Celebrating the Visionary Stories of Kelley Eskridge

Wed 29 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Delighted to come across Dangerous, Hopeful Futures: Celebrating the Visionary Stories of Kelley Eskridge by Jonathan Thornton on Tor.com this week:

Kelley Eskridge is not a prolific author, but she has nevertheless produced a body of work remarkable for its subtlety and depth. Eskdrige’s short stories are marvels of character-focused SF, where speculations are explored through the interactions of everyday people. They frequently centre queer characters and explore ideas around gender. Similarly, her lone novel Solitaire (2002), is an underrated and pioneering work of queer cyberpunk that thoughtfully explores the potential uses of VR technology for incarceration.

Kelley is an excellent writer. We brought Solitaire back into print a few years ago. Her collection, Dangerous Space, is also available from Aqueduct. Definitely recommend if you’re looking for sf that takes on the current moment in gender, incarceration, family, politics, and more.


Room of One’s Own Holiday Catalog

Tue 28 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Page of trans fiction picks from Room: Wild Geese, Idlewild, OKPsyche, and PonyboyIn previous years we’ve celebrated books being in the NPR Best Books lists and others and I’m still somewhat optimistic that some of the books will appear here or there but with me being less able to reach out to reviewers I suspect some books sent out did not always reach their target. C’est la vie. I’ve said before I always expect our books to win every award and be in every list (“What’s the world coming to? Our book is not in [incredibly niche list the book might tangentially have fit]? Oh no!”) and sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

We published 4 books (& a zine) this year: 2 collections, a series capping novel, and a short novel — the good news today is that two of those books (along with Kelly’s White Cat, Black Dog) are in A Room of One’s Own Holiday Catalog: Kij Johnson’s The Privilege of the Happy Ending and Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche‘s highlighted on the trans fiction page:

“This novel tore my heart up—in the very best way. Our narrator is a semi-recently-out trans woman in her forties, she is an ex-wife, a mother separated from her son, and largely between stable work (a former writer, whose metafictions pepper the text). Friendships real and imagined provide a mirror of reflection in which our narrator turns the mundane into profound. This is a portrait of a woman who has so much love in her heart, and slowly learns to afford herself some of that love.” — Charlie


Brew & Forge Book Fair

Mon 27 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Copy of brew & forge_edited.jpgIf you have some Small Beer books on your to-read list, see if you can get them at the Brew and Forge Book Fair where multiple copies of four of our books are available. Coincidentally, if you buy 4 books at the fair, you get a free notebook . . .

The fair opened today and runs until December 8. Authors voted for the tenth book fair to benefit the Palestinian Feminist Collective which “is committed to achieving Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession. Read more about their work here.“


Brindles?

Fri 24 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Discounted Bundled Books for You & Your Reader Friends:

2023: Hard year. Good weird books. ayize jama-everett, heroes of an unknown world “dive in, you will love what you discover.” —victor lavalle, author of the changeling sarah pinsker, lost places ★ “queer, hopeful, and eerie, celebrating the rebellious spirits of both immortal-feeling youth and resilient elder protagonists.” — booklist (starred review) anya johanna deniro, okpsyche “an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose.” — nina maclaughlin, boston globe kij johnson, the privilege of the happy ending ★ “hugo and nebula award winner johnson (the river bank) returns with 14 dazzling speculative shorts. . . . these boundary- pushing, magic-infused tales are sure to wow.” — publishers weekly (starred review)


What about Small Beer?

Sat 18 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

AKindling covers a follow up to my last post, ugh, I did go on, I wanted to give a clearer idea of what is happening with the press.

Of course, since we have the obfuscatorily named zine, the story isn’t 100% clear.

There are many things I can do for the press lying here on this couch. There are many I can’t and sometimes all I can do is watch TV or read the internet.

We have one book under contract that was just delivered. Because it is a different kind of thing it would take normally about 3 years to bring to publication. I am not sure how long it will take now.

Other than that, we have Kathleen Jennings’s collection of stories, Kindling, coming in January. The proofs just arrived from the printer and when I return them I’ll find out if we’re still on schedule. I don’t think we’ve only ever had one book in that forthcoming page before. Weird to see. Glad this dictation thing is working well today.

We hope to publish a limited edition of Kelly’s novel at some point next year. There would be some kind of poetry if that were our last book. Although I’m a big fan of accessibility, so it would be sad if our last book is a limited edition.

We closed completely to submissions in March and given that I have not improved, I do not expect to reopen anytime soon. The way I am now I could not do justice to any book that we bought. It is very strange not to read submissions after 20 years.  I’m going to try and keep the zine going. However, I’m not up to mailing it, and some days I’m not up to reading. This year we managed one this year.* Next year, who knows.

 

* Rather than correct the sentence I’m going to leave it to sure the basic level of brain fog detail missing that I know have. I’ve never been the best writer (I’ve published some of them, ha!), but at least I was able to string a sentence together and I enjoyed writing fiction, nonfiction, reviews, etc. I didn’t expect to write like this until I was 85 or so. What can I say, I’m ahead of my time.

 


This Sauce Is Weak

Sat 18 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

I have — hilariously to me — just had my first cold in 3 years or so. Having a cold while having long covid. Phew, I do not recommend it.

I used to be decently fit. Not a runner, that was always painful for some reason. This screenshot of my phone/watch stepcounter shows my rather crappy daily average and how in the last few days it cratered. To get the generally unsaid part over with now rather than at the end (my own tl;dr), no matter when I die, mine will be a Covid-related death. To be brought so low by a basic cold demonstrated that my defenses/immune system/resources are weak sauce indeed and one energetic butterfly flapping its wings in a nearby town will be enough to tip me over. It sounds melodramatic but I’m over 50 and I read new studies every week about long Covid’s effects on my age group. So far, so not great. Check out the drop in my already low number of daily steps on the tiny chart. On the other hand, I am reading my first Vita Sackville-West novel, All Passion Spent, about an 88-year-old widow and very much enjoying every slow minute of her looking around and back at her life.

Anyway. What about lying around feeling even more rubbish than usual was hilarious? Just the very fact of picking up a cold despite taking the same Covid precautions as we’ve done for the last 3 years.

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve only seen people who are either masked or people who test for Covid when they arrive. Last week I saw some friends — wait, I know how this often goes, but this story doesn’t go that way: we hadn’t dropped our guards, everyone tested negative and then we took masks off. So, no, since they tested negative and I did daily tests Sunday to Wednesday, it seems unlikely I had Covid23.

But despite all that, despite testing whenever seeing friends, despite me masking if I go to Book Moon (I go to so few places, it’s a curtailed world, but at least I can read and write about it), after all that care, I caught a simple cold, ha! The less hilarious part was how it absolutely flattened me. So stop reading here if you don’t like icky stuff about bodies. Which is me, I’d like to stop reading.

A pallet of boxes of booksColds, as I learned during this pandemic, are also coronaviruses. On Thursday morning, which I think was Day 5 of the cold, I started improving. Those five days were a grind on the household. I stayed in bed a lot more or, as is usual, on the couch. Not that different from my new normal, but without my usual ability to potter around the kitchen and put together a quick meal. That morning I made some porridge and felt that sitting at the table to eat (instead of lying on the couch — how often I have to type those words; almost as often as I . . . ) was a huge and difficult accomplishment. I’m expecting a congratulatory telegram from the president to arrive any time. Maybe tomorrow.

After, as I shuffled — these feet would not be lifted — to the couch, my watch was showing my heart rate at 118 and when I lay down it was ~95. I was lying here doing nothing, resting after a 10-yard shuffle, thinking about picking up my laptop, looking at our dog, unimpressed with me as I was not scratching her, on the other of the couch, then . . . I started sweating, and sweating more until I was wiping sweat off my forehead. Or fivehead as our kid likes to say. I was a whole gleaming ball of fivehead.

Me in the lift with yet another pallet of books.Was I moving a pallet of books per the photo above from a few years ago (I do order optimistic print runs) or the terrible selfie in the cargo lift (ugh, too lazy to shave) from October 2021? Nope. I was lying around. Maybe working out the poisons? I had a few sessions of sweating it out this morning and now I’m improved.

I wrote somewhere in a previous long Covid post about my new ability to lie around and not do anything and this week I levelled that up. When I was sick as a kid I remember being so bored lying in bed. Now, despite not going to sleep, I could look out the window — or more likely, at a wall, the window being too stimulating — for a while. When I’m sick(er than my new normal, etc.) I often feel I could do what needs to be done. Walk the dog? Of course. Do this, do that? I could, but the lever (pick your own mechanical, literal, or technological metaphor) won’t flip. I could do it and there’s no impatience as to the why not, it’s just I don’t. There’s no Bartleby, no draft card or bra burning, just seeing what needs to be done and being aware that I am not doing it.

I became a different person 23 months ago. Curtailed, diminished, disabled. When I caught the cold I’d roll between the high point of perhaps if I kick this my body will return to what it used to be and the low point of what if this is my new, new normal? Every day I wake up curious to see what’s happened and it’s not until I stand up and my heart rate jumps that I find out how I am. Meh.

Looking at what’s to come leaves a little to be desired. It’s taken a couple of days to write this because there’s no good ending. I answer a some work emails and just I run out of juice. When I walk, I shuffle and this new, new normal is a bit painful. I watch TV and try not to miss walking or running or singing or dancing. When I walk I feel as if I have worked hard all day. Step count, faithful step count, proves me wrong. It is a bleak series of thoughts to take into the darkening of the year. There are millions like me, trying different meds (yep, still am), masking when they see anyone, unable to do most of what they used to. Kelly described me as profoundly changed. My vulnerability has placed huge limits on what she and our kid can do. I am chronically disabled and now it looks like I am one good infection away from real trouble.

How annoying. How are we — all of us, not just this household — supposed to live? Well, I certainly don’t have a neat and tidy answer to that.

If you read this far and want to help:

— Please wear a mask in public.
— Or: we publish good, slightly weird books that make great presents and my PR efforts are a bit weak this year.
— Or: donate & support our kid and Kelly’s mum who will be doing the annual Hot Chocolate Walk in a week or two.


Hot Chocolate Walk 2023

Thu 9 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

It is almost time for the annual Safe Passage Hot Chocolate Walk (or run, for the more lively among us) here in Northampton. A while ago a friend persuaded me to take part and me and our kid did quite a few years together. We started long enough ago that I was pushing the pram around. Now the kid could push me around. This year our kid and Kelly’s mum are walking while I am raising money from this here couch.

Any donations are welcome with the understanding that everyone is stretched and has their own things they like to support. If you’re of a mind, I’d love your to support either our kid’s page and Annie’s, thank you!


Austin Woerner in Ploughshares

Thu 9 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Austin Woerner has an essay in the new issue of Ploughshares. The issue is edited by Ladette Randolph and also features prose by Anthony David, Parul Kapur, John Keeble, Diane Hinton Perry, Nafis Shafizadeh, Wiam El-Tamami, Jamie Lyn Smith, and Jim Shepard. I haven’t seen it yet but Austin’s essay is apparently about the Chinese writer Su Wei. We published Austin’s translation of Su Wei’s first novel to appear in English, the weird and fascinating The Invisible Valley. 

More about Austin:

Austin Woerner is a Chinese-English literary translator whose work has appeared in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a novel, The Invisible Valley, and two volumes of Ouyang Jianghe’s poetry, and the editor of Chutzpah!: New Voices from China (University of Oklahoma Press). For the past seven years, he has taught creative writing and translation in China, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou.


An Uneasy Stage

Wed 8 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Happy to note that Kirkus just posted a review of Anya’s OKPsyche and it will be in their December 1st issue. Here’s how it begins:

An unnamed trans woman is at an uneasy stage in her metamorphosis. She has finally cast off the male persona that never fit her, but she has yet to become the woman she dreams of being. Part of her discomfort is physical—she does not have the body she wants—but much of it is social and emotional. She knows that most strangers do not see her for what she is. Her ex-wife is still adjusting to what is, for her, a surprising new reality. Her mother deadnames her. And, most importantly, her young son is shutting her out. DeNiro’s significant achievement here is making palpable the excruciating, inescapable self-consciousness of her main character. Her decision to narrate in the second person is a bold one; this move will help some readers immerse themselves in the story, but it will just as likely alienate others.


OKPsyche in Locus

Tue 7 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

The new issue of Locus has a roundtable on short fiction with Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik and an interview with superstar Carmen Maria Machado, both of which I’m looking forward to seeing when my print issue arrives. But the first thing I read in the pdf was Jake Casella Brookins’s review of Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche. I can’t reprint the whole thing but it is worth reading before and after you read the book. It starts off:

I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to find friendship and love in a hostile world, is aided by magical figures and contraptions, but it’s her voice that stands out. This is absolutely brilliant writing: raw and unflinching in how it portrays transphobia and self-doubt, sweeping and dynamic in its use of language and imagery.

And all I can say is that I am so glad the reviewer read the same book I did and hope many people will pick up the book and see how strong it is.


Kij’s book on BookBrowse

Mon 6 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

The Privilege of the Happy Ending coverBookBrowse’s review of Kij Johnson’s The Privilege of the Happy Ending and their Beyond the Book article, Dream Interpretation are featured today in their “Top Picks.”

During the week or so that the book is featured, everyone can read the review and article in full. After that, only members can read in full, everyone else sees an abbreviated version, so clickity click!

Excerpt:

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.


The Manna Is a Super-Consciousness

Fri 3 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

FanFiAddict posted an interview with Ayize Jama-Everett on the closing up of his Liminals shop with the publication of the final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World. (Start the first novel here.)

That was four novels written over 10+ years with which cover more ground than expected: time travel, racism, slavery, inequality, family: blood and found, and more. They’re fast-paced and furious and I love them. Here’s a taster of the interview:

Q. Heroes of an Unknown World is the final Liminal novel. When you began in 2009, did you see the story spinning out ahead of you?

AJE: The Liminal people was a truncated version of a side character’s story that I wrote in frustration when a novel I was sending out was getting excellent rejection slips. I thought it would be a bullet aimed at the heart of Afrofuturisms more utopian aspects.
read on


The Real Challenge

Thu 2 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Anya Johanna DeNiro contributed a short recommendation to Poets & Writers magazine for what to do as a writer when stuck or when the mind is lodged somewhere not useful. Read it here:

Whenever I get stuck I don’t go to one single thing to unlodge myself. . . .


A Locus Bestseller

Wed 1 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Bestseller lists are weird things. None of them turn out to be as simple as I’d expect — except, I suppose the ones I make for Book Moon because that they are what they say they are: a list of bestselling books in the store.

Anyway, this hardly a thought never mind an exploration of the concept comes from celebrating Sarah Pinsker’s recent collection Lost Places just slipping onto the August bestseller list as reported in the new issue of Locus.

Have other Small Beer titles been Locus bestsellers? Could this be our first bestseller? Can we get it to appear on other lists? I have no idea! In the meantime, we’ll celebrate having possibly the only short story collection on the list this month!