25 Years: STH, MMitMR

Mon 20 Jul 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Leave a Comment | Posted by: Gavin

Stranger Things Happen cover - click to view full sizeTwenty-five years ago this month Kelly and I published our first Small Beer books, her first collection Stranger Things Happen (STH) and Oregon writer Ray Vukcevich’s first collection, Meet Me in the Moon Room. If you haven’t read Ray’s story Whisper take a moment.

I used to have a count of how many free Creative Commons downloads of Stranger Things Happen there had been. I stopped when it hit a couple of hundred thousand — some sites, besides ours, used to keep counts and I’d check them occasionally because it was amazing. It’s been so long that I’m no longer sure what those sites are nor whether they’re still around.

You can still download it from that page, along with a few other titles. The expectation from some quarters was that because of the existence of the Creative Commons release, STH wouldn’t be picked up by as many international publishers. When I check my handy list I confirmed that’s wrong. It’s been published by Hayakawa, Japan; Donzelli Editore, Italy; Delta Vision, Hungary; Gayatari, Russia; Argo, Czech Republic; Editions Denoel, France; Babel, Israel; Woongjin Think Big Co., Korea; Versus Kitap, Turkey; Evaristo Editorial, Argentina & Chile; and, most recently, Carcosa, Germany.

Meet Me in the Moon Room cover - click to view full sizeWhen Kelly’s collection was in the works, she talked to editors who wanted a novel instead. It took 23 years until The Book of Love was published by Random House. In between she published Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog. No matter the novels, I think she’s going to keep writing stories — her latest, “The Girl Collector,” is in the second issue of new magazine, Elastic.

We thought we’d keep publishing books until we dropped dead in the trad. arr. small press fashion: hauling boxes of books into or out of a convention center in slightly too hot weather. As it is, Long Covid has kind of put a pin in our publishing ambitions. We have a bookstore we intend to see thrive, about 100 books in print, and a zine I think we’ll keep going. Maybe one day we will reprint some out-of-print favorite novels, or make more zines. In the meantime, STH is in its 10th printing. We’d like to do the same for a few more of our books.

How about for the rest of the month, buy one of these two, we’ll include the other in for free.

 

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