Local Boy Makes Good

Fri 25 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin

Richard Butner has been localized in the Raleigh area for some years — you can see pictures of him there and even in some other places here — although it’s our local paper here in Western Mass., the Daily Hampshire Gazette, that has a great review of The Adventurists today:

an excellent new collection of short stories . . . Butner, who lives in North Carolina, livens his writing with wry humor and moments of absurdity and surrealism, but his stories also explore the fraying of friendships and the sense of loss that the passage of time can bring.

What also anchors the 16 stories in the collection is Butner’s crisp, understated prose, a style that lets him quickly segue from straightforward descriptions of everyday life to off-kilter narratives.

I recommend the book, mais oui, and also subscribing to your local paper if possible!

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NoWP 2022

Thu 24 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bodies, events, Long Covid, meh, the world| Posted by: Gavin

I’m sorry not to be at AWP (ha) this week.

tl:dr I am out sick

Longer version:

I like tabling. I like talking to people about books, selling some, surprising people with LCRW (a paper zine? What?!), and the accessibility of being right there for people to ask questions about Small Beer/publishing/whatever. I like wandering the book fair and buying books and magazines from publishers new and old. I like going to an occasional panel and some readings — I especially like putting on or being involved with other presses putting on an offsite reading — and I really enjoy catching up with people I know, meeting new people, all that.

If we were there . . . we’d have a stack of Richard Butner’s new collection The Adventurists — it’s so good! It came out this week! We’d have books by Small Beer authors who are at the big show: Sofia Samatar’s world bestriding A Stranger in Olondria and her collection Tender; Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American — one of his stories is soon to be read on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space; and Elwin Cotman’s NPR Best of the Year Dance on Saturday. And we’d have all those pretty books in that picture below that came out oh just quite recently.

We aren’t there for 2 reasons: the first is Covid — which as far as I know I have never had. I have had all 3 of my vaccines. I’m delighted that AWP required vaccinations and masks. Science, FTW! But the idea of being in a book fair with up to 3,000 people is too much for me. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (updated 3/24/22) has the US covid fatality rate at 1.2%. The deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated and the immunocompromised — but risking my (and by extension my family’s) life on someone else’s masking choice when there is a 1 in 100 chance we might die is too high for me.

I am sorry not to be at AWP, but: I haven’t even been to the Small Beer office or Book Moon in more than 3 months because the second reason we’re not there is that I am out sick.

I’m writing from my couch where I’ve been laid up since mid-December with something — most likely post-viral fatigue. In the first week of December I had a small cold(?) and had multiple negative Covid results. A week later I was in the ER. I’m improving — at a glacial rate. I have only left the house since then to see the doctor. I lie around all day, do a little work, watch Abbot Elementary and Better Things and sometimes read (including, for my sins, twitter) — although that brain fog made fiction too hard for a bit. So please accept my apologies for being slow at everything, including email. In early December I was running up the stairs from the Book Moon basement carrying boxes of books. Now a zoom conversation leaves me exhausted. (As in: I will lie flat for 3 hours and do nothing.)

Ugh, I did not want to have to write this but since I am missing a very enjoyable event and have been down for 3 months it seemed like time. I am 51 (when did that happen?) and despite having to lie around all the time (walking is a lot; running is woah so very far away) I feel very lucky, very well looked after at home. I’m not really looking for feedback — unless you have a similar experience with post-viral fatigue — and I apologize in advance for not keeping up as I’ve used much of today’s energy to write this. Although my prognosis is unclear, if all goes as it seems it might, it looks like I will be healthy again by summertime. Fingers crossed!

And if you just can’t help yourself and must buy some books, why, stop by here. Or: we have a tiny, mighty bookshop, Book Moon, with fabulous booksellers who can help you out Monday-to-Saturday 10-6.

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Happy Adventurists Day!

Tue 22 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Butner, Publication day| Posted by: Gavin

Happy publication day to Richard Butner whose debut collection The Adventurists comes out today and should be available at all your favorite indie (and other) bookshops! If you’d like a taster,  you can read or listen to Ash City Stomp [audio], or read Circa, or read Under Green which was just published this month in Uncanny.

It’s been fun to see the wide variety of places these stories were first published in: from Crimewave (“Holderhaven”) to F&SF (“Give Up”), LCRW (“Pete and Earl) to Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, (“Horses Blow Up Dog City”) — and of course there are a good number of new stories in the book. The first story, “Adventure,” also appears in the new issue of The Deadlands which came out three days ago. That story just gets better every time I read it.

We’ll have more about the book soon. All the pre-orders were sent out this week — thank you! Some are delivered, some still on their way — sorry about that, I usually try and have them arrive by or before publication day. But we did include a bonus book where we could so maybe that will make up a little.

The Adventurists is available with a lovely felted-paper cover and also as a DRM-free ebook from Weightless — and maybe a DRM’d edition everywhere.

Richard, who was just at ICFA this weekend, will be doing a couple of North Carolina readings — pre-order your signed copies here:

April 2, 6 p.m. Richard Butner, John Kessel, & Wilton Barnhardt, So and So Books, Raleigh, NC

May 17, 6 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC

And we’ll have more reviews and stories online and things to talk about in coming weeks. Kelly has been planning this for years and it is just great to have this book out. Enjoy!

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The Adventurists

Tue 22 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731944 | ebook · 9781618731951

A collection of stories written over a lifetime of looking forwards and backwards and sometimes even at the now.

Read

. . . Kelly Link interviews Richard Butner for Catapult “about the short story form, running the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, and the value of writing with other people.”
. . .  an interview by Christopher Rowe in the Subterranean Press newsletter
. . . “Adventure” in The Deadlands

Listen

. . . Gil Roth interviews Richard Butner for the Virtual Memories podcast about “his love of the short story as a form . . .writing & performing theater and how he balances that collaborative art with the solo process of writing” and a lot more.

The Adventurists

Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house, where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it led.

Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of the way.

Butner’s allusive and elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life—where there are no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be ignored.

Reviews

“Richard Butner’s work explores the weird, uncanny corners of everyday life — from a theater kid who becomes the queen, to a tree who talks to just one person, to Death’s Fool, who you really shouldn’t ignore.” — Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

“This powerhouse fabulist collection melds ghosts, virtual futures, and the intricacies of friendship into 16 breathtaking, intimate stories that will delight readers of Ray Bradbury, John Crowley, and Sally Rooney alike. In these stories, Butner examines a broad range of interests—the aging process, acts of remembering, overreliance on technology—all in elegant prose, unique imagery, and with keen and generous human insight.”
— Publishers Weekly Holiday Gift Guide

“Butner, who lives in North Carolina, livens his writing with wry humor and moments of absurdity and surrealism, but his stories also explore the fraying of friendships and the sense of loss that the passage of time can bring. What also anchors the 16 stories in the collection is Butner’s crisp, understated prose, a style that lets him quickly segue from straightforward descriptions of everyday life to off-kilter narratives. . . . Yet for all his off-hand tone and biting humor, Butner writes feelingly about human connection and loss, and about the challenge of moving forward without losing touch with the past.” — Steve Pfarrar, Daily Hampshire Gazette

“Gorgeously mesmerizing.” — Beatrice Toothman, San Francisco Review

“Butner’s new collection of SF stories is a wonderful look at his long-established but back-burner career as a writer of speculative fiction. Richard is beloved by many in Raleighwood for his quirky and often endearing local theatre roles, his championing of local music and its venues, and (among the cognoscenti) his loyalty to Modernist architecture. This review is overtly from the perspective of a Raleigh native who enjoys the many local references in these stories and the bits and pieces of RB rendered in the protagonists.” — John Dancy-Jones, Raleigh Rambles

“Butner’s stories are wonder­fully insidious in a number of ways. He seldom works beyond traditional short story lengths, and the stories tend to be constructed in ways that first seem conventional, with conventional concerns: trying to recapture the past or reconnect with old friends, visiting sideshows and fairs, surviving in anonymous corporations, exploring a spooky old house. Butner also brings along some famil­iar furniture of fantastika, like magic portals, timeslips, and ghosts. But – more through the accumulation of sinister anomalies than through dramatic plot twists – we watch the world of the tale grow estranged around us. . . . Often haunted by a profound sense of loss. If not quite a new voice, Butner’s is one of the most distinctive and memorable I’ve encountered in quite a while.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Landscapes and memories alter, gentrify, and crumble in Butner’s flawless debut collection, which wends ghosts, virtual futures, and the intricacies of friendship into 16 breathtaking, intimate stories. “Holderhaven” slowly unfurls a country house museum’s ghostly mystery into a multifaceted examination of recreation’s limits, who is allowed agency, and the impossible truth behind the legend. “Ash City Stomp,” about an encounter with the devil, and “The Ornithopter,” set in a high-technology future, both imbue their speculative setups with vital humanity. The delicate “Adventure” holds a mirror to the aging process while still honoring a vividly alive present, and in “Sunnyside,” exes attend a successful artist friend’s virtual-reality wake in a breathtaking commentary on the act of remembering. Butner pairs clean, elegant prose with keen and generous human insight, unique imagery, and a broad range of interests, treating Renaissance faires, 1980s counterculture, and rich small-town worlds with the same loving deliberation. Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home in this beautiful, grounded exploration of pasts and futures—and the people suspended between them.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Butner’s short stories are strange little vignettes of people’s lives, tales of the ways time and memory—both what we remember and what we don’t—affect the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us. The collection opens with ‘Adventure,’ with a long-overdue visit to an old friend and a tale told about a stranger, which may be just fantasy, but, setting the tone for the collection, the reality is not entirely clear-cut. There are tales about history like ‘Holderhaven,’ in which a house-turned-museum has plenty of secrets hidden by both the stories the family who owns it tell and in the architecture of the building itself, and tales in which the past is all too real, like the nostalgia-riddled ‘Delta Function.’ Sometimes Butner ventures into near-future speculation, as he portrays people clinging to corporate life in the decaying office park of ‘The Ornithopter’ and climbing the virtual backyard Everest of ‘Give Up.’ All in all, a worthwhile collection of not entirely comfortable stories exploring the past, the present, and the future.” — Booklist

“Butner has a knack for a quirky, eye-catching premise. . . . The stories’ arch tone, offbeat scenarios, and folkloric elements bear a resemblance to George Saunders’ and Carmen Maria Machado’s work, though Butner has his own thematic obsessions. . . . In his best stories, Butner effectively merges the strange setups with a bracing mix of humor and dread.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Grounded by concrete pop culture details, each strange narrative makes what’s familiar seem eerie.” — Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“I’ve been enjoying this debut collection of short fiction by Richard Butner. It’s New Fabulist fiction in the vein of Amber Sparks, Kelly Link, and Aimee Bender but with a flavor all its own.” — Craig Laurance Gidney

“This astonishing story collection stars protagonists with special gifts such as telepathy, time travel, and traversing parallel worlds. A few other stories employ fantastic futuristic technologies to great effect. Butner stretched my brain this way and that and quite possibly reactivated some long-unused circuits. I see a second reading in my not-too-distant future.” — Kay, Boswell Books

Advance Praise for The Adventurists

“Consistently one of my favorite short story writers.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“My heart isn’t large enough to contain all these stories at once.”
— Christopher Rowe, author of Telling the Map

“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

“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.” — John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus

“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

“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

“Richard Butner writes gorgeous, heartfelt stories that are completely his own, each propelled by an inner logic that may or may not match consensus reality, each ringing utterly true. He is unafraid of tough questions and even tougher answers. His characters sweat, grieve, exult, and struggle for understanding, and even when they terrify, they never fail to touch me.”
— Lewis Shiner, author of Outside the Gates of Eden

Table of Contents

Adventure
Holderhaven
Scenes from the Renaissance
Ash City Stomp [listen]
Horses Blow Up Dog City
The Master Key
Circa
At the Fair
Pete and Earl
The Ornithopter
Stronghold
Delta Function [Read an excerpt on Tor.com]
Give Up
Chemistry Set
Under Green
Sunnyside

Reviews of Richard Butner’s stories:

“Captivating and gripping.”— Bookotron

“In the face of even the most absurd scenario, Butner’s writing remains cool and understated; he treats the bizarre as if it were commonplace, eventually convincing the reader that nothing is too far from the real. Indeed, many of the stories’ most bizarre moments are simply exaggerations of the inanities of our world, thrust into the forefront of the plot as a sort of social criticism. . . . Butner picks up the absurdities of high-speed America and throws them back in its face, reveling in the wild, wonderful mess he creates.”— New Pages Review

“A powerful story of obsession.” — Lois Tilton, Locus

“The saddest ghost story you’ll read this year.” — Charlie Jane Anders, Gizmodo

“Haunting and heartbreaking.” — iHorror.com

“Wry, caustic, calculated, impulsive…. Gems of gorgeous weirdness.”— Asimovs

“Finely wrought fiction that earns its effects. Evocative and passionate, meaningful and filled with wonders.” — SF Site

“Butner’s meticulous prose lays a cool surface over some twisty terrain. Understated and profound, deft and smooth, these stories sneak up on you and then don’t let go. Boxes within boxes, wheels within wheels.”— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“If you let Richard Butner’s sideways fiction into your brain it will slice you to ribbons so quietly that you won’t even know why you’re laughing, or crying. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” — John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus

“In the work of writers who have truly burrowed in, often I’ve a sense of there being not many stories but one continuous, ongoing story, ever growing, ever increasing, turning this way and that in shifting light — which is how I feel about Richard Butner’s.” — James Sallis, author of Sarah Jane

Previously

March 16-20, 2022: ICFA, Orlando, FL
April 2, 6 p.m. Richard Butner, John Kessel, & Wilton Barnhardt, So and So Books, Raleigh, NC
May 17, 6 p.m. Richard Butner & Nathan Ballingrud, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
Aug 17, 7 p.m. Richard Butner & Veronica Schanoes, KGB Fantastic Fiction, KGB Bar, NYC
Aug 18, 7 p.m. Little City Books, Hoboken, NJ
March 15-18, 2023: ICFA, Orlando, FL
April 10, 6 p.m. Richard Butner, Karen Heuler, Randee Dawn, Leopoldo Gout, #YeahYouWrite, Someday Bar, 364 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Richard Butner‘s short fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. 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, Teacher, The Independent Weekly, The North Carolina Review of Books, 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.

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Prix Bob Morane Finalist

Mon 14 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Carol Emshwiller| Posted by: Gavin

Lovely to see in Locus that the French edition of Carol Emshwiller’s novel The Mount published by Argyll éditions is a Prix Bob Morane Finalist. We’ve had low stock on our edition for a while on this one — I was going to reset it at some point but got distracted so one of these Sunday afternoons I’ll get that done — but we always keep copies of the cheap, handy, and very portable Penguin Firebird mass market edition in stock at Book Moon.

Should you read it? On io9 MaryKate Jasper and Charlie Jane Anders have it on a list that says yes: 10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading.

The Mount was one of the first books we published that picked up a major award. Kelly’s stories had received awards before her collection was published in 2001 and, of course, so had some of Carol’s stories that were collected in the second of her books we published in 2002, Report to the Men’s Club — she played off Kafka’s A Report to an Academy for her collection title — what a book that is! Even if you just read the first (“Grandma”) and last (“After All”) stories, you’re going away a winner. These two books by Carol (our 3rd and 4th published titles) comprise the whole of our second year of book publishing — we also did 2 chapbooks and 2 issues of LCRW.

Both Carol’s novel The Mount and her collection Report to the Men’s Club were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and The Mount was the winner. It was also a Nebula finalist, an Impac Award nominee, and included in Best of the Year lists by Locus, Village Voice, and Book Magazine. and you can Read Chapter One here. Maybe it will add the Prix Bob Morane, maybe not, as with many awards, it is an honor that the book is nominated, congratulations Argyll éditions!

I still miss Carol. She was incredibly fun to work with — even if I spent the next decade asking her if she had more work and she kept ignoring me — and while writing this I was delighted to be reminded of Matt Cheney’s 90th birthday present to Carol, the Carol Emshwiller project.

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“the strangest book I’ve ever read”

Fri 11 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., John Crowley, Robert Freeman Wexler| Posted by: Gavin

Well here’s a fine thing that should set many a Small Beer reader’s Spider senses tingling: John Crowley — whose own new novel Flint and Mirror comes out next month from Tor — sent along this note after reading an early copy of Robert Freeman Wexler’s forthcoming novel, The Silverberg Business:

“Certainly the strangest book I’ve ever read, and strangeness is a thing that I take to. The grotesque horrors, the impossibilities, the shifting scenes, Silverberg’s skull, the skull-heads, the wooden house that turns into a mansion without the detective finding it particularly odd. It is in fact a book not like anything I’ve ever read.”
— John Crowley, author of Little, Big

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So and So

Wed 9 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin

If you’re in the Raleigh, NC, area, the Triad, North Carolina, the southeastern part of the USA, in other words, somewhat close by, please do plan to head to So and So Books on Saturday, April 2, at 6 p.m. where Richard Butner will be reading from his new story collection, The Adventurists, and will be in conversation with John Kessel. Introductions by Wilton Barnhardt.

Refreshments provided by Anisette.

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Venus of Chalk ebook

Fri 4 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Susan Stinson, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin

I’m happy to say that next month we’re adding another Susan Stinson novel, Venus of Chalk, to our list. First published in 2004 by Firebrand Books this will be the first ebook edition. Susan lives near us in Western Mass and to keep it really local here’s a word on it from another fabulous and famous local author, Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies,

“Carline is brave, strong and beautiful, just like Susan Stinson’s writing. As a reader, I was fascinated by Carline’s journey; as a writer I was dazzled by the language in which it was told.”

And here’s more about the book:

In Susan Stinson’s shimmering second novel, three friends drive from Massachusetts to Texas to unload an old bus, and in the process become the selves they were meant to be.

Carline’s life is settled and happy: she has a great home with her partner, Lillian, and a job she loves as the editor of a respected pamphlet series, The Modern Homemaker. But after an unpleasant harassment experience in her home town, when her aunt calls from Texas she surprises herself as much as anyone and says yes to the opportunity to accompany two friends across the country in an old bus. Stinson’s always sensual and humorous writing tingles on the page and nothing is quite what’s expected as Carline sews her way across the country and makes notes for her new pamphlet, “How to Ride a Bus.”

Venus of Chalk was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Benjamin Franklin awards, and a Top 10 Publishing Triangle lesbian book of the year.

It comes out April 5th and is available to preorder now — DRM-free of course! — on Weightless now and will be available at all the usual ebookstores.

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New Month, New Book

Wed 2 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin

This month we’ll publish our first title of 2022, Richard Butner’s long awaited debut The Adventurists. We have copies going out to reviewers and so on now and the cover, by Wesley Allsbrook, on the felted paper is is a beautiful thing to behold.

You can get a sneak peak at the book in the new March/April issue of Uncanny Magazine which just went out and among many tasty things includes a new Butner story, Under Green.

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