Prix Bob Morane Finalist

Mon 14 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

ActuaLitté La MontureLovely to see in Locus that the French edition of Carol Emshwiller’s novel The Mount published by Argyll éditions is a Prix Bob Morane Finalist. We’ve had low stock on our edition for a while on this one — I was going to reset it at some point but got distracted so one of these Sunday afternoons I’ll get that done — but we always keep copies of the cheap, handy, and very portable Penguin Firebird mass market edition in stock at Book Moon.

Should you read it? On io9 MaryKate Jasper and Charlie Jane Anders have it on a list that says yes: 10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading.

The Mount was one of the first books we published that picked up a major award. Kelly’s stories had received awards before her collection was published in 2001 and, of course, so had some of Carol’s stories that were collected in the second of her books we published in 2002, Report to the Men’s Club — she played off Kafka’s A Report to an Academy for her collection title — what a book that is! Even if you just read the first (“Grandma”) and last (“After All”) stories, you’re going away a winner. These two books by Carol (our 3rd and 4th published titles) comprise the whole of our second year of book publishing — we also did 2 chapbooks and 2 issues of LCRW.

The Mount cover - click to view full sizeBoth Carol’s novel The Mount and her collection Report to the Men’s Club were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and The Mount was the winner. It was also a Nebula finalist, an Impac Award nominee, and included in Best of the Year lists by Locus, Village Voice, and Book Magazine. and you can Read Chapter One here. Maybe it will add the Prix Bob Morane, maybe not, as with many awards, it is an honor that the book is nominated, congratulations Argyll éditions!

I still miss Carol. She was incredibly fun to work with — even if I spent the next decade asking her if she had more work and she kept ignoring me — and while writing this I was delighted to be reminded of Matt Cheney’s 90th birthday present to Carol, the Carol Emshwiller project.