New Interview Series

Fri 21 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Today we’re celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month as well as short story month by kicking off our Small Beer Press Author Interview series with Franchesca Viaud’s interview with Isabel Yap which has just been posted on the Book Moon website.

Isabel’s first collection, Never Have I Ever: Stories, was published in February 2021 — we have a limited number of signed bookplates to go with it. A number of Isabel’s stories can be read online: Milagroso, Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?, & How to Swallow the Moon.

If you missed it, you can also catch up with Isabel’s Strange Light Reading Series event with Rebecca Roanhorse here.

As with all things Small Beer this series is imagined as an occasional event that will meander along in its own sweet time for many years to come. Francesca has been working at Book Moon for a while now splitting her time there between working outside on the fine weather days and working behind the scenes on the not-so-fine weather days. Her interview with Isabel is a conversational delight — as is the Strange Light event above; the common factor being Isabel, so perhaps she is just a conversational star as well as being a great writer! Read the interview here.

Author photo by Meg Whittenberger.


More Hands, More Hands

Mon 17 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Being among the more cautious, I have no idea if travel will seem like a good idea or not this summer or autumn. I know millions of people are traveling right now but I’m not there yet so for travel, it’s all just books for me.

Come September, those who are armchair traveling will have 2 dark, propulsive options to carry them to Scandinavia and the south of England and the the darkest secrets at the heart of humanity. In other words, Cass Neary is coming back.

I’ve added 2 new September 2021 books to this site: Elizabeth Hand’s novels Available Dark and Hard Light, the second and third books in her can’t-look-away series of Cass Neary novels that began with Generation Loss. In the coming weeks I’ll post them on Edelweiss for reviewers and booksellers and post excerpts here to give readers a taste — here’s the the first chapter of Generation Loss.


Elle, Zen, Saving Animals on the Moon

Wed 12 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Alison Bechdel spotlighted the first line of Susan Stinson’s novel 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.”

This Saturday June 15th Book Moon will be part of a Cottage Street Sidewalk Sale, We’ll have books on the sidewalk. Should be interesting.

And at 3 p.m. ET/8p.m. UK on Sat. the 15th Zen Cho (England) and Kelly Link (Massachusetts) will do an online event celebrating Zen’s new novel Black Water Sister which came out this Tuesday. Register here.

Book Moon has some excellent events coming hitting up a couple of different parts of the old cerebellum:

June 1st,  6 p.m. ET: Strange Light Reading Series features Rivers Solomon (Sorrowland) and Leigh Bardugo (Shadow and Bone). UMass zoom link goes live 2 weeks before the event so will post it again then.

June 2nd , 7 p.m. ET: Join local author Elan Abrell (Saving Animals) and Alex Blanchette (Porkopolis) online for celebration of the publication of Saving Animals and an interesting conversation on same.

June 15th, 7 p.m. ET: Join NYT bestselling authors Gayle Forman (Just One Day, If I stay) and Holly Black (The Cruel Prince, Tithe) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Gayle Forman’s new book, We Are Inevitable, which will be published in June by Viking Books for Young Readers. Register here.


Not Without Mercy

Tue 4 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Some days are just better if you go read a scary story: here’s Jeffrey Ford’s Not Without Mercy on Conjunctions — soon to be collected in Big Dark Hole.