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.