Speeches Not Delivered

Tue 31 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’ve written a few acceptance speeches that didn’t have to be given — although in 2015 I did not write one when Monstrous Affections was up for the World Fantasy Award as the ballot was so strong. Ellen had won the award before, George and Gardner had won the year before, Michael Kelly happily won this year, and Long Hidden is a spectacularly good book. I didn’t even notice that Gordon Van Gelder was leading me back from a playdate for our kids to the awards in time for the announcement. Anyway, I was surprised and a little embarrassed to be the person throwing out random words instead of organized.

So this year I got ahead of things and a week before the convention I wrote this speech with Kelly and emailed it to Jeff Ford who kindly agreed to accept on our behalf. The award went to Matt Ottley, for The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness, which looks like a great book. If I have to writer one of these, it’s usually along the lines of thanks to the writers, the readers, the booksellers, and librarians.

This year’s version is here:

First, thanks to the marvelous Jeff Ford for accepting this award for us. And huge thanks to the writers we published over the years, but especially Richard Butner and Robert Freeman Wexler, whose books we published in 2022, and the contributors to 2 issues of our zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

We are sorry not to be here in person: Gavin never tested positive for Covid but after an brief illness in December 2021 he has now has something which seems to be long Covid/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This has much diminished his physical capacities. This is also why we are publishing many fewer books. We still wear masks everywhere we go.

We have mixed feelings about missing conventions, this one in particular. Missouri has passed anti-trans and anti-lgbtq laws that mean it is not a safe place for many people. Can we support these inequalities with our tourist dollars? Also, how would we have travelled here? By plane? With climate change we find it harder to justify getting on a plane for anything these days. Even so, we miss being here so a last thanks to this gathering, in person or online, for making community out of some great, very weird books.


Kij @ World Fantasy

Thu 26 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

While we won’t be at World Fantasy, some of our books will be, and, even better, some of the authors: starting with one of the guests of honor, Kij Johnson. I just grabbed her schedule from this page so if you’re there, hope you will get to see some of this and maybe get a signed copy of her new new new book The Privilege of the Happy Ending.

Thursday
Reading; 4PM, Chicago A
Spotlight: Kij Johnson; 5PM, Empire A/B
Opening Ceremony; 8PM, Atlanta/New York
Work/Work Balance: Writing With A Day Job; 10PM, Empire A/B

Friday
Animals in Fiction; Noon, Empire A/B
The Mythology and Fantasy of the Fox; 4PM, Atlanta/New York

Saturday
Kaffeeklatsch; 1PM, Dragon’s Den
Stories Without Stories: Non-Narrative Fiction; 3PM, Empire A/B

Sunday
Ad Astra Presentation; 10AM, Chicago A


New Book Day!

Tue 24 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The Privilege of the Happy Ending cover - click to view full sizeWhen we published our first book by Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, an amazing wide-ranging collection of stories, I had no idea that eleven years later we’d be publishing our third: The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small/Medium/Large Stories. This time we accompanied the trade paperback with a small hardcover run to give people —and libraries — the choice. I’ve seen copies of At the Mouth read to death so I am sure some people will prefer the hardcover. One of the stories in that first book, Ponies, was reprinted in a text book so many, many readers had the rather staggering experience of that story. With luck some of those readers will be looking for more unexpected oddities and weirdness and the new book has all that and more. Looking forward to getting it out into the world and reading people’s reactions.

Kij launches the book tonight at 7 p.m. at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, KS, and will be one of the guests of honor later this week (10/26-29) at the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City, MO.


The Privilege of the Happy Ending

Tue 24 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 304 pages · published simultaneously in trade paper (9781618732118), ebook (9781618732125), and a limited hardcover run (9781618732163)

The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small, Medium, and Large Stories is award-winning writer Kij Johnson’s long-awaited second collection, following the celebrated At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Contained here is Johnson’s speculative fiction from the last decade, ranging in form from classically told tales to playfully post-modern work drawing on medieval dream manuals, Icelandic spell books, and the OuLiPo manifesto.

The collection includes the two World Fantasy Award-winning stories “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” and “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,” as well as the illustrated book of signs, “The Apartment Dweller’s Stavebook,” and two never-before published works. Here you will encounter dreamlands, talking chickens, stranger beasts, and also the ghastly spectre of Toad Hall.

Reviewed in the Washington Post by Michael Dirda.

Read the title story on Clarkesworld.

Read an associated article: Dream Interpretation by Jillian Bell.

Table of Contents

Tool-Using Mimics
Mantis Wives
Butterflies of Eastern Texas
Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers
Ratatoskr
Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead
The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall
Certain Lorebooks for Apartment Dwellers
— Bestiary
— Stavebook
— Alphabetical Dreambook
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Noah’s Raven
Crows Attempt Human-Style Riddles, and One Joke
The Privilege of the Happy Ending

Reviews

“Johnson’s work imagines a world of mythic possibility where the tension between name and feeling isn’t a problem but rather, an entry point into our fuller selves. A door.”
— M. L. Clark, Strange Horizons

“Two of her most promi­nent publications have invoked writers as wildly divergent as H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Gra­hame, and some of the short fiction included in The Privilege of the Happy Ending is about as experimental in form as anything I’ve seen in genre venues for some time. . . . Enigmatic, allusive, poetic, fragmentary, and sometimes oddly moving – but with some assembly required.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“This collection of speculative stories feels like being in a vivid dream that you don’t want to wake up from. Kij Johnson’s imaginative narratives are utterly surreal and somewhat dark, yet laced with wit. Their language is highly literary, almost poetic, and draws the reader deeper into Johnson’s world. . . . It’s immersive and supernatural enough to appeal to diehard fantasy fans, but also addresses universal themes like family relationships and loss. The literary prose and character-driven stories (you won’t find hard magic systems here) mean it might make a good introduction to the fantasy genre for those who usually read more grounded contemporary works. It’s simultaneously creepy and cozy, making it perfect to curl up with on a crisp autumn day.”
— Jillian Bell, BookBrowse

“In these strange and speculative stories, Johnson, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Kansas, plays with form and narrative voices in a way that’s designed to raise questions about how much we really know about one another, the past, or the nature of stories themselves.” — Daily Hampshire Gazette

★ “While the entries are uniformly excellent in pacing and prose, the standouts may be the collection’s opener and closer. ‘Tool-Using Mimics’ spins out a half-dozen explanations for a vintage photo of a young girl with tentacles that lead to piercing questions about how much we can know about the past, other species, and each other. The titular novella, which also won a World Fantasy Award, is a compelling fairy tale about a little orphan girl and her talking hen that poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage. A strange and glimmering jewel for any genre fiction collection.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ “Hugo and Nebula award winner Johnson (The River Bank) returns with 14 dazzling speculative shorts. . . . The devastating title tale follows another young girl and her cherished talking hen as they barely escape a swarm of monsters who devour anything with flesh. Johnson’s keen eye for the mysteries of human nature shines as her characters experience love, loss, growth, and betrayal, all made delightfully strange. These boundary-pushing, magic-infused tales are sure to wow.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for Kij Johnson’s stories:

“Wondrously strange and sinister stories of other worlds, future times, and everyday life gone haywire.” — Dan Kois, Slate

“The best short-story collection I read this year was Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees.” — Adam Roberts, The Guardian

“Ursula Le Guin comes immediately to mind when you turn the pages of Kij Johnson’s first book of short stories, her debut collection is that impressive. The title piece has that wonderful power we hope for in all fiction we read, the surprising imaginative leap that takes us to recognize the marvelous in the everyday.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR

“For all the distances traveled and the mysteries solved, those strange, inexplicable things remain. This is Johnson’s fiction: the familiar combined with the inexplicable. The usual fantastic. The unknowable that undergirds the everyday.” —Sessily Watt, Bookslut

“In her first collection of short fiction, Johnson (The Fox Woman) covers strange, beautiful, and occasionally disturbing territory without ever missing a beat. . . . Johnson’s language is beautiful, her descriptions of setting visceral, and her characters compellingly drawn. These 18 tales, most collected from Johnson’s magazine publications, are sometimes off-putting, sometimes funny, and always thought provoking.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[The] stories are original, engaging, and hard to put down. . . . Johnson has a rare gift for pulling readers directly into the heart of a story and capturing their attention completely. Those who enjoy a touch of the other in their reading will love this collection.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“When she’s at her best, the small emotional moments are as likely to linger in your memory as the fantastic imagery. Johnson would fit quite comfortably on a shelf with Karen Russell, Erin Morgenstern and others who hover in the simultaneous state of being both ‘literary’ and ‘fantasy’ writers.” — Shelf Awareness

“The book overflows with stories that, sentence by sentence, scene by scene, can never be taken for granted; they change in your hands, turn and shift, take on new faces, new shapes. Their breathing grows heavy, soft, then heavy again. You lean in close.”—James Sallis, F&SF

“Kij Johnson has won short fiction Nebula awards in each of the last three years. All three winning stories are in this collection; when you read the book, you may wonder why all the others didn’t win awards as well. “Ponies”, to pick just one, is a shatteringly powerful fantasy about the least lovely aspects of human social behaviour… and also about small girls and their pet horses. Evocative, elegant, and alarmingly perceptive, Johnson reshapes your mental landscape with every story she writes.” —David Larsen, New Zealand Herald

“Apparently, Johnson publishes in fantasy and SF mags because they’re the only ones who’d have her, though New Yorker should be so lucky.” — PopMatters

“‘Ponies’ . . . reads like the sort of thing that might have happened if Little Golden Books had inadvertently sent a contract to Chuck Palahniuk. . . . It’s not surprising that [‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’] won the Nebula Award and garnered Hugo, Sturgeon, and Locus nominations, since it’s a stunning example of what Johnson does best – using the materials of SF, fantasy, myth, and even romance not as genres to inhabit, but as tools for building or, you could say, as a kind of story kit. ”— Locus

Cover art by Sophia Uceda.

Previously

9/8: Campus visit, Kansas State University
10/14, 11 a.m. Twin Cities Book Fest, Fine Arts Stage, Minneapolis, MN
10/24, 7 p.m. Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, KS
10/26-29: World Fantasy Convention, Kansas City, MO
11/12: Other Skies Books, St. Paul, MN
4/19 – 4/21: Guest of Honor at Constellation 13, Lincoln, NE

About the Author

Kij Johnson writes speculative and experimental fiction, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards (among others). She also writes gaming material, puzzles, and nonfiction. She teaches creative writing, novel development, and science fiction and fantasy, for her own Novel Architects group, the Ad Astra Institute, and various universities. For many years, she was the associate director for the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.


Local Paper Goodness

Fri 20 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

I was reading our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, at first breakfast with our kid (me: tea; toast: marmite; toast: peanut butter & banana) this morning & was delighted to see a review of Kij Johnson’s The Privilege of the Happy Ending — which Kij launches on Tuesday at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, and then next week, 10/26-29, she’ll be a Guest of Honor at this year’s World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City, MO. I don’t know how Steve Pfarrer keeps up, he also wrote today’s above-the-fold story on Smith College Museum of Art’s new show, Sum of its Parts.

I was even more delighted when I followed the jump to read the rest of the review and found he had also reviewed Anya Johanna DeNiro’s “dreamlike, speculative novel” OKPsyche. I hope wherever you’re reading you have a decent local paper. If not, I highly recommend our paper which I finished reading when I went back for second breakfast with Kelly (porridge with miso and fresh tomato).

Review in the local paper! Titled "Fantasy fiction from Small Beer Press: The Privilege of the Happy Ending By Kij Johnson Small Beer Press Fantasy writer Kij Johnson has a long list of awards and award nominations to her name, from Nebula and Hugo Awards — two of the premiere prizes for fantasy and science fiction writing — to World Fantasy Awards. She and her publisher also have a good sense of humor: Her newest collection of work, “The Privilege of the Happy Ending,” includes the subtitle “Small, Medium & Large Stories.” (Many of the pieces have previously been published separately.) Published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton, “Privilege” indeed offers work of varying length, from vignettes of just a few pages to a novella-length tale, “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,” which won a World Fantasy Award; NPR voted it one of the best books of 2016.

Review of OKPsyche in our local paper, yay! The unnamed narrator of “OKPsyche,” a dreamlike, speculative novel by Anya Johanna DeNiro, lives in or around Minneapolis in a not-too-distant future in which climate change and economic inequality have brought increasing ugliness and violence to the country. “The street is mostly empty except for surplus-green tents in the greenway and armed guards in front of the luxury towers. The creative class needs tactical teams to protect them from people who are not them.” But the heart of this short novel, published by Small Beer Press, is about the narrator’s journey as a trans woman, someone who’s trying to come to terms with the pain of her closeted past even as she struggles to find her way in a fragile, uncertain present. Part of that present is the fallout from the narrator’s transition: Her ex-wife and 11-year-old son, Aaron, now live in another Midwestern state, and the narrator is desperate to reconnect with Aaron...


H’ard Starts: The Early Waldrop

Tue 17 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Subterranean sent me a note the other day that my copy of their new Howard Waldrop collection, H’ard Starts: The Early Waldrop, is about to ship. If you ever read “The Ugly Chickens” and thought, I have to read more like that! this might be the book for you.

George R.R. Martin, Waldrop’s early penpal and lifelong friend, has been working on adapting some of Waldrop’s stories into film. Pick up this book and see where it all started.

And a lovely note from Sub Press about the book:

In order to properly celebrate the writer we all know as “Mr. National Treasure,” the editors, book designer, and publisher have produced H’ard Starts as a true labor of love—and all proceeds from the sale of the book (minus shipping and credit card/PayPal fees) will go directly to the author, the one and only Howard Waldrop. So join us in our adventure in the Wayback Machine, and grab your own copy of H’ard Starts: The Early Waldrop.  Supplies are limited, so act now, or regret it forever.


Who Will Tell This Story?

Mon 16 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

An early story celebrating Kij Johnson’s new collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending, went up recently on the University of Kansas’s website: Fantastic fiction writer Kij Johnson can go home again, accompanied by a good photo of Kij on a scooter. If you want to keep up with Kij she is quite an active blogger and she also has a Patreon.

Here’s a snippet:

“Until the last three or four years, I would have said I don’t want to ever write about Iowa because it was boring. And yet here I am starting to write about Iowa. I can’t help it,” said the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author and University of Kansas professor of English, who will be a guest of honor at the World Fantasy Convention Oct. 26-29 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Read more here.


Twin Cities Book Fest

Thu 12 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

This weekend in Minnesota the Twin Cities are celebrating everything bookish with Rain Taxi’s annual Book Fest and you can catch both Anya Johanna DeNiro, author of OKPsyche, and Kij Johnson, author of The Privilege of the Happy Ending on a panel there on Saturday morning at 11 a.m.

Kij launches her book in 10 days time at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, KS, but Magers & Quinn should have some early copies tomorrow and both she and Anya will be available to sign their new books.


Callum Angus reads “Red Work”

Mon 2 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Last night Callum Angus streamed a live reading of his quilt-inspired story “Red Work” — “Come for the lesbian roller derby inside a volcano, dragons, and quilts!” — which was just published in the new issue of LCRW. Cal reads the whole story which begins at about 14:05 on the video below. Enjoy!