Fixed!

Fri 29 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Aaaaand after Paypal broke our old buy buttons Michael has fixed them: please, go try them here and see!

 

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Paypal?

Thu 28 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Received an email today that said Paypal wasn’t working on this site, oops. It was working on Tuesday and my Paypal account is still working out fine. This is not the time for me to switch payment processors so I’ll look into it. Especially as we have a new book and a new issue of the zine both dropping sooooon.

This link does seem to say it all — what are the basic parameters the Paypal buttons are suddenly lacking? Wish me luck! (Or, send cash or order Small Beer books here.)

Another question from the floor: will there be a Small Beer sale this summer? Between me being mostly out of action and us changing websites at Book Moon next month the answer is no. Autumn sale? Who knows! I lie here on this couch and think who can think that far ahead?

ETA Friday: Friday update: the subscription page works. Double hmm.

ETA: Wondering if this is because Paypal wants me to add the Pay Later option which is hard coded into their new buttons — and I don’t want to add that. Hmm.

Gah, all my old saved buttons are inaccessible/gone. Whee. This link below leads to the apology, oops, no access page . . .

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Top 10 21st-Century Fantasy Novels

Tue 26 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

Brian Attebury’s new book Fantasy: How It Works comes out from Oxford University Press in October and in the run up to the publication date he wrote up a Top 10 21st-century Fantasy Novels for the Guardian. I’ve read seven books on the list — I should just complete it! — and was very happy to see Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria on the list:

5. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2013)
In this gorgeously written tour of a complex secondary world, Samatar explores ghosts, culture clashes and the effect of written language on a purely oral culture, while also providing engaging characters and a rousing adventure story. The imagined world of the fiction reflects Samatar’s own immersion in multiple cultures as the daughter of a Somali immigrant and a scholar of Arabic literatures with teaching experience in Sudan and Egypt.

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Backlist To The Future: Short Story-Style

Fri 22 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sarah Pinsker, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

Should you be a short story kick this weekend, Book Riot’s SFF Yeah’s podcast has you covered:

Jenn discusses two favorite speculative short story collections.

Tender by Sofia Samatar

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

We are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

Follow the podcast via RSS here, Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here.
The show can also be found on Stitcher.

 

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The Silverberg Business OHTX Tour

Thu 21 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

We just got a review of this book that called it something like weird and great and, really, aren’t they all, the books? Otherwise, what is the point? Well, I like many nonweird books, but of the ones I want to publish, a touch, a smidgeon, a skullwhat? is always welcome.

Robert is going to some of our fave indie bookstores and I hope if you’re near you can go, bring friends, be surprised! Also, Jon Langford, cover artist and legendary musician, is, amazingly!, opening for him at the Book Cellar which is way beyond my bingo card hopes for this life, yay!

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Congratulations World Fantasy Award finalists!

Wed 20 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap, Jeffrey Ford| Posted by: Gavin

Congratulations to all of the World Fantasy Award finalists and especially to:

Isabel Yap for her collection Never Have I Ever
and her novella “A Canticle for Lost Girls”

Jeffrey Ford for his collection Big Dark Hole

Sarah Pinsker for her story “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” — originally published in Uncanny and collected in her 2023 collection Lost Places

The news came in just too late to put in the forthcoming late issue of LCRW which might even be mailed out this month, that part is out of my hands.

Anyway, congratulations to all the finalists, what fun!

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Susan Stinson on NEPM

Wed 13 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

Every summer our local NPR station, NEPM, does a series on local authors with new books out and this summer one of the writers they are highlighting is Susan Stinson for the first ebook edition of her novel Venus of Chalk:

Northampton’s Susan Stinson wants to add ‘fat lesbian home economist’ to canon of literature themes

Stinson’s new e-book, “Venus of Chalk,” adds a new twist to the classic road-trip novel.

Listen here.

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 45

Tue 5 Jul 2022 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Last days of July, 2022. 64 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732071

May: gone. June: gone. July: moving fast. Here are gods, snakes, death, and demons. On the lighter, crunchier side: carrots and apples. Twice a year this zine slips out into this world, less internationally than it used to. Maybe I just need to stand at airports and offer it as in-flight reading? Maybe I can persuade an airline to make it their in-flight magazine? How refreshing it would be to pull LCRW out of the seat pocket. Since LCRW only comes out twice a year, that leaves 10 months to be filled in with other zines. Airlines, ping me. We can make this work.

Reviews

“If you are looking for unique literature, you can’t beat LCRW.” — Paula Guran, Locus

In the meantime, good things are here:

fiction

Anna O’Connor, The Rattling Seed
Ellen Rhudy, This World Will Be True
Julie A. Hersh, Snakes and God
Christopher Yin, The Crack
Robert P. Kaye, The Subrogation of the Internal Messenger
Olga Niziolek, To the Bottom
Laura Wang, Teenage Demons

poetry

Two Poems by Jessy Randall: Pandrosion of Alexandria (ca. 300-360) & Modern Day Folk Remedies
Neile Graham, The Goddess of Apples

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Are They Sweet?

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

This 2 minute 45 second issue is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 45 and is going out in August 2022. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732071. 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 · Printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Subscriptions: $24/4 issues (see page 13 of the print issue or PDF for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press.

Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO.

LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

Contents © 2022 the authors. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration “Nausicaa” © 2020 by Ashanti Fortson (ashantifortson.com).

Celebrating! Zen Cho’s LA Times Ray Bradbury Book Award for Spirits Abroad and Isabel Yap’s Ladies of Horror Awards for her story “Syringe” and her collection Never Have I Ever. We brought two titles out as ebooks recently: Susan Stinson’s novel Venus of Chalk and Howard Waldrop’s collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures. RIP Angélica Gorodischer and Geoffrey Goodwin.

Since December 2021 Gavin has been on the couch/working from home (not in the office or shop) with something along the lines of CFS or post-viral fatigue so everything Small Beer has & will be slowed down for the foreseeable future. Thanks to Laura, Kate, Beth,  Franchie, Diya, & Jess at Book Moon for shipping LCRW (&c) and running the bookshop like a dream.  We’re switching websites and point of sales systems  there so your orders and patience are much appreciated.

Please send submissions (especially weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Thanks again, authors, artists, readers.

About the Authors

Ashanti Fortson is an award-winning cartoonist, illustrator, editor, and professor with a deep interest in difficult emotions, quiet moments, and the rifts and connections between human beings. Their work explores transience and reflection through a tenderhearted lens, and a good comic essay will always brighten their day. Ashanti lives in Baltimore with their spouse, their cat Miss Cheese, and at least three pet rats at all times. They’re the spider-saving sort. Ashanti’s short comic Leaf Lace won the 2021 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic, and was nominated in the categories of Outstanding Artist and Outstanding Online Comic. Ashanti also won a Prism Award as part of the Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy anthology. Ashanti is currently working on their debut graphic novel, Cress & Petra (HarperCollins).

Since stepping down from directing the Clarion West Writing Workshop Neile Graham has been slowly developing plans for her fantasy romance novel empire. Meanwhile, she has had poems in Mad Swirl and Polar Starlight, and her most recent collection, The Walk She Takes, came out in 2019, with poems about her travels in Scotland among all the stones (crofts, brochs, cairns, castles, and Neolithic villages). Several of the poems there appeared in earlier issues of LCRW.

Julie A. Hersh is a writer of speculative/odd fiction living in New York. She also works as an editor and practices martial arts. Her writing has appeared in journals including Visitant, Five on the Fifth, Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, and Menacing Hedge. She can be found at  and on twitter.

Robert P. Kaye’s stories have appeared in New Letters, Dark Lane, Jersey Devil, and the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review. He hosts the Works in Progress open mic at Hugo House in Seattle and is an editor at Pacifica Literary Review.

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.

Olga Niziołek is a Polish writer and literary translator. In her stories people infuse clothes with darkness or tame little tornadoes. She will not refuse coffee under any circumstances.

Anna O’Connor is an American writer and visual artist. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Copper Nickel, Travesties?!, The Scores, and elsewhere. She lives in Edinburgh.

Jessy Randall’s poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, McSweeney’s, Nature, and Scientific American. Gold SF at the University of London will publish her new book, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science in September. She is a librarian at Colorado College.

Ellen Rhudy lives in Columbus, where she’s an MFA candidate at Ohio State. Her stories have appeared in LCRW #15 and #38, as well as Northwest Review, Story, and the Cincinnati Review. She’s currently working on a novel. You can find her on twitter.

Laura Wang is based in Brooklyn and Taipei, where she writes stories and talks to human beings about molecules. Her fiction has appeared in the Jellyfish Review and Pigeon Pages, her nonfiction has appeared in Catapult, and her random thoughts have appeared on twitter. She is frequently found in close proximity to delicious snacks.

Christopher Yin is a closet literature major wearing an engineering grad student’s clothing. Following the advice of Octavia Butler’s famous self-help books, he has escaped the fires and droughts of Southern California for Seattle. In his professional life he tries to keep cells from dying; in his nonprofessional life he reads too much/never enough. In fact, he is probably reading something right now, while also eating dumplings.

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21 today

Fri 1 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Apparently we published Ray Vukcevich’s collection Meet Me in the Moon Room 21 years ago today! (Eh, what a year.) Kelly and I were living in Brooklyn and if memory serves* we had a ticker tape parade, handed out exploding comets and moon suits to thousands of readers who danced with us all the way along Atlantic Avenue, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and up to Central Park where the lucky few discovered their suits were real-ish and floated off, I think to the moon. The west coast celebrations, which began in Ray’s hometown of Eugene, were reportedly wilder.

Read: Whisper · No Comet · Mom’s Little Friends

It’s another of those books like Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog which I always find is weirder in its own way than I expect every time I go back to it. Every writer is unique but Ray really writes his own way through things.

And! I’m delighted to say that we just came across copies of the book so it’s available now again from here or Book Moon & so on and so forth for the first time in a couple of years.

The book was one of two we published that year, our first publishing season, woah! — the other book was Kelly’s first collection.

21 years ago in our apartment — very glad that Pathway were doing the actual shipping of books to bookstores and libraries — I had yet to do any royalty statements. Today I’ll start on Jan-Jun 2022 statements and, thanks to readers of the print and ebook editions, I’ll be sending Ray a check: thanks, all!

If you only click one link today and only read one spooky story, read this one: Whisper.

* Wellll

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