure but don’t want to wait until February? There are 10 copies to be had on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers here.


Beginning the adventure

Thu 23 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeNext year we’re looking forward to publishing The Adventurists, a collection of stories by a long time favorite writer, Richard Butner. Butner’s stories have been published in Interfictions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Crimewave, Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic, SciFiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, When the Music’s Over, and Strange Horizons among others.

We’ve sent advance copies to booksellers and more are going out to a few readers and reviewers every week. For those who like electronic hunting and gathering you can now download or request it on Edelweiss.

I love to hear what other readers think of the books and am happy to share a couple of early reactions:

“A Richard Butner story is an invitation to discovery alongside his characters. It’s a left turn off of reality’s highway and into its old business district: defiantly shabby, casually weird, and occasionally surreal, perfect in every grounding detail. Every story zigs when you expect it to zag. You only think you know where they are going, but it turns out you are on the same adventure as the protagonist, discovering as you go that the world is stranger than it was the minute before, and the minute before that. Well worth the journey.”
— Sarah Pinsker, author of We Are Satellites

“At last, one of the contemporary masters of the uncanny and darkly humorous, Richard Butner, has his stories in one place where we can get at them. With a toe (just a toe) in the literary pool, and the rest of him splashing happily in the spec fic/sci-fi/surreal swimming hole, Butner’s tales deal in the deadly habits of nostalgia, and the surprises waiting for the wistful and the obsessive whose march forward obliges a look backward. Linkean, Barthelmean, Saundersean . . . hm, okay, these guys do NOT lend themselves to sonorous adjectivization but, nonetheless, they’ll have to welcome a new storyteller beside them on the shelf.”
— Wilton Barnhardt, author of Emma Who Saved My Life and Lookaway, Lookaway


Cass Neary Dark Mode Now Available

Mon 13 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Available Dark cover - click to view full sizeThis month we are putting out our first paperback edition of Elizabeth Hand’s second Cass Neary novel, Available Dark — available in paperback and ebook now at your favorite bookstores. The ebook wasn’t connected to the print book because I missed the new switch added to the massive flowchart of How To Publish A Book. Oops. It’s up there and should be connected by Thursday or later. Will it matter to anyone but me? Don’t know.

I sometimes find it hard to find the right words to recommend these books because Cass Neary is such a walking car crash — although that’s not right as it doesn’t capture her relentless forward-moving energy. (So maybe it’s more like she’s always crashing in the same car.) If she looks back she might turn into a pillar of salt (or something slightly more illegal) and blow away so she is always moving, almost on the run, looking forward for a place where she won’t be surrounded by and immersed in the damage she can see on some people. Well, no such luck this time, Cass.

Available Dark immediately follows Generation Loss as Cass takes on a photo authentication assignment and leaves the US for Helsinki (what, no Covid fit-to-fly test?) and then goes onto Reykjavik. It’s beautiful up there in the Iceland, but for Cass and others, it’s getting deadly.

Hand will be down in DC this Saturday as part of the 20201 National Book Festival for this event celebrating the new paperback edition of the 4th book in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners (which I think comes out this month):

Live Event (virtual link to come)
September 18, 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT

Elizabeth Hand, author of The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland), and Alex Michaelides, author of The Maidens  (Celadon), discuss their new books with NPR Books editor Petra Mayer.

A direct link to the virtual event will be available here closer to the date of the Festival. Attendees may register during the event to submit questions for the live Q&A at the end.

 


Too Too Solid Paper

Fri 10 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Here’s a fun one: do you work at a lit nonprofit and like getting boxes of free Small Beer books? Email us!


Available Dark

Tue 7 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731906 | ebook · 9781618731913

Second in the Cass Neary series.

Generation Loss · Available Dark · Hard Light

Elizabeth Hand’s writing honors include the Shirley Jackson Award, the James Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and many others. Now, this uniquely gifted storyteller brings us a searing and iconoclastic crime novel, in which photographer Cass Neary, introduced in the underground classic Generation Loss, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of crime in Scandinavia’s coldest corners.

As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. In Available Dark, the eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.

Reviews & Praise

“Available Dark works well as a thriller, but it’s Cass who makes the book extraordinary. It’s rare to find a strong female character – especially a middle-aged one — who likes sex and drinking and drugs and doesn’t feel the need to apologize about it. Eight pages into the book she’s offered some crystal meth. She takes it. Why the hell not? Neither she nor the narrator blinks. There’s nothing coy or exhibitionistic about it, it’s just who she is.” — Time Magazine

“In this brilliant sequel to Hand’s acclaimed literary thriller, Generation Loss (2007), Cassandra Neary, “a burned out, aging punk with a dead gaze,” who subsists largely on alcohol and speed, confronts darkness nearly beyond her comprehension. . . . A flash of incandescence counters final threats of death, and the all-encompassing darkness is leavened by a glimmer of hope. Stunning.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Norwegian collector Anton Bredahl, an admirer . . . offers Neary a tidy sum to fly to Helsinki to give her opinion on some photos he’s thinking of purchasing. She finds herself blown away by the photographer’s technique, notwithstanding the grim subject matter—corpses. The bloody aftermath of the assignment places Neary in grave danger as she confronts a significant figure from her past. The scenes of violence advance the plot while helping the reader to understand Hand’s uncompromisingly compromised main character.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Buy this book!” — Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde

“Tense, compelling, and beautiful.” — Christopher Farnsworth, author of Blood Oath

“Available Dark is dark stuff indeed. . . . ​This book disturbs and delights.” — Paul Doiron, author of The Poacher’s Son

“I hate modern fiction; it usually sucks. Available Dark is the exception to my rule. It is wonderfully depressing—­the locations, the characters, the mood, the murders. It’s so well written, it reads true. I can think of no higher compliment.” — Legs McNeil, cofound­er of Punk magazine

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction 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.


50 of the Best

Fri 20 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

We’re delighted to see Sofia Samatar’s two Olondria novels included in NPR’s big fun list — how many have you read?

We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

In Olondria, you can smell the ocean wind coming off the page, soldiers ride birds, angels haunt humans, and written dreams are terribly dangerous. “Have you ever seen something so beautiful that you’d be content to just sit and watch the light around it change for a whole day because every passing moment reveals even more unbearable loveliness and transforms you in ways you can’t articulate?” asks judge Amal El-Mohtar. “You will if you read these books.”

Which reminds me it was also on a big list last year:  Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

“This slowly-unraveling, exquisitely-detailed novel made the poet Sofia Samatar a World Fantasy Award winner and a Nebula Award finalist. It follows Jevick, a young writer who is obsessed with the fantastical, distant world of Olondria, where his father is a merchant. But when Jevick is called there after he inherits the family business, he becomes haunted by a ghost—and is unwittingly pulled into Olondria’s power struggle. The novel unfolds in waves of A Game of Thrones-level twists, all while its fantastical world-building pulls from South Asian, Middle Eastern and African cultures to offer a welcome departure from Eurocentric fantasy.”


Vandana Singh, Climate Imagination Fellow

Tue 17 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

I was delighted to see via Locus that Vandana Singh (author of Ambiguity Engines among others) is one of 4 new Climate Imagination Fellows, hosted by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The fellowship “seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world.”

I have Xia Jia’s collection from the Clarkesworld Kickstarter but the other 2 writers are new to me:

  • Libia Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City. She writes speculative fiction as well as nonfiction and criticism about science fiction and fantastic literature. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian and Portuguese. She is one of the co-founders of the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, with a special focus on science fiction; and Mexicona: Imagination and Future, a series of Spanish-language conversations about the future and speculative literature from Mexico and other planets. She was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for the bilingual and bicultural anthology “A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia.” After that, she was so excited that she edited “A Timeline in Which We Don’t Go Extinct,” a bilingual anthology that is also a video game, which is free to download and play. She edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine “Strange Horizons,” published in November 2020.
  • Xia Jia is a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, a city in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. Seven of her short stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. She has published a fantasy novel, “Odyssey of China Fantasy: On the Road” (2009), and four collections of science fiction stories: “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” (2012), “A Time Beyond Your Reach” (2017), “Xi’an City Is Falling Down” (2018), and “A Summer Beyond Your Reach” (2020), her first collection in English. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Nature and Clarkesworld magazine. Her nonfiction academic collection, “Coordinates of the Future: Discussions on Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Globalization,” was published in 2019. She is also involved in science fiction research, translation, screenwriting, editing and teaching creative writing and is currently working on a new science fiction book, titled “Chinese Encyclopedia.”
  • Hannah Onoguwe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies “Imagine Africa 500” (2016), from Pan African Publishers, and “Strange Lands Short Stories” (2020), from Flame Tree Press. Her work has appeared in publications including Adanna, The Drum Literary Magazine, Omenana, Brittle Paper, The Stockholm Review and Timeworn Literary Journal. In 2014, “Cupid’s Catapult,” her collection of short stories, was one of 10 manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She won the ANA Poetry Competition in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ibadan and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Jos. She works at a software company, providing support for the Nigeria Immigration Service.
  • Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” (2014) and “Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories” (2018), the second of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2014, she traveled to the Alaskan North Shore to create a case study on climate change for undergraduate education as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Her work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis is part of a forthcoming volume from UNESCO, “Charting an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Radical, Transformative Change in the Midst of Climate Breakdown.” Her short fiction has been widely published, including the short story “Widdam,” part of the interdisciplinary climate-themed collection “A Year Without a Winter” (2019). She was born and brought up in New Delhi and now lives near Boston.

It is quite an exciting program. The fellows will write short fiction, short flash fictions, and essays and so on to be collected in a Climate Action Almanac next year. They also will be doing workshops around the world including the countdown summit to COP 26 in Scotland later this year.

Congratulations to Vandana and all the Fellows. Looking forward to seeing what they do.


Read Liyana on Lithub

Mon 16 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Spirits Abroad cover - click to view full sizeLithub just dropped an excerpt from Zen Cho’s story “Liyana” — read it in the book or check it out here.

Recent notes about the book can be found in the infinite pages of Bustle

“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”

and Buzzfeed:

“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”


Here, There, and Everywhere

Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Spirits Abroad cover - click to view full sizeI’ve been looking forward to this day for a while as it’s the publication day for our expanded edition of Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad. The book was originally published a few years ago and was a co-winner of the Crawford Award. I hadn’t read it until more recently when it came across my desk with nine additional stories including the Hugo Award winner — and such a good story! — “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.”

We were a bit late with getting the cover finalized but when it came in from Wesley Allsbrook we were over the moon, what a cracker! The book is about as much fun as can be with the whole gamut of stories, running from here, there, to everywhere.

The book is available everywhere in print, audio, and ebook. Dive in!


Spirits Abroad

Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 352 pages · $17 · 9781618731869 | ebook · 9781618731876
2nd printing: December 2022

LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize winner
Locus Award finalist

A new expanded edition of Zen Cho’s award-winning debut collection.

Nineteen sparkling stories that weave between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead. Spirits Abroad is an expanded edition of Zen Cho’s Crawford Award winning debut collection with twelve added stories including Hugo Award winner “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian. A teenage pontianak struggles to balance homework, bossy aunties, first love, and eating people. An earth spirit gets entangled in protracted negotiations with an annoying landlord, and Chang E spins off into outer space, the ultimate metaphor for the Chinese diaspora.

Read an interview on Electric Lit: On Writing Fantasy Inspired by Malaysian Chinese Folklore

Read a story: 七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)

Reviews & Praise

“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”
— Bustle

“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”
—Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed

“The first iteration of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad came out a few years ago, but this new collection is bigger and bolder, including the delightful ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ which won a Hugo Award.”
— Washington Post

“The most stylistically adventurous, even ex­perimental stories are included in the final sec­tion, ‘Elsewhere’, in which supernatural figures may be the main characters – a minor earth spirit narrates ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote’, while a tricksterish Monkey King confronts a quite traditional Faerie Queen in ‘Monkey King, Faerie Queen’. My favorite story here is also the only one in the book which hints at science fiction. In ‘The Four Generations of Chang E’, the title character escapes a nightmarish, dying Earth by winning a lottery to migrate to a moon colony, where she learns to live with moon rabbits and eventually has herself surgically altered into a Moonite with ‘long, ovoid eyes.’ She never escapes family responsibilities, though, and, after her mother dies, returns to Earth with the ashes. There she gains an insight that seems to haunt several of Cho’s stories, including perhaps Black Water Sister: ‘Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.’ The tension on that thread of narrative, which adds subtle meaning to the title Spirits Abroad, is what gives Cho’s short fiction, even at its wittiest, a kind of haunting – and haunted – sensibility.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Highly recommended for those interested in well-written fantasy fiction outside of the post-Tolkien mold.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“Powerful but subtle magic woven into the fabric of intricate worlds make Cho a sure favorite for readers of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A collection of speculative stories that play on Malaysian folklore and fantasy tropes with humor and compassion. . . . The stories are told with the precise and almost sparse voice of fairy tales. . . . the collection’s most moving stories harness seamless worldbuilding, intriguing character development, and thematic complexity. A swath of delightful and intricate stories from a wildly inventive storyteller.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Sorcerer to the Crown author Zen Cho writes stories that slide easily between genres, and characters who hop nimbly between our world of banal bustle and a supernatural world that often seems just as annoying. This collection of ten stories, originally published in 2014 by Buku Fixi and the joint winner of 2015’s IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, is now being re-issued by Small Beer Press, and gives us new takes on ancient lore—especially the tales of Malaysia.
“A vampiric teen pontianak finds it hard to keep up with her schoolwork and her constant need to feed upon people. The moon goddess Chang E heads further into outer space—but is it in a spirit of adventure or to get away from Earth? An elderly Datin looks back at her failed love affair with an orang bunian, a type of spirit who would normally favor a deep forest or mountain home to avoid humans. Cho’s stories look at the intersection of those mundane and uncanny worlds—and the ways life among the humans can drive the spirit to distraction.”
— Leah Schnelbach, BookMarks, The Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of 2021

“Zen Cho’s stories manage the rare and precious feat of being smart, witty, wise, horrific, and comforting all at once.” — Kate Elliott author of Unconquerable Sun

“An excellent collection.” — Abigail Nussbaum, Strange Horizons

Table of Contents

Here

The First Witch of Damansara
The Guest
The Fish Bowl
First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia
Odette
The House of Aunts
Balik Kampung

There

One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland
起狮, 行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)
七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)
The Mystery of the Suet Swain
Prudence and the Dragon
The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

Elsewhere

The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote
Monkey King, Faerie Queen
Liyana
The Terra-cotta Bride
The Four Generations of Chang E

Praise for Zen Cho’s Books:

“An enchanting cross between Georgette Heyer and Susannah Clarke, full of delights and surprises. Zen Cho unpins the edges of the canvas and throws them wide.” — Naomi Novik, New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education

“A warm, funny debut novel by a brilliant new talent.” — Charles Stross, award-winning author of the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series

“Fabulous! If you like Austen or Patrick O’Brian, or magic and humor like Susanna Clarke, or simply a very fun read, you will really, really, enjoy this!” — Ann Leckie, Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of Ancillary Justice

“Zen Cho’s SORCERER TO THE CROWN is inventive, dangerous, brilliant, unsettling, and adorable, all at the same time. It shatters as many rules as its characters do. Historical Britain will never be the same again, and I can’t wait for the next book.” — Courtney Milan, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

“A deliciously true tale of politics and power in a charming, cruel world — it demands and deserves to be read again and again. Cho has humor and flair to match Pratchett and Heyer plus her own marvelous style.” — Karen Lord, award-winning author of The Best of All Possible Worlds

“A delightful and enchanting novel that uses sly wit and assured style to subvert expectations while it always, unfailingly, entertains. I loved it!” — Kate Elliott, author of the Spiritwalker series

“Magic, manners and dragons in Regency England — this alone would be awesome, but Zen Cho adds a veneer of comment on English colonial politics …. Like a mix of Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and all its own thing. Glorious.” — Aliette de Bodard, award-winning author of Obsidian and Blood and The House of Shattered Wings

“A sheer delight from beginning to end. Cho perfectly conjures the opulence, absurdity and conflict of the period.” — Samantha Shannon, author of The Bone Season

“A delightful follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown! Cho applies her characteristic wit and charm to a tale of cursed sisters — a story I found as enchanting as her Faerie Court.” — S.A. Chakraborty, author of City of Brass

“Cho continues to confront class and gender roles in an alternate Regency England while showcasing entertaining prose and characters. A delightful historical-fantasy novel that will capture readers in its layered story line.”—Booklist

“Reading the clever deployment of weaponized manners never gets old; in Cho’s charming prose, The True Queen weaves a very pleasant spell indeed.” — NPR

“A winning combination of magic and thrill set in an alternative version of Regency England.” — Washington Post

“A captivating debut that, aside from examining both gender and racial prejudice, tells an entertaining story with wit and consummate skill.” — The Guardian (UK)

“Fans of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will flock to this historical fantasy debut for its shared setting and be rewarded with an exciting story and nuanced, diverse characters who make this novel soar on its own merits.” — Library Journal (starred review; debut of the month)

“Combines magic and the Regency period in the manner of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but adds an Austenian piquancy . . . Cho’s debut has much to recommend it, particularly its implicit critique of colonialism and its frothy good humour.”— Financial Times

“A classic, gently barbed upper-crust comedy mixed with magical thrills, modern social consciousness, and a hint of political intrigue. A decidedly promising start.”— Kirkus Reviews

“Zacharias brings to mind another orphaned young wizard whose combination of grit and melancholy captured readers’ hearts, and ingenious, gutsy Prunella simply shines.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Sorcerer to the Crown exceeds expectations. It’s a very entertaining and deeply enjoyable novel—and if this is what Cho gives us for her debut, I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does next.” — Locus

About the book

“The original print edition of Spirits Abroad was published by Fixi Novo in 2014. It was also released as an ebook containing extra stories and author’s notes. The Small Beer Press edition is an expanded edition published in August 2021, containing nine added stories including Hugo Award winner ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again’.”

Zen Cho is the author of Black Water Sister, the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad. She is a Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

Cover by Wesley Allsbrook.


And now we ship

Tue 13 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Don’t expect to hear too much from us as we try and organize hundreds of orders from that sale. Phew. Thank you! With luck the monthly warehouse charges will have been significantly reduced. If not, check back here.


Warehouse Clearance Sale — last day

Mon 12 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

It has been — it is — nuts, so: thank you! Today, July 12th, is the last day of our Warehouse Clearance Sale — maybe we’ll do another next year and I’ll be better prepared for the madnesses. We’ve processed on third or so of the orders and some are shipping out. Many are being assembled. Books are moving from one warehouse to the other, being shipped from our office to the warehouse, adding a T-shirt, or another Angélica Gorodischer title.

Anyway, last day of the sale is here.


Celebrating Jeffrey Ford’s new book Big Dark Hole with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

Tue 6 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

July 6th, 2021: We are celebrating a new book, Jeffrey Ford’s Big Dark Hole, and 20 years (. . .) of Small Beer Press books with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

It’s been 20 years since we started publishing books as Small Beer Press and we are going to celebrate in a couple of different ways beginning now and continuing later this summer — mostly by making books or sending even more books out into the world, ha!

First Thing

We are delighted to celebrate 20 years of really rather good books by publishing Jeffrey Ford’s new collection Big Dark Hole. It’s a stoater!

This is Jeff’s sixth collection — seventh, really, as there was a Best of from PS last year — and every one of them is a cracker. We’re already planning our next collection with him — who wouldn’t when you look at this list I grabbed from his site:

The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, 2002, Golden Gryphon Press

The Empire of Ice Cream, 2005, Golden Gryphon Press

The Drowned Life, 2008, Harper Collins

Crackpot Palace, 2012, Harper Collins

A Natural History of Hell, 2016, Small Beer Press

Big Dark Hole, 2021, Small Beer Press, natch, comes out today, July the 6th, 2021, and it is a short, sharp shock of fantastic fiction.

There are a three new stories first published here in this book, “Monkey In the Woods,” “Inn of the Dreaming Dog,” and “The Match.” That third one there will have you stopping what you’re doing and making sure you read the rest of the story before someone interrupts.

You can read one of the stories, “Not Without Mercy,” online, but, really the book is shiny in surprising places and feels good in the hand. Sign up now for Readercon — online in August — where Jeffrey Ford and Ursula Vernon will be the guests of honor.

Second Thing

We’re putting on our first warehouse sale in many years. Long time readers will recognize the screenshot below from our pre-WordPress website — and now 10+ years later we’re basically doing the same thing.

The sale is going to run on the Book Moon website and will have a few rules and limitations:

  • alphabetical buying encouraged but quite difficult given the price-ordered list, but it’ll be fun, honest.
  • no buying over 5,000 books unless you really want to build something interesting out of them.
  • On second thoughts if you want to buy over 5,000 copies, you do you.
  • Discounts range from 0-94% off retail prices.
  • Order some full-price titles (such as the first one on this page,Travel Light, or Big Dark Hole) and we’ll throw free titles from the sale list.
  • Orders on this Easthampton, Massachusetts-based bookshop website will be shipped as fast as we can put them through from the Tennessee warehouse of our fabulous Minneapolis-based distributor, Consortium.
  • Gosh we love these books. We loved publishing every single one of them and right now we’re lining up some surprises and new books for the couple of years. It is true that I am an enthusiast, still, about all this and our warehouse people will tell you that, yes, I am very enthusiastic when I put the print orders in. More joy all round, says I.
  • There are a few books in the sale that are rarer and we will ship them from Book Moon.
  • This Decennial Warehouse Clearance Sale will run for one (1) week, July 6th-12th with the possibility of being extended for one (1) more week.
  • We only ship within the US & Canada.

I imagine if we keep publishing for another 10 or 20 years, we’ll have more clearance sales. Imagine that: 2030. 2040. What funny looking numbers. 2030 looks more like a time than a year. 8:30 already?

Who knows. Maybe by 2040 we’ll all be ordering small pills from Bookland that download the latest story virus into our chips. If you trust Bookland and your shipper, of course.

Anyway, please pass the word around and stock up: it’ll be Jolabokaflod before you know it.

Right, here’s that all important Warehouse Clearance Event link.

Thanks for reading, spreading the word, buying books, and keeping this Small Beer contraption on the road!


Big Dark Hole

Tue 6 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731845 | ebook · 9781618731852

A new collection from the award winning author of A Natural History of Hell.

World Fantasy Award finalist
Locus Award finalist

A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.

“Nobody else can quite make the short story form frolic the way Ford can. Equally at home exploring a slightly eerie Midwest or the out-and-out odd, his writing is often deeply weird, never arbitrary, and always profoundly satisfying. Whether he’s writing about a hive mind of fleas, the local monster, bookshelf fairies, an odd mountain hotel, or a professor named Jeff who has to wrestle an angel if he’s to keep his job, Big Dark Hole offers Ford at his outlandish best.”
— Brian Evenson, Song for the Unraveling of the World

Read: an excerpt of “Five-Pointed Spell” on Lithub

Reviews

“While it might be gentler and more personal, it’s still weird, beautiful, gothic, and strange, all of it definitively Jeffrey Ford.” — Nightfire, The Best Horror Short Story Collections and Anthologies of 2021

“Each and every story in Big Dark Hole stands distinct in my memory. . . . Ford employs the tools of fantastic fiction to explore the strangeness of twenty-first-century American life.” — Matthew Keeley, Tor.com

“Big Dark Hole is quintessential Jeffrey Ford, everything avid readers love about him in a concentrated burst set to knock them off their seats. It’s grounded and accessible, yet hallucinatory and surreal. It’s heartfelt and melancholy, but also hilarious and terrifying. It’s all these things in one two hundred page package, and contains some of Ford’s best work to date. Those into weirder, more surreal works of horror should find this essential reading, and for those who aren’t, well, maybe a little weirdness might do you some good. Either way, do yourself a favor and seek this one out. ”
— Sam Reader, Nightfire

“One can encounter a myriad of strange and otherworldly things in a big dark hole; sometimes, we discover these holes in the most unexpected places. This new short story collection explores the extraordinary that lurks just behind everyday life. Some of its subjects are truly otherworldly, like tiny fairies who risk their lives in a daring rescue (‘The Bookcase Expedition’), an angel whom one must wrestle to secure a professorship (‘The Match’), or spirits trapped in a never-ending circle of violence who suck others in with them (‘The Jeweled Wren’). Others are about weird events or beings that mark our lives, like a monkey in the woods (‘Monkey in the Woods’), or a drainage system that a young boy is compelled to explore (‘Big Dark Hole’).
VERDICT In this collection, Ford (‘The Well-Built City’ trilogy) serves up a variety of staples from the sci-fi/horror buffet: monsters, ghosts, fairies, and even a creepy carnival. Exacting language and well-drawn characters give these stories enough depth to satisfy both sci-fi/fantasy fans and literary fiction readers. Seamlessly blending the surreal with the mundane, Ford gives readers an innocuous ride to places they never knew they wanted to go. Recommended for fans of Neil Gaiman and Ursula Le Guin.”—Elisabeth Clark, West Florida P.L., Pensacola
— Library Journal

“‘Fifteen tales of horror, suspense, and macabre encounters that recount moments when the fantastic finds a crack in our everyday world.
Ford is a prolific writer with a shelf of well-deserved rewards for his novels, but short stories are his sweet spot. Armed with the paranoia of Poe, the psychological terror of Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King’s empathy for everyday people, this latest collection is both subtle and nightmare-inducing, depending on the story. The opener, “The Thousand Eyes,” is a noir-tinged period piece about a mysterious bar, an obsessed painter, and a frightening singer with a “voice of death.” Many of the stories are subdued creature features: “Hibbler’s Minions” is about a flea circus gone awry while “From the Balcony of the Idawolf Arms” features a werewolflike shape-shifter. Finding the minor magic in the everyday world is another thread, but the shifts in style between stories are impressive, from gothic horror in “Inn of the Dreaming Dog” to mythology in “Sisyphus in Elysium” to the long-suppressed grief in the title story. Several of the stories—some of the most experimental and intriguing—find the author narrating his own experiences through fantastical events. In “The Match,” sporadic writing teacher Ford is informed that in order to keep his job, he must fight an angel, as one typically does in academia. Elsewhere, in ‘Monster Eight,’ the author’s fictional counterpart has a run-in with the local monster just doing his “monster thing,” and in ‘The Bookcase Expedition,’ he witnesses a minor war between fairies and spiders. In ‘Five-Pointed Spell,’ the final story and one of the longest, Ford deftly spins a tale that starts with shades of Duel or Mad Max and turns into something that more closely resembles The Blair Witch Project.
A collection of wonderfully creepy gems in which each story goes its own way, to frightening effect.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Employing wide-ranging supernatural conceits—Dust Bowl demons, Amish hexes, figures from Greek legend—these 15 dark tales of evil, loss, and greed from Ford (Out of Body) are sure to send shivers up readers’ spines. Ford’s subtle stories peel away suburbia’s mask of mundanity to reveal sinister undertones—and most of his hapless characters are oblivious to the darkness around them until it’s too late. The title story sees inept cops and apathetic townsfolk abandon their search for an abused boy who crawled into a sewer pipe. In ‘The Thousand Eyes,’ an artist works to capture the grotesque lounge singer he saw perform at a bar, but comes to believe that when he finishes the painting, he will disappear. A bored writer witnesses a tribe of tiny fairies scaling his bookshelves in ‘The Bookcase Expedition.’ In 1933, the manager of a rundown carnival accepts a demon’s help in ‘Hibbler’s Minions.’ And after Sisyphus’s boulder is destroyed in the melancholy yet redemptive ‘Sisyphus in Elysium,’ the tormented and regretful Greek king searches the afterlife for the spirit of his wife. Readers will enjoy these creepy, thoughtful stories—but should be warned not to read them in the dark.“ — Publishers Weekly

“The disquieting title story ‘Big Dark Hole’ describes the (voluntary) disappearance of a young man inside the complex sewer system of a small town, from which he will never resurface. . . . In short, an interesting, entertaining collection apt to satisfy any speculative fiction lover.” — SF Revu

“Ford’s story ‘Word Doll’ from his collection A Brief History of Hell is one of my favorite stories of all time. Ford specializes in having the mundane meet the creepy and inevitably weird, leaving the reader often unsettled and in awe. Having heard Ford read one of the stories included in this collection at a public reading pre-pandemic, I can’t wait to gobble up the rest.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot, 10 Speculative Short Story Collections to Enjoy in 2021

Table of Contents

The Thousand Eyes
Hibbler’s Minions
Monster Eight
Inn of the Dreaming Dog
Monkey in the Woods
The Match
From the Balcony of the Idawolf Arms
Sisyphus in Elysium
The Jeweled Wren
Not Without Mercy [Conjunctions]
The Bookcase Expedition
The Winter Wraith
Big Dark Hole
Thanksgiving
Five-Pointed Spell

Cover illustration: “Vanitas Still Life” by Herman Henstenburgh, Creative Commons Universal, CC0 1.0, the Met Museum.

Praise for A Natural History of Hell:

“Ford specializes in employing vivid and precise language to portray the inexplicable, often with great intensity or deadpan humor. In his odd but compelling stories, strange things happen for reasons that are never made completely clear but that demand attention even as they grow ever more disturbing. A Natural History of Hell is an excellent sampler of Ford’s singular brand of storytelling, a baker’s dozen of diverse and diverting literary treats.”
— Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle

“Formally Ford’s stories are object lessons in how to stage a narrative.”
— James Sallis, F&SF

“In this collection of 13 stories, Ford showcases his award-winning talent for crafting creepy tales that bend the world as we know it in unexpected ways. Although the stories are not linked, they do share a common theme: wickedness lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life. And while each uses different degrees of the supernatural to get there, all employ a dark and uneasy atmosphere, quirky characters, and thought-provoking endings, with delightfully unsettling results. . . . This collection is a good choice for fans of short stories by Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, or Kevin Brockmeier.”
— Booklist Online (starred review)

Publishers Weekly Best Books of Summer:
“Celebrated short-form fantasist Ford blends subtle psychological horror with a mix of literary history, folklore, and SF in this collection of 13 short stories, all focused on the struggles, sorrows, and terrors of daily life. Each tale gently twists perceptions, diving down into the ordinary and coming back out with a thoughtful nugget of the extraordinary. Readers will be alarmed by how easily they relate to the well-meaning but inevitably destructive characters.”

“Seamlessly blends subtle psychological horror with a mix of literary history, folklore, and SF in this collection of 13 short stories, all focused on the struggles, sorrows, and terrors of daily life.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“13 tales that revel in the dark and strange, exhibiting ardent and pliable storytelling that ranges from suburban exorcisms to ghosts in bucolic 1915 Ohio. Each story in this collection displays Ford’s vigorous invention and witty idiosyncrasy in explorations of the wicked and violent corners of the imagination, but the variety of subject, setting, and tone ensures that the book never slips into an authorial haze. . . . The entire collection has a zeal for imagination and an unabashed pleasure in both entertainment and graceful writing that is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s short fiction. Ford has a knack for choosing the precise words that evoke an image and leave enough room for it to bloom. “Later, the rain started in again. The sound and smell of spring came through the screen of their bedroom window while he dreamt in the language the angels dream in, and she, of the land without worry.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“What distinguishes this collection of tales by New York fantasy writer Jeffrey Ford is its mix of eerie, sometimes violent subject matter and droll narrative voice; the juxtaposition of modern, ordinary settings and dialogue with the strange and the supernatural makes for memorable reading.”
— Daily Hampshire Gazette

“‘The Blameless’ is . . . a perfect example of Ford’s eerie subversion of mundane life. In it, suburban parents have begun throwing their children exorcisms as rites of passage, and the premise delivers plenty of black humor and bone-dry social satire.”
— Jason Heller, NPR

“A series of hits that linger long after you’ve finished reading. The mundane seems fantastical when penned by Ford, and the fantastical dreadfully human. Stories range from surreal daily life, to epic fantasy, to Gothic Americana and far, far beyond. It’s hard to pick a favorite, so I recommend you read them all.”
— RT Book Reviews ****

“An excellent collection of stories.”
— Weird Fiction Review

“A truly outstanding writer.”
— Locus

“Throughout his bounteous career, Jeffrey Ford has fully figured out which experiments work, and in what direction; the miracle is that he has also figured out how to rewrite the rulebook with his own brand of magic.”
— Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, IGMS

“Delightful, terrifying, thoughtful and incredibly well written. Jeffrey Ford’s style is eloquent and accessible, literary and engaging. His stories have an engrossing, almost mythological feel to them, strengthened by well-placed descriptions, impeccable pacing and Ford’s rare talent for delivering a satisfying ending.” — Catherine Grant, Huffington Post

“No one writes more beautifully about American nightmares and dreams. Every story is great but my favorites are ‘Word Doll,’ ‘Rocket Ship to Hell,’ ‘The Last Triangle,’ and — especially — ‘The Prelate’s Commission.’ Ford takes ideas that most writers would cling to and milk for three or four or five hundred pages and tosses them off left and right like they were nothing on his way to new worlds he seems to create out of thin air. If these stories weren’t so god damn enjoyable they’d make me jealous as hell.” — Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

“Jeffrey Ford is a beautifully disorienting writer, a poet in an unclassifiable genre—his own.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“Jeffrey Ford is a true heir to his teacher, John Gardner—not only in his ability to inhabit an astonishing range of styles and different worlds with jaw-dropping verisimilitude, but also in the great-hearted compassion and depth that he brings to his characters. I have long admired and learned from his work, and I’m grateful to have these beautiful stories to contemplate.”—Dan Chaon

“Combining legend and suspense, terror and darkly comic social commentary, Jeffrey Ford brings our greatest fears to life in this terrific collection. A Natural History of Hell is jammed with stories I wish I had written.”—Kit Reed

Praise for Jeffrey Ford’s award-winning books:

“Outstanding. . . . Ford uses . . . incongruously lyrical phrases to infuse the everyday with a nebulous magic.”—Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year (Starred Review)

“For lovers of the weird and fantastic and lovers of great writing, this is a treasure trove of disturbing visions, new worlds and fully realized craft.”—Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)

“Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue.” —Booklist

“Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford.” — Boston Globe on The Shadow Year

“Jeffrey Ford s latest triumph, The Shadow Year, is as haunting as it is humorous readers will recognize real talent in Ford s vivid, unerring voice.” —Louisville Courier Journal on The Shadow Year

“Spooky and hypnotic…Recommended for all public libraries.” — Library Journal

“[Ford’s] writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.” — io9.com

“The 16 stories in this collection are a perfect introduction to Ford’s work and illustrate the vast range of his imagination . . . If you haven’t discovered Ford, it’s time you did. His carefully crafted novels and short stories are all top-notch. Grade: A.” — Rocky Mountain News

Jeffrey Ford was born on Long Island in New York State in 1955 and grew up in the town of West Islip. He studied fiction writing with John Gardner at S.U.N.Y Binghamton. He’s been a college English teacher of writing and literature for thirty years. He is the author of nine novels including The Girl in the Glass and five short story collections, including A Natural History of Hell. He has received multiple World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards as well as the Nebula and Edgar awards among others. He lives with his wife Lynn in a century old farm house in a land of slow clouds and endless fields.

 


Ben Rosenbaum event Wednesday night!

Mon 28 Jun 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Join us Wednesday night for the last Book Moon zoom of the month with 2 fabulous authors. We published Ben Rosenbaum’s absolutely fabulous collection The Ant King and Other Stories a few years ago and this novel is a leap from there. I used to read Annalee Newitz on io9.com and now I enjoy her monthly column in New Scientist. Her latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age which I’ve started and recommend. They are both lovely, smart people and I’m looking forward to listening to them (and seeing them!) build the future we want to see in conversation:

Wednesday, June 30th @ 7:00 pm ET

Join authors Benjamin Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) and Annalee Newitz (Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, The Future of Another Timeline) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Rosenbaum’s amazing first novel, The Unraveling, published this month by Erewhon.

**Register here**

Hope to see you there!


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