Got Poems? Try Snakeskin

Thu 19 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jessy Randall, poetry| Posted by: Gavin

Just received a note from frequent LCRW poetry (and sometimes fiction, too) contributor Jessy Randall who asked me to share this with You.

Jessy Randall will guest-edit the February 2025 issue of the long-lived online poetry magazine Snakeskin. The theme is SCIENCE FICTION. Send up to five unpublished poems about robots, other planets, Star Trek, imaginary technologies, utopian and dystopian futures, Octavia Butler, clones, Barbarella, Blade Runner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doctor Who, the singularity, Princess Leia, black holes, the uncanny valley, alien invasions, time travel, soylent green, Zaphod Beeblebrox, sentient microbes, and so on, to jessyrandall at yahoo.com. Put your poems in the body of the email, please – no attachments (unless it’s a visual poem or something that needs special formatting). Simultaneous submissions are fine. Deadline is January 1, 2025 and you can expect a response by mid-January.

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NY Mag: What’s Your Go-to Book to Gift Big Kids?

Wed 18 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Joan Aiken| Posted by: Gavin

Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden received a lovely lift this week as writer and book editor Lauren LeBlanc chose it for New York Magazine’s feature What’s Your Go-to Book to Gift Big Kids?

“Told in stories, this is an ideal book to read aloud at bedtime for kids who are perhaps reluctant to commit to bigger novels.”

I recommend clicking through as it’s a very handy list of books. There are 2 from the d’Aulaires, a James Herriott(!), and I’d definitely recommend some of the graphic novels such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo among others. I’m very happy to see The Serial Garden still finding new readers.

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2024 Bestsellers So Far

Thu 12 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers| Posted by: Gavin

Here are two versions of our 2024 bestsellers so far: the first is from NPD/Bookscan which captures between 50-70% of sales for our books. The second is Combined Net Sold Print Units from our distributor, Consortium — which means books shipped out minus books returned. The two lists are quite different! (Here’s 2023’s list.)

Thanks to all our authors and to every reader, librarian, bookseller, und so weiter who took a chance on some Small Beer fiction, slightly weird this year. We only published two books, Kathleen Jennings’s Kindling and we’re still slowly organizing the limited edition of The Book of Love. We’re also trying to ship out the new issue of LCRW which is directly related to how much time I spend on the couch.

If you’d like to order some books, we’d love to ship them out to you (with a bonus book for luck). Order here.

 

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Late Holiday Shipping Note

Thu 12 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., holidays, shipping| Posted by: Gavin

I forgot to post about holiday mailing dates. Our office is closed and orders are going out from either the Consortium warehouse or the fab people of Book Moon.

Media mail shipping is free. However, if you’d like pre-holiday arrival, please choose Priority Mail.

USPS Ground Advantage™ Service	Dec. 18
First-Class Mail	Dec. 18
Priority Mail	Dec. 19
Priority Mail Express	Dec. 21

And no matter where you are, Weightless Books is always open and has all our DRM-free ebooks.

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North American Lake Monsters hc sale

Mon 9 Dec 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., film, Nathan Ballingrud, sale| Posted by: Gavin

This month we’re celebrating the news of Nathan’s novel The Strange being picked up for film adaptation by taking 25% off the first hardcover edition of North American Lake Monsters — was $100, now $75.

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Limited Edition Now Available

Fri 29 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Going to have to make a better post about this but The Book of Love limited edition is now available in Character, Lettered, and Numbered editions.

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Book of Love, LCRW 49

Fri 22 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

If all goes well, we’re going to be picking up LCRW 49 from the printer next week and start shipping it out. Ever so slowly, as ever. I could not resist and spent a bit more for the color cover. There are many issues I’ve been very tempted to print in color but I am usually too stingy/aware of the economics of the zine for this but I see it as a little treat (my home culture!) for everyone concerned.

And, at last, the numbered edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love is now available on Book Moon’s site. Can’t wait for this to go out to people, too.

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Breathtakingly Slow Movement

Mon 18 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions| Posted by: Gavin

I’ve just added the somewhat breathtaking pricing on our forthcoming 4-volume limited edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love. At the end of the page I’ve pasted in how to get notified.

The Book of Love was just included in Time’s 100 Books of the Year and Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 of 2024. I’d planned on getting the book out earlier but it should be out soon. Everything Small Beer (or if it’s for me to do, then Book Moon, too) is slow now as I just run out of energy all the time. Publishing this book has been both fun and challenging. I doubt we’d have published it if I were well as we’d be too busy with other title. But this way at least we published two books this year and for this, unlike a regular trade edition, my molassesesque movements mattered less.

(We also have a few unsigned/numbered copies of the limited edition of Magic for Beginners. These are not part of the original edition and will not be signed on shipping.)

The books will be priced at $1,000 (Character), $600 (Lettered), and $225 (Numbered). The prices will rise to $1,200 (Character), $700 (Lettered), and $250 (Numbered) on January 1, 2025.

We ship within the USA. Canadian friends recommend Shippsy.

We will open up orders in two steps. First: the Character and Limited Editions to a password protected page on this website. Second: the Numbered Edition on the Book Moon website.

The order of sending out information/access will be:

1. Book of Love Ltd Ed Expression of Interest List
2. LCRW Subscribers
3. Small Beer newsletter
4. This and BKMN websites

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Newsletter and a request

Mon 4 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Sent out one of our infrequent newsletters with a few Small Beer updates but also this pre-US election request:

If you are eligible to vote in the USA, I hope you have already voted for Harris/Walz or have a plan to do so tomorrow.

If you are voting, please vote the whole ballot.

Sister District reported that Republican voters are more likely to vote the whole ballot than voters choosing the Democratic candidate.

If all the voters who chose Biden in 2020 had voted the whole ballot, the House and the Senate results would have been different(!).

Vote like your life and your friends’ lives and family’s lives and complete strangers lives depend on it.

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New LCRW on the Horizon

Mon 28 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 49 is nearing completion, although Kelly’s in Seattle today, so, no, it won’t be quite ready for a bit yet.

In the meantime, I’m emailing 10.1 million subscribers to see if they’ll renew — with a note that, hey, we appreciated that past subscription! Also of interest, we send a backlist title out with new or re-subscriptions.

Must admit it is kind of weird not to have any new books — not counting the limited edition of The Book of Love — since Kathleen’s collection, Kindling. What am I going to do next year? Monthly issues of the zine? (Ha. No.)

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1 Year of New Kij

Thu 24 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kij Johnson| Posted by: Gavin

It’s a dozen years since we published our first Kij Johnson collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, and I’m delighted to say that last month we received copies of the sixth printing.

Today is the one-year anniversary of Kij’s wide-ranging second collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending. At the start of this month, she was at the Kansas Book Festival at Washburn University in Topeka where she was quoted as saying, “Sometimes you’re reading for story and sometimes you’re reading for art,” which is an especially good thought to hold while reading the new book.

Also, Phoebe Cramer, Publishers Weekly’s SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor chose it for PW Picks, a newsletter whose “best feature is its most personal: each week, our reviews editors single out the titles they’re most passionate about and excited for you to read.”

The Privilege of the Happy Ending
Kij Johnson. Small Beer, $18 trade paper (302p) ISBN 978-1-61873-211-8
Formal experimentation and fairy tale elements are like catnip to me, so Johnson’s latest collection was hard to resist. Featuring squirrel ghosts, squid girls, and sphinxes, these wild speculative shorts take the form of classic fables, modern bestiaries, and riddles told by crows.

Besides Kij’s Patreon, if you’d like to keep up you can now subscribe to her newsletter.

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Scary Books

Thu 17 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, horror, Isabel Yap, Jeffrey Ford, Mary Rickert, Nathan Ballingrud, October Country, Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin

Every October I think, Darn it, should have posted about our scary books so instead of occasionally thinking that for the next two weeks here’s a skeleton’s handful of scary books all pretty much guaranteed to be a mistake to start reading after 10 p.m. (Although maybe I should have included Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius which is terrifying in a completely different way.)

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 49

Thu 17 Oct 2024 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

December 2024. 56 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731234.

A surprisingly quick turnaround from the previous issue, mere months, a blink in the (imagined) eye of a tree that one day may become a future issue of this zine. The chocolate has barely been bought but many stories have been read and these two (just two? one of them is quite long) rose to the top of our particular list. We have a suitcase full of stories to look in for the next issue which should be out next May.

This issue features Jessica Bromley Bartram’s nonchalant individual on, as are we all, their way somewhere. May the place we’re going be filled with excellent fiction, unexpected poetry and art, a helping hand from a fabulous cook, chocolate for those so inclined, and peace in our time.

Reviews

“The issue contains two works of fiction. . . . A charming and somewhat romantic tale. . .  Another lovely story.”
— Paula Guran, Locus

“[M]ore hopeful than I anticipated and left me feeling rejuvenated.”
— Alex Brown, Reactor, on Susan DeFreitas’s “Hannah and Grackle, Lost in the Woods”

“An antidote to the stagnation and monotony.”
— Jessica Dylan Miele, Lit Mag News

Fiction

Dora Holland, Pomegranate Hearts
Susan DeFreitas, Hannah and Grackle, Lost in the Woods

Poetry

Jessy Randall, Five Poems
Seth Wade, Three Poems

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, How to Knock a Feast Day Out the Park
About These Authors

Art

Jessica Bromley Bartram, Cover
Dawn Kimberling

Celebrating

Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche received the Blurred Boundaries Award from the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards.

Masthead & colophon

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

Memorization not expected but applauded. LCRW is (usually) published in June & November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 | info@smallbeerpress.com | smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Printed by Paradise Copies. Subscriptions: $24/4 issues (see page 17 of this issue for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO.

DRM-free ebooks available from the lovely weightlessbooks.com.

Contents © 2024 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration © 2024 Jessica Bromley Bartram. All rights reserved.

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

About These Authors

An American with roots in the Caribbean and upper Midwest, Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, as well as the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. Her work has been featured, or is upcoming, in the Writer’s Chronicle, LitHub, Story, StoryQuarterly, Daily Science Fiction, Oregon Humanities, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dora Holland is a writer and editor. She graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a PhD in Creative Writing in 2023. She lives in northern Virginia with two big, happy cats. She is currently working on a cyberpunk-fantasy novel. You can find her on Twitter @phantasmadora.

Nicole Kimberling is a novelist and publisher who catered her own wedding reception for one hundred. She does not recommend this at all.

Jessy Randall’s poems and stories have appeared in Asimov’s, LCRW, Nature, and Scientific American. In 2025, MIT will publish her new book, The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science. She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is bit.ly/JessyRandall.

Seth Wade is a tech ethicist studying and teaching philosophy at Bowling Green State University. You can read his fiction and poetry in publications such as Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hunger Mountain Review, Apparition Literary Magazine, HAD, hex, The Cafe Irreal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, BAM Quarterly, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Gateway Review, and now Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can follow him on X @SethWade4Real or Instagram @chompchomp4u.

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Sleek Fat Albinos in Spring

Thu 5 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Nicole Kimberling| Posted by: Gavin

This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s sixth column for LCRW originally published in LCRW 32. Asparagus photo by Dawn Kimberling.

A couple of years ago I happened to be in Europe during the Easter season. Specifically, I was right at the border of Germany and France. There, in field after field lining the autobahn, I saw nothing growing. But my godson, who had just finished a cooking apprenticeship at a hotel in the Black Forest, saw something else.

“Under those rows covered in white plastic—that’s where they grow the spargel—white asparagus. The Germans are crazy for it.”

Is there a vegetable that better typifies spring than asparagus, white or otherwise? The somewhat sleazy little nub nosing its way blindly through the newly unfrozen soil seeking the sun’s warmth to turn from white as a worm to brilliant green.

Read more

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LCRW 48 is out

Thu 5 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 48 has gone out into the world to subscribers, contributors, reviewers, readers, surprised people, & so on. I’ll put the table of contents below. I am almost sure it is final. Nicole Kimberling’s column is an especially good one and in keeping with my sometime habit I have posted one of of her previous columns — more Southern Hemisphere appropriate at the moment, but with luck spring will come again here, too — Sleek Fat Albinos in Spring, originally published in LCRW 32.

I have most of the next issue but already the usual November publication date is looking a bit iffy. Perhaps it’s time to retreat to the original tagline, An Occasional Outburst. In the meantime, hope you enjoy this latest issue.

Fiction

Lyndsie Manusos, Mnemonic
W. J. Tattersdill, The Skildraffen Stitch
Summer Olsson, Divergence at the Village Thrift
Zebulon House, Pianoskin Boots
Victor Ladis Schultz, Tributary
Bess Lovejoy, Internal Theft
Jennifer Hudak, The Witch Trap

Poetry

Rachel Ayers, The Soldier and Death
Daniel Rabuzzi, Along the River’s Edge

Nonfiction

Gavin J. Grant, Zining
Nicole Kimberling, The Food of Sadness
Dave Myers, Howard Waldrop Fishing: The Oso Letters 1995-2002
About These Authors

Art

Deborah Mills, b&w art
Gessica Maio, cover art: “Castle Panther”

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Joan Aiken’s 100th Birthday

Wed 4 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Joan Aiken| Posted by: Gavin

Joan Aiken’s daughter, Lizza, posted on Bluesky that today, September 4th, is Joan Aiken’s Centenary. Lizza keeps her excellent Wonderful World of Joan Aiken site going as well as ensuring new editions of Joan’s work keep coming out. I’m delighted to take any opportunity to celebrate Joan’s work — although I am taking liberties here as we were never on first name terms. I think I only met her once when she was a guest at the IAFA Conference in Florida and it was a treat. She was an absolute fount of good stories from her childhood with her writer parents who split up to bringing up her own kids in a bus to publishing her first book of short stories (All You’ve Ever Wanted) to working at and writing — sometimes under a pseudonym — for Argosy magazine and others.

20+ years ago I interviewed Joan — by mail, I still have the answers somewhere in a file cabinet — for BookSense.com, the early website of the American Booksellers Association and happily for me Strange Horizons agreed to reprint it as part of a Focus Issue in 2001 where you can a story, poems, and reviews by Beth Kelleher and Jed Hartman.

I was looking for that interview and I read part of an interview Kelly did with Strange Horizons in 2005 where she said we were hoping to reprint Joan’s stories in a multi-volume set. We’d just started dipping our toe in the reprint world with Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog and we didn’t have the experience to know how hard it can be to get publicity or to get bookstores to carry reprints. So the multi-volume set idea went out the window and instead between 2008 and 2016 we published three new collections of Joan’s stories.

The first collection we published was The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories and — it still amazes me — we somehow reached Philip Pullman who sent us this:

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”

But the real reason to mention that book is to mention UK artist Andi Watson who illustrated it and to send you off to celebrate Joan’s books by checking out this page of illustrators who worked on her stories over the years.

 

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Blurred Boundaries Award Winner

Tue 3 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, Awards| Posted by: Gavin

Good news for Anya Johanna DeNiro whose short novel OKPsyche has been chosen as the winner of the Blurred Boundaries Award at this year’s Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards. You can read more about the awards here and here are the rest of this year’s winners:

FANTASY

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi (HarperCollins India)

SCIENCE FICTION

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chaingang All-Stars (Pantheon / Harvill Secker)

NOVELLA

Indra Das, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (Subterranean Press)

SHORT FICTION

Kristina Ten, Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 48

Sun 1 Sep 2024 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

If the regular button is not working, please use this Paypal link — thanks to readers who emailed to say the regular button was working sporadically.

———

Jennifer Hudak’s “The Witch Trap” is a Nebula Award finalist and will be reprinted in this year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nnedi Okorafor & John Joseph Adams.

Aimed for May, published in September 2024. 60 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731227.

L C R W 4 x 1 x 2 x 3 x 2 x 1
or IIL
or more properly XLVIII.

Editing, partially accomplished. Stories: mostly gathered. Design TK. Proofing TK. Printing TK. Ebook TK. Distribution TK. Reading by 10.2 million people TK.

 

Reviews

“Four tales in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #48 piqued my readerly interest. ‘The Skildraffen Stitch’ by W. J. Tatersdill is a very tall tale about a knitting stitch, a lost runekey, and puffins. These elements (and more) are all suitably spun together to entertain the denizens of a fantasy pub/tavern and, of course, us readers. A couple find an Alad­dinesque lamp in a thrift store in the clever ‘Diver­gence at the Village Thrift’ by Summer Olsson. They discover their wishes for the future may not be as they wish them to be.
“Bess Lovejoy’s engaging ‘Internal Theft’ is set in 2002. A small-town newspaper reporter investi­gates a 1990 story about a huge stash of undelivered mail discovered after the death of a thirty-year postal employee named Dorothy Fairchild. What he uncovers involves the positive side of mail theft and supernatural aspects of both a model of the town and the mail hoard itself.
“An old shoe is found beneath the floorboards of an old house in the interesting ‘The Witch Trap’ by Jennifer Hudak. Told that such hidden footwear was once supposedly believed to keep witches away, homeowner Elizabeth does her research. She discov­ers the superstition was really used to trap witches rather than repel them and a great deal more.”
— Paula Guran, Locus

Dylan Haston and Becca Schneid poetry review of Rachel Ayer’s “The Soldier and Death” at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Arrived in this leapyear 2024 and containing these parts:

Fiction

Lyndsie Manusos, Mnemonic
W. J. Tattersdill, The Skildraffen Stitch
Summer Olsson, Divergence at the Village Thrift
Zebulon House, Pianoskin Boots
Victor Ladis Schultz, Tributary
Bess Lovejoy, Internal Theft
Jennifer Hudak, The Witch Trap

Poetry

Rachel Ayers, The Soldier and Death
Daniel Rabuzzi, Along the River’s Edge

Nonfiction

Gavin J. Grant, Zining
Nicole Kimberling, The Food of Sadness
Dave Myers, Howard Waldrop Fishing: The Oso Letters 1995-2002
About These Authors

Art

Deborah Mills, b&w art
Gessica Maio, cover art: “Castle Panther”

Celebrating

Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is a finalist in the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards; Sarah Pinsker’s Lost Places (& the press) being Locus Award finalists; and Naomi Mitchison being this year’s Memorial Guest of Honor at Readercon.

Masthead & colophon

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 48. September 2024. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731227. Text: New Caledonia LT Std. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. Thanks, Valerie. Only surreal ingredients.
LCRW is (usually) published in June & November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 | info@smallbeerpress.com | smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Printed by Paradise Copies.
Subscriptions: $24/4 issues — the chocolate option is very popular while the marmite option is gaining ground. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO. DRM-free ebooks available from the lovely weightlessbooks.com, &c.
Cover illustration “Castle Panther” © 2024 Gessica Maio. All rights reserved.
Contents © 2024 the authors. All rights reserved.
Please send fiction and poetry 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.

Dear Subscribers,
please send your old and new mailing addresses to us at info@smallbeerpress.com.
Thank you!

About These Authors

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes and hosts shows for Sweet Cheeks Cabaret. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science, which comes in handy at odd hours. The DM for her D&D group is constantly exasperated by her need for more research texts to read in her spare time, especially as they are a homebrew group. She dabbles with oil painting, knitting, and making burlesque costumes and pasties. Her fiction appears in Metaphorosis, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Radon Journal, and the anthology Fall into Fantasy; she is a regular contributor at reactor.com. She shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

Zebulon House is a white settler, born on unceded land of the Pennacook. They are the author of The psychic surgeon assists (Calamari Archive, Ink., 2024), and their work has previously appeared in ergot. and Sleepingfish. They work as a librarian, and play horror sound effects on the radio; you can find them online at zebulon-hourse.xyz.

Jennifer Hudak is a speculative fiction writer fueled mostly by tea. Her work has appeared on both the Locus and the SFWA recommended reading lists, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Boston, she now lives with her family in Upstate New York where she teaches yoga, knits pocket-sized animals, and misses the ocean. Find out more about her at jenniferhudakwrites.com.

Nicole Kimberling has cooked so much food in her lifetime that she’s developed a philosophy around nearly every aspect of it. When she’s not putting hot meals on the table she can be found either running Blind Eye Books or procrastinating until the last possible second to finish her most recent novel. You find her on IG @the_nicole_kimberling

Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. Her fiction has also appeared in The Ghastling, while her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Atlas Obscura, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Public Domain Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

Gessica Maio is an illustrator. Initially trained in communication design. She works for Hermès, Fulllife, The Good Life, and Marie-Claire Magazine. In 2021, she won the Prix des Agents Associés prize and the Grand Prix Jeunes Talents prize at the Saint-Malo Comics Festival.

Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared in LeVar Burton Reads, The Deadlands, Lightspeed, and other publications. She lives in Indianapolis with her family, works as an indie bookseller, and writes for Book Riot. You can read more of her work at lyndsiemanusos.com.

Deborah A. Mills (she/hers) is a professional woodcarver, who trained in Norway. She has demonstrated & taught classes at the Cloisters/Metropolitan Museum, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum. Her commissioned pieces are in many private collections. Deborah illustrated Daniel Rabuzzi’s two novels. She lives in New York City with Daniel, where they collaborate on various projects.

David E. Myers has published fiction in Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Pulphouse, and articles in the New York Review of Science Fiction and “How-To-Build an Igloo” at Gorp.com. He is a graduate and former administrator of Clarion West, has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and currently resides in Seattle. He fly-fishes when near water.

Summer Olsson is an emerging writer whose stories are threaded with loneliness, ghosts, everyday magic, and female perspectives. Besides being a writer, she works in theater as a physical comedian and puppeteer. She also works in stop motion animation, and was a Second Assistant Director on the film Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. She grew up in New Mexico and lives in Oregon.

Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he/his) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Asimov’s, Harvard Review, Abyss & Apex, Coffin Bell, Shimmer, Red Ogre Review, Goblin Fruit, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Pushcart Prize nominee. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills.

Victor Ladis Schultz lives near Chicago. His fiction has been in various venues, including McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Chicago Quarterly Review, Barrelhouse, and Chiricú: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. He is also an editor at the Chicago Review of Books.

W. J. Tattersdill writes stories about a fantasy ferry network, others of which have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. With Sarah Crofton, he’s co-author of League of Thieves, a kids’ choose-your-own book published by Usborne. He lives in Scotland with an assortment of strange animals and is also a teacher, critic, and musician. He’s very good at Mario Kart.

Peace in our time.

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Alisa Alering, Smothermoss

Thu 8 Aug 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

I was just listening to Alisa Alering talk with Lindsay Hunter about her debut novel, Smothermoss — which has a great cover — on Lithub and thought you might enjoy it, too. You might remember Alisa had a great story in a LCRW 43.

Alisa Alering on Being the Mountain

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LCRPrinter

Wed 7 Aug 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

It’s about true, next issue of LCRW is taking the snail trail to the printer quite soon. Which means I should make an ebook and start getting the old team back together to mail this thing out. Ok, I’m going to need a safecracker and a driver . . .

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Readercon 2024, the Aftermath

Wed 17 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Long Covid, Readercon| Posted by: Gavin

We arrived at the Quincy Marriott for Readercon a little after 1 p.m. on Saturday. I was relieved and delighted to immediately get into our room and take a break as there was a panel I wanted to see at 3 p.m., The Works of Naomi Mitchison, with Amal El-Mohtar, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Lila Garrott, Max Gladstone, and Rebecca Fraimow.

Outside our room Kelly, our kid, and I were all masked and we all use a nasal spray: used to be Enovid, now we use ePothex.

I took a break then took the lift down (no more stairs for me, meh) and slipped into a seat at the back of the room while Kelly took some last minute books and T-shirts to the dealer’s room where Kate and Jonathan had set up next to friends at the Ninepin and Reckoning tables.

The panel was great. Everyone knowledgeably discussed three of Mitchison’s novels with thoughtful and sometimes amusing diversions into discussions of some of her other books. Her UK publisher does her few favors with the terrible covers they’ve slapped on all the books. Oh well, better in print than not? I’d have been happy if the panel had been twice as long. Well, maybe not all at once. I visited the dealer’s room to say hi to a few people, many fewer than I’d like to, returned to our room and went to bed.

Later on Kelly sat with three friends having dinner and now two of them have tested positive for Covid. I woke up when she came back from that and we ordered dinner delivered. I hoped to make it to more convention programming but I couldn’t really make it out of bed, so that was Saturday.

On Sunday morning after breakfast in our room we went to the dealer’s room at 10 a.m. and I was lucky enough to see some friends and chat while sitting down. By eleven I was done in and we set out for home.

I just checked Bluesky again — good break for when I get so tired every word or two has a typo — and someone reports there are now 20 Covid cases “out of a (rough) total of 700 attendees.”

So now we’re waiting to see if — at my first convention/bookfair/conference in four years — any of us have picked up Covid, too.

That said, I’m delighted that Readercon takes safety so seriously. They require masking in panels and added Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to rooms so as not to just rely on the hotel’s air filtration system. But they can’t control people outside of that. People travel, eat, wander around outside without masks and since the coronavirus is an aerosol that stays in the air (especially if a place gets stuffy), the virus gets passed around.

We’ve missed so many events, concerts, movies, let’s not even get into travel, and so on because 1) I am disabled, and 2) masking is not required. I don’t know what would would happen if I get Covid. Would I, lying on this couch as sitting up wears me out, shrug it off? Hmm.

We went to Readercon knowing and planning on it being a test for our household of The Way We Live Now (ahem). How will I do? Can we as a family go to conferences? (Our kid is 15 and would love to go to more of them.)

The answer is that we’re still assessing the risks — as ever these days. I understand the want for the pandemic to go away as it was so lovely to sit with friends, even if briefly. We’ll just cross our fingers and keep replying on nasal sprays, vaccinations, N95 masks, Corsi-Rosenthal boxes at Book Moon, and asking visitors to either stay outside or test before coming in. I don’t have the energy or ability to return to my pre-pandemic life so I really need to do what I can to not get Covid again.*

 

* I am in the long Covid cohort who never tested positive for Covid, woohoo, etc.

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Times: Top 100. Lithub: 71 More. Small Beer: 101+

Wed 17 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

The NYT, not a paper I’ve given money to in years because despite their usually solid work I find them terrible on US politics — did they ever stop prevaricating and just state that Tr*mp lies? Ugh — and can be awful on minorities and trans people. They have millions of subscribers and don’t need me.

Anyway, their latest complicated listicle is something along the lines of some hundreds of writers come up with 10 books from this century they admire and they made a Top 100 out of that list: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

I’ve enjoyed some of the books on the list and there are definitely some I intend to read. Hilariously Lithub then published What the New York Times Missed: 71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century. I don’t know if there is any crossover. So that’s 100+71 books. What about the 101+ Small Beer books? Always 10% off on Bookshop.org — shipping free today.

In the meantime, I’m reading Ben Francisco’s Val Vega: Secret Ambassador to Earth which is a pageturner and now our kid wants to steal it from me before I finish. Eek. I recommend it and am open to suggestions for what to read next.

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Readercon 2024

Wed 10 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Rosenbaum, Greer Gilman, Jeffrey Ford, Naomi Mitchison, Readercon, Sofia Samatar, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

I’m looking forward to Readercon this coming weekend. It looks like we will be there from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning. I am hoping to attend a panel on Naomi Mitchison on Saturday afternoon and then lie around and not do much. A number of Small Beer authors will be there —

Benjamin Rosenbaum
Greer Gilman
Jeffrey Ford
Sofia Samatar
Susan Stinson

— and Kate and Jonathan will have some of their books at the Small Beer/Book Moon table in the dealer’s room.

I am both intrigued to go to a convention for the first time since Boskone 2020 (what a close escape as there was an early superspreader event at another Boston convention that month!) and also nervous about 120-year-old me running out of steam very quickly. Oh well! It will be a lot for everyone.

Quite a few people are down with Covid so we’ll be using our carrageenan nasal sprays, wearing our N95 masks, and cross our fingers that everyone doing the same will keep us all safe.

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Added Illustrations

Tue 2 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions, Wesley Allsbrook| Posted by: Gavin

As things move along on The Book of Love I’ve updated the description and added a page with all Wesley Allsbrook’s interior illustrations.

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Ayize @ ALA, July 1

Wed 26 Jun 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ayize Jama-Everett, conferences, libraries| Posted by: Gavin

Ayize Jama-Everett (Heroes of an Unknown World) will be winging his way down to San Diego next Monday to take part in a panel at 2024 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition:

How the World Might Be: Speculative Fiction, Horror, and the Endless Possibilities of Genre Fiction

Speculative fiction, horror, and sci-fi offer endless possibilities for future worlds – so then why is so much of this genre associated with outdated tropes? In this diverse panel of authors and publishers, we’ll talk about how libraries can maintain a strong collection of genre fiction, and why speculative fiction can still give us hope in the bleakest times.

Panelists: Esme Addison, author of An Intrigue of Witches (Severn House); Bill Campbell, writer, editor, and owner of Rosarium Publishing; Ayize Jama-Everett, author of Heroes of an Unknown World (Small Beer Press); M. M. Olivas, author of Sundown in San Ojuela (Lanternfish Press); Jim Ruland, author of Make It Stop (Rare Bird); Sharon Virts, author of The Grays of Truth (Flashpoint); and moderated by Beth Reinker, manager of Collection Development Curation for Ingram Library Services.

Monday, July 1, 2024 

11:30 AM- 12:20 PM 

Stage: Diversity in Publishing Stage (Booth 2250)

There was a good and thoughtful review of Ayize’s most recent one by Jenny Hamilton on Strange Horizons:

The decision is shocking, and it highlights one of the key themes of the book: we are all imperfect, broken, compromised. The salvation of the world has fallen to Taggert and his team, and they are choosing to answer the call—but neither they nor the reader should be under any illusion that this makes them good guys. They’re not good now, and maybe they never can be. It’s just that they’re all they’ve got. Taggert and Tamara and Prentis are powerful, sure, but the most important thing they are is passionate.
What does it take to save the world — even if it’s not as you know it? Friends, frenemies, family, sacrifice, and a hell of a party.

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Approving Proofs, Short Run Printing

Tue 25 Jun 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Geoff Ryman, Kelly Link, Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Just like old days here: sent two books to the short run printer before breakfast — 1 box of Laurie J. Marks’s Fire Logic for Book Moon, 5 boxes for our distro; along with another 3 boxes of Geoff Ryman’s Was. Both books generally receive a small annual boost from Pride Month, which — from a publishing and personal standpoint — heartlifting.

Was is also taught in a couple of universities. If you’ve visited our table at AWP or, really, almost any bookfair, in the last 10 years I may have tried to put this book in your hands. It is a heartbreaker, an absolute unstoppable train that no matter how many times I reread it, I keep hoping the end will be different. It wasn’t ever a book I expected we would reprint but then, after we published the US edition of The King’s Last Song we were able to pick up the rights. And I keep re-reading it, and keep hoping. So many readers have found the same. Ack. What a book.

I started this meaning to write 2 lines: one about reprinting books, the other about approving printer proofs. I am not sure when I’ll next do this so there’s an odd feel to it. What used to be a run-of-the-mill task now holds an extra weight. The proofs are for the limited edition of Kelly’s novel, The Book of Love, and are for the endpapers, the signing sheet, the illustrations, the onlays, and the text, and I am not sure we’ll get them all approved today. Luckily for the two of us, this (hmm, somewhat mentally exhausting, there goes the day!) work also qualifies as fun.

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Slow Moving

Fri 21 Jun 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 48 comes along very slowly caused entirely by my laptop keyboard and trackpad no longer communicating with the computer. Who knew that could happen?

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Sooner or Later in New StoryBundle

Fri 31 May 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bundles, Sarah Pinsker, StoryBundle| Posted by: Gavin

Sarah Pinsker’s award-winning debut collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is one of thirteen books in Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott’s newly launched Pay-What-You-Want 2024 Pride Bundle.

The bundle is available for 31 days — today + Pride month! The 4-book basic bundle is $5, and is really 5 books as it includes both volumes of Ginn Hale’s Champion of the Scarlet Wolf. The real deal is at $20 (or more, seems to top out at $100, challenge activated?) where you get all 13 titles.

Every buyer chooses how their payment is split between the authors and the platform (StoryBundle) and can choose to donate 10% to the charity Catherine and Melissa selected, Rainbow Railroad whose mission is to help at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to safety.

Hope you enjoy the bundle and any help spreading the word over the next month would be much appreciated.

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