West Coast Link

Mon 26 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, readings, tour| Posted by: Gavin

Kelly is off to the west coast for 3 quick readings then one in Atlanta. If you go, please mask up! Info below or here.

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The Twisted Folklore Histories Bundle

Tue 20 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elwin Cotman, Isabel Yap, StoryBundle| Posted by: Gavin

Mike Allen has put together a great StoryBundle, The Twisted Folklore Histories Bundle, which includes not just one but two Small Beer titles, Isabel Yap’s award-winning debut, Never Have I Ever and Elwin Cotman’s Dance on Saturday. It’s a good time to check out Elwin as his next book, Weird Black Girls, comes out April 16 from Simon & Schuster.

There are books by Angela Slatter, Eugen Bacon, Theodora Goss, two books from C. S. E. Cooney, and more. You can pay whatever you want, direct some of your payment to Girls Write Now, and no matter how much you pay, you’re going to end up with some great books:

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Kelly @ Book Moon Tomorrow

Fri 16 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Book Moon, events, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Kelly will be at Book Moon tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 17, from 3-5 p.m. signing The Book of Love (and so on), saying hello, and passing out cookies. Drop by if you can!

More events. (Cambridge, Natick, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, online.)

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Heroes: One Year On

Wed 14 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Liminals| Posted by: Gavin

We published Ayize Jama-Everett’s 4th and final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World, a year ago today.

Good and thoughtful review by Jenny Hamilton just recently popped up 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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Happy Publication Day to a Great Novel(ist)

Tue 13 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Tonight, weather willing, Kelly will launch her new book, her first novel, The Book of Love, at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. (All her tour dates are here.) It is an amazing novel, has received the kind of reviews an author might dream of and I love the framing of 20+ years of nope, no novel, nope then oh, ok, HUGE novel. What a treat for me and everyone else. I meant to write about it in the run up to publication but other things kept getting in the way.

Now here I am on publication day, lying on a couch in a hotel in NYC while Kelly has gone off to her a reading and I have run out of juice so here are a few links. Some people will have seen some of them, with luck they are wide enough scattered that they might intrigue many different readers. With Kelly away, I’ll go listen to her talk to Beth Golay on KMUW’s Marginalia.(Later: I strongly recommend this!) I enjoyed, even if I disagree about the book’s length, Michael Patrick Brady’s review on WBUR. My favorite thing that came out today was Riza Cruz’s Shelf Life piece on Elle where Kelly gets to recommend some favorite reads.

Before today, Ron Charles reviewed the novel in the Washington Post, Steve Pfarrer chatted with Kelly and reviewed the book in our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and yesterday Amal El-Mohtar’s review — such a review to bring tears to one’s eyes — arrived in the New York Times.

Kelly’s posted her Book of Love playlists — Apple; Spotify — and if you can’t get to any of the readings, there’s now an online event: Kelly & Kathleen Jennings read from and discuss their new books, The Book of Love and Kindling respectively and Moon Palace will have signed book plates to go with orders.

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AWP 2024

Thu 8 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., AWP| Posted by: Gavin

Some years ago I got a positive result on my test to see whether they will print anything in the AWP listings of exhibiting publishers:

On Wednesday afternoon I realized the 2024 AWP Conference & Bookfair would just be beginning. Pre-pandemic, pre-long Covid I’d have been taking 8-10 boxes of books into the conference center either on a tiny hand truck I took along or asking people if I could borrow one. Thanks again Coffee House, Copper Canyon, and the many other kind people over the years who lent me one when I didn’t bring one or just plain forgot.

The conference moves around so occasionally Kelly and I drove to it, other times we flew. We often mailed books to friends’ houses and that gave me a good way to catch up with people. I sometimes sent them to a nearby UPS or Fedex — once I tried to UPS some boxes to a Fedex office and apparently that is a Spy vs Spy level no-no-no! Had to change the delivery address. Then I’d pick up the boxes in a (very surprised) taxi, get them to the place, get them on the dolly/hand truck, and walk them in. It was way too expensive for us to use the official shipper and the conference haulers.

I think I reserved a table in the bookfair in 2023 because, really, how sick could I be in 2022 that I would not be able to go? Silly me. AWP is going to be back in LA next year, what a great place for it. The lunches I was able to walk out and find when we were there! Anyway, doubt we will be there.

We occasionally co-hosted parties. Sometimes great fun. Excellent to be able to pay back and pay forward other people who hosted some great dance parties over the years.

I liked to set up a reading on the Wednesday evening if possible — we had one at the Last Bookstore and one at Politics & Prose — so after the Wednesday morning flight, or maybe Tuesday night if I was feeling fancy, we’d be hustling around to get ready. Kelly would read along with as many Small Beer authors as were at the conference. Abbey Mei Otis read in DC along with We’d ask them to sign at the bookfair table at some point, too. Woah, imagine if we went this year with Kelly’s book coming out. Not sure I could lift that many boxes.

I really liked tabling at events, being right there seeing what people like to read, seeing the covers they like, seeing if they like short stories or if they’re just looking for a place to sell their memoir. (We were a great nonfiction market for older woman writers of weird fiction from Oregon.) There’s nothing like being available to writers and readers and people who don’t know you from Adam and have questions, so many great questions. I’d sometimes get to panels but I’d find it hard to skip meeting friends and strangers in the bookfair. I usually brought home 15-20 books and magazines at least?

Anyway, we’re not there this year and neither will we be at the ABA Winter Institute in Cincinnati next weekend. Good golly that’s a level of frustration. I’d love to be there: went to my first one in Baltimore in January 2020, four months after we’d opened Book Moon, met some great people, learned a lot. Kelly was going, too, but on the train down we got a call from her mom that our kid, who had a bad cold, had gotten worse. Could we come back? Kelly has an incredible knowledge of our kid when sick and an ability to know what they need so we talked about both of us going back or just one of us, and soon enough she was on her way back. It’s ok, we thought, we’ll both go in 2021.

The kid recovered, Kelly and I got slight colds; something was going around. We don’t think it was Covid, but there weren’t tests, so like everyone else, it’s a maybe. We’re not going to Boskone this weekend — but Kate & her husband are tabling for Small Beer & Book Moon for their first time there. If you’re there, please say hello! Hope they’ll have fun, meet good people, sell some books. We last went to Boskone in 2020 and our kid had a great time. We didn’t catch Covid there, even though some people from Boskone went to the Boston superspreader international biotechnology conference that same weekend. Everything comes back to Covid these years. Since it’s the reason we’re not doing any of these things this year, I suppose that’s ok.

Anyway, off to read some LCRW submissions for the next zine!

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Dammit, I Missed the 20-year Anniversary of Our Oldest Unpaid Invoice

Thu 8 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookshops, chapbooks, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Excellent that the search function, while messy, thanks Google, still works well enough for me to find this rather than having to page down through the Not Journalling Updates Page. I was putting together the Book Moon monthly bestseller list for Locus when I remembered that I’d posted a while back about the 10-year anniversary of our oldest invoice.

Ten years? A blink of a fruit fly’s eye! Twenty years? Now we’re getting somewhere. I long ago figured the bookstore mustn’t have sold any copies of the zine or the chapbooks — they should have ordered copies of Kelly’s chapbook 4 Stories — maybe they did, I’m not going to go find out — but they could have returned them. I’d be happy to have a few extra copies around.

Anyway, as with everything (except wishing death to stingy billionaires and those who declare who is human and who isn’t), time has removed any sting from this and now it’s just here to amuse. 20 years? A dog’s yawn! Looking forward to 30.

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Kelly’s Book of Love Tour

Wed 7 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kelly Link, tour| Posted by: Gavin

Kelly’s new (first!) novel, The Book of Love (reviewed today by Ron Charles in the WaPo) comes out next Tuesday and very appropriately she will be at Books Are Magic with Hilary Leichter in Brooklyn to launch it.

Since we don’t host readings at Book Moon, she’ll do a local reading (with Yvette Lisa Ndlovu) on Thursday with our friends over at the Odyssey in South Hadley, and then will do a drop-in signing at Book Moon on Saturday. The next week she’s off to the Harvard Bookstore and the B&N in Natick before a quick jaunt over to the West Coast. One extra day in Atlanta, then home.

Here’s a link to all the events — there will be a virtual event with Kathleen Jennings open to all hosted by Moon Palace on March 5 — and if you do manage to go, please do wear a mask.

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Isabel Yap @ KGB Bar

Wed 7 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap, KGB Fantastic Fiction| Posted by: Gavin

Next Wednesday Isabel Yap will be reading in New York as part of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Reading series hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel:​​​

Isabel Yap & Randee Dawn, February 14th, 2024, 7pm ET.

KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
(Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs)

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Sareen McLay is Writer of the Week at the People’s Friend

Sat 3 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sareen McLay| Posted by: Gavin

My sister Sareen McLay is Writer of the Week at the The People’s Friend. If you’re in the UK you’ll know the mag, the “world’s longest running weekly women’s magazine and number one for quality fiction every week.” Long term LCRW readers might remember her poem “Illumination” about climbing and caving in the north of England in the third issue. I’m toasting Sareen this morning with this mug of tea!

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Locus 2023 Recommended Reading List

Thu 1 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, Kij Johnson, Locus, Sarah Pinsker, year's bests| Posted by: Gavin

In 2023 we (only) published four books and I’m happy to see three of them are on the Locus Recommended Reading list. The one title missing is Ayize Jama-Everett’s series capper Heroes of an Unknown World—at least The Last Count of Monte Cristo, his great Afrofuturist graphic novel, is listed.

As ever, congratulations to everyone whose work made the list! Do I think more of the list makers should read LCRW? Well of course! How could they miss our monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semiannual, dammit, annual issue from last year? (I mean, maybe they all read it and didn’t enjoy any of the stories, but, come now, how likely is that?)

The three titles, which if you are reading this you may be familiar with, that did make the list are:

Kij Johnson, The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small, Medium, and Large Stories

Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places: Stories & the original story novelette first publisher there, “Science Facts!”

Anya Johanna DeNiro, OKPsyche

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