Retro Neo Noir
Tue 22 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Robert Wexler| Posted by: Gavin
J
. Robert Lennon just sent along after reading Robert Freeman Wexler’s original and unexpected Western detective novel — with just a hint of WHAT!? — which comes out in August when up here in the northern hemisphere we’re all going to be baking and it will be just the right temperature to read The Silverberg Business:
“This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir — at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque — is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail.”
Good Weekend for Never Have I Ever
Mon 14 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin
Congratulations to Isabel Yap whose debut collection Never Have I Ever received a Stabby Award this weekend! That was a new award for me and I’m delighted to discover it this way.
Then I read that Never was shortlisted for the 2022 Crawford Award “presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for a first book of fantasy.” Usman T. Malik won the award for his collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan (Kitab) and E. Lily Yu’s novel On Fragile Waves (Erewhon) was the other runner-up. Congratulations all — and may all weekends be as fun!
The news comes in slightly too late to go on the cover of the second printing of the book — it is back at the printer slowly making its way through the general slowdown and will be back in stock oh in a blink of an eye (as slowed down to last weeks and weeks).
On Publishing Angélica Gorodischer
Mon 7 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer, remembering, Sue Burke, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin
On Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022 I was incredibly sorry to read in an email from Amalia Gladhart, who translated Trafalgar for us as well as Jaguars’ Tomb for Vanderbilt UP, that Argentinean author Angélica Gorodischer had died at her home in Rosario at the age of 93. Here’s a link to the obituary Amalia sent.
We published the first three of Angélica’s books to be translated into English: Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin) in 2003, followed by Trafalgar (translated by Amalia Gladhart) in 2013, and Prodigies (translated by Sue Burke) in 2015.
Publishing Angélica’s books — and meeting her when she came up to the WisCon conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2003 — have been one of the highlights of our work here at the press. Kelly and I publishing Angélica’s books in our third season put Small Beer onto a different plane and meant that we could from our early years use Kalpa Imperial to show that we had very broad horizons in our sights. Angélica was exceedingly generous to share her books with us and we very appreciative. The story of how we came to publish the books, while not as interesting as any of Angélica’s own wide ranging stories, shows a little of how publishing works, with a drop of luck, much hard work and juggling, and a little of being in the right place at the right time.
In 1998 Kelly read and admired a section of Kalpa Imperial, The End of a Dynasty, or The Natural History of Ferrets, in the anthology Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which had been translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was not the first translation of Angélica’s work into English. According to this useful site, Alberto Manguel translated “Man’s Dwelling Place” for his anthology Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (Three Rivers, 1985); four of her stories were translated (by Monica Bruno, Mary G. Berg, and two by Lorraine Elena Roses) for the 1991 White Pine Press anthology, Secret Weavers, edited by Marjorie Agosin; and Diana L. Vélez translated “Camera Obscura” for Latin American Literary Review, 19 (37).
At some point after reading Starlight 2, Kelly wondered if Ursula had translated more of Angélica’s work. We had met Ursula once or twice at WisCon, an annual feminist science-fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin, which we all loved and so we sent her a letter. I am still amazed at the response.
At this point, the two of us had published four books through Small Beer: in 2001, Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen and Ray Vukcevich’s collection Meet Me in the Moon Room, and in 2002, two books by Carol Emshwiller, a novel, The Mount, and a collection, Report to the Men’s Club. While talking to Carol we found out that Ursula was a big fan of Carol’s books and asked Ursula if she would blurb one of Carol’s books — Ursula said she could not . . . because she admired Carol (here’s her review of Ledoyt) so much that she had just asked Carol to blurb one of her books. So when we wrote, rather out of the blue, asking about Kalpa Imperial we had at least corresponded a little and at some point I’d been brave enough to buy her a bourbon in Madison. (Ursula and Angélica were both smart, no nonsense, and more than a little bit terrifying.)
Ursula’s agent at the time was the late Linn Prentis of the Virginia Kidd Agency — who was a mixed blessing. She was willing to work with our tiny press but between her office having work done on it and not everyone being on the same computer system it took three months for the manuscript to be sent to us and the final deal — our first translation contracts — wasn’t concluded until January 2003. Here’s the Publishers Lunch announcement:
Angélica Gorodischer’s KALPA IMPERIAL, a history of an empire that never was, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, to Gavin Grant at Small Beer Press, in a nice deal, by Linn Prentiss at the Virginia Kidd Agency (NA).
We were planning on publishing in August of that year — as we’d done for our first two seasons — but then an unmissable opportunity came up: the possibility that Angélica could attend WisCon on the Memorial Day weekend in May 2003. Suddenly everything was moving very fast. Fortunately for my monolingual self, Angélica’s English was strong: “I can make myself understood and I can understand your Scotch English. Je parle Français aussi.” (I read in the one of the obituaries that her 1988 Fulbright Scholarship allowed her to participate in the University of Iowa International Writing Program and she also taught at the University of Northern Colorado.)
She could do more than make herself understood. She was sharp and funny and sometimes returned emailed after trips to Ecuador or Bolivia (“where I thought I was going to die: 4,500m above sea level!”) and I learned that she too loved Carol’s books — I had mailed her our first four books and we were both delighted they arrived. The mail to Argentina then seemed to be about as reliable as the present day USPS.
And then the US started another war and we were all thrown for a loop (again).
However she was worried at the speed we were working.
She was right.
Our proofreader turned in a workmanlike job and after all the changes had been entered I sent the book to the printer. There’s nothing quite like having an internationally acclaimed award-winning author fly in from Argentina and when you meet for the first time she sits you down in an empty ballroom to show you the typos in her first book translated into English that you have just published.
Our printer also shifted the ship date at the last minute without telling us and we almost didn’t get books to the convention. For some reason they also individually shrink wrapped every copy. Ugh. It was both a fantastic and miserably stressful weekend and I learned that all that “extra time” in publishing schedules is very necessary.
By a happy coincidence in 2003 another of Angélica’s short stories, “The Violet Embryos” translated by Sara Irausquin, was published in the anthology Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (Wesleyan UP).
In the run up to the actual publication date of Kalpa Imperial, a bilingual friend of ours from the KGB Bar Fantastic Fiction reading series, Gabriel Mesa, offered to interview Angélica for the website Fantastic Metropolis. You can read the interview here which captures some of Angélica’s vivacity.
The book found many friends at independent bookshops and a few months later it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. It was easy to be enthusiastic about, as I loved it so much.
Being a very small press, I struggled with how we could afford more translations of Angélica’s work. I knew I wanted to read them but I didn’t know enough about the industry to even know where to begin. So I put a tiny line on our website saying that we were always looking for more translations of Angélica’s work. A couple of people contacted us over the years, usually grad students, to see if we had any funding or if they could work with us. My (ongoing) problem was that I have to read the full book before I can tell if I’m going to publish it so I could not read just a chapter or two. Early as 2003, two books were especially recommended to me: a short story collection, Trafalgar, and a novel, Prodigies. Both of them were said to be very different from Kalpa Imperial which only deepened my interest.
In 2011 I discovered something which made it much less likely that we would be able to publish another of Angélica’s books. All the checks we had sent to her agent from 2004 – 2011 had been cashed but none of the money had been sent on. I was truly horrified — I can still hardly believe it. I can see how easily it happened — many international editions don’t earn out their advances and I trusted the agent, of course, so I never checked with Angélica to see if she was receiving the money.
When I found out from the agent by email she replied saying how expensive it was (as it still is) to send money to Argentina, but that was no excuse. Despite my pushing, nothing happened until the agent retired and someone else took over that we were able to make any headway. I had given up on the agent by then and the Argentinean government had made it easier to send money into the country so I was able to send everything owed to Angélica. At some later time, the agency paid the press back for the unsent royalties — minus their percentage. Anyway, she was a good agent for a lot of people for many years and had done good work for Angélica at first.
Then, as I was trying to get information from the agent about the unpaid royalties, came the news that Angélica was going to be awarded a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards at their November 2011 convention — a lovely prize for a writer who had dipped in and out of many genres and who received many awards: here are a few from her extended bio:
1964 “Vea & Lea” award, III contest of detective stories
1965 “Club del Orden” award
1984 “Más Allá” award; “Poblet” award, “Premoi Konex”
1984-85 Emecé award
1985 “Sigfried Radaelli Club de los Trece”
1986 Gilgamesh (Spain)
1991 Gilgamesh (Spain)
1994 “Platinum Konex”
1996 “Dignity” award granted by the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights for works and activity in women’s rights
1998 Silvina Bullrich award, granted by the Argentina Writers’ Society to the best novel written by a woman during the three precedent years
2000: “Esteban Echeverría”
2007: Premio ILCH, California
2014: Konex Career Award
2017: Honorary Doctorate, National University of Cuyo
2018: Prix Imaginales for Kalpa Imperial
2018: Grand Prize for Artistic Career from the National Fund for the Arts for her contribution to Argentine culture.
At first it seemed the organization was going to bring Angélica in to receive the award in person but it did not work out. Another translator, Edward Gauvin, who had translated French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s stories in a collection, A Life on Paper, was good enough to collect the award in her place. This is the speech Angélica sent:
As you may see, I am not here, but just now, at this exact moment I am in Rosario, very far away from here but thinking of you all, and I wonder: what are they thinking now? Are they happy to be here? Yes. I know you are, and then, of course, I am happy too. And I feel immensely grateful. This Award is very important to me. It comes to my hands at the right moment. At eighty-three years old, I can count so many blessings: my husband, my sons, my daughter, my grandsons and my granddaughter, and my accomplices: the words I put in my thirty books of narrative. As Jorge Luis Borges said once I am condemned to the Spanish words. And I am trying to say in my poor English that I feel happy and joyful and that I send you my love and my gratitude. Thank you.
And here is Gauvin’s speech on accepting the award:
Any committee (or convention) that gives a prize like this to a person like this needs no reminder of the kind I’m about to give, so let me position this as preaching to the choir rather as a pat on its back, or a collective prayer. Angélica Gorodischer has been given a tremendous honor but one that I hope will serve to take her a step further down the trail first blazed eight years ago by the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Kalpa Imperial by Small Beer Press, Angélica’s publisher and mine.
Giving her this award is a little like hanging a medal round the tip of the iceberg whose other nine-tenths I hope one see the light of English day. By a curious metonymy of publishing economies, single books sometimes stand in for entire bodies of work. In the worst cases, single authors are allowed to stand in for entire countries or languages, as if the attention span of English-speaking readers were not enough to hold more than one complicated, funny-sounding name in its mind at a time. Or, as if with such an award, we Anglophones deigned to notice the rest of a world with a nod and now owed no more. We in this room know better.
Let fantasy, which draws already from so many folkloric world traditions, truly become world fantasy. Thank you.
At yet the same time, I received an email from a writer and translator, Amalia Gladhart, an Associate Professor of Spanish Department of Romance Languages. Amalia had translated two books by Ecuadorian writer Alicia Yánez Cossío (The Potbellied Virgin, UT Press, 2006, and Beyond the Islands, UNO Press, 2011) and after reading Kalpa Imperial and finding the note on our website, she contacted us about translating Trafalgar. She had been in touch with Angélica, had begun translating Trafalgar, and was heading to Rosario to teach so would be able to go over her translation directly. I was delighted and when she sent me the translation I was enamored of the strangeness of the book in which an intergalactic salesman tells stories of his travels to his friends back in a coffeeshop in Rosario.
We placed some of the stories in magazines (The Sense of the Circle [interview], The Best Day of the Year, Trafalgar and Josefina) and published the book in 2013. The colors in the cover came out muddier than the sharp piece of art we had selected. Our then printer didn’t agree with us and would not reprint so we did not work with them again. Despite the muddy cover, much to my relief, Angélica was very pleased and Amalia translated her letter on receipt of the books:
Dear Gavin: I received the copies of Trafalgar, just marvelous. The first thing I did was to caress them, because they are so beautiful that they call to the hand and the eye. What a fine object, so attractive, so precious. Afterwards, of course, with great feeling I began to turn the pages and, as always, I was stunned by Amalia’s expert translation. Well, everything is perfect, and I am very happy, very moved, and Amalia and I are planning public presentations and dialogues in bookstores, the College of Translators, etc., here in Rosario, to make the book known. Many thanks for everything and let’s keep in touch as in the past.
With warm greetings,
hugs,
Angélica
In 2020 Trafalgar was reprinted in the UK as part of a new Penguin Classics line and I very much like the presentation and the quotes they’ve used:
“A novel that is unlike anything I’ve ever read, one part pulp adventure to one part realistic depiction of the affluent, nearly-idle bourgeoisie, but always leaning more towards the former in its inventiveness and pure sense of fun.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
In an email in 2004, Ursula had said she was reading Prodigies and found it “fascinating and extremely difficult.” In his 2003 interview, Gabriel Mesa had asked Angélica:
Q. If after KALPA you had to choose another of your novels to be translated into English, which would it be?
A: PRODIGIOS, always PRODIGIOS which I believe is the best thing I have ever written in my life. Of course no one would read it because it is a difficult text.
A few months after Trafalgar came out we were approached by another writer translator, Sue Burke, to see if we were still interested in a translation of that very novel, Prodigies. An American, she was then living in Madrid and her most recent translation was Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Science Fiction (Sportula, 2013). Given that Angélica thought it was the best thing she had written, how could I resist? I may have ignored the last line in her answer above.
Prodigies is as promised, a slim, fabulous, somewhat difficult novel. We placed excerpts in the journals Eleven Eleven and Spolia Magazine. Reading it is like diving into a dream, with sentences and paragraphs that leave no room for coming up for air so the reader has to go with it or drown.
Angélica wrote around thirty books and so far Prodigies is the last translation of her work we’ve published — but never say never. Amalia Gladhart translated the dark, recursive, and fascinatingly structured Jaguars’ Tomb for Vanderbilt UP and Angélica’s name is now well enough known in the Anglophone world that I expect there will be more translations, perhaps published by us, perhaps elsewhere. Having more than one publisher means there is more than one team of publicists and editors talking up the books and there is more chance the books will find readers.
We were incredibly fortunate to work with Angélica — and her three translators — on these three books. I send my sympathies and condolences to Angélica’s family and those who knew and loved her and I am grateful that we have her books.
More
El Pais obituary
Locus obituary
Sofia Samatar on Kalpa Imperial
Not Entirely Comfortable
Thu 20 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
A
nother strong trade review came in for Richard Butner’s forthcoming debut collection, The Adventurists, this one from ALA’s Booklist which spotlights a few stories and like all of us who enjoy the book try and capture something of the author’s play with time and memory and then declares it:
“A worthwhile collection of not entirely comfortable stories exploring the past, the present, and the future.”
Gravity Again
Tue 18 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., chuntering on, ebooks, Long Covid, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
On January 1st of this year I hung up my space boots and Weightless Books became the sole property of my friend and cofounder, Michael J. DeLuca.
Michael and I began Weightless in late 2009. Weightless was nominally owned by me as I had the Small Beer business infrastructure in place so that I could pay sales tax and send out annual 1099s but it was an equal collaboration: we were each paid equally every quarter and we made decisions together. I admire Michael both for his work ethic (how American of me!) but also his wandering off to the woods, the way he and his wife are raising their kid, his way of moving through the world, his home brewing and baking, and although Weightless is a small niche website that could always be better, I have always enjoyed it as an excuse to work with him.
Where and Why Weightless
In 2009 Michael and I had been redoing the Small Beer Press website from a clunky hand-coded html site to an up-to-date (for its time) WordPress site and among the problems we ran into was that of selling both print and ebook formats simultaneously from the site. (Let’s not talk about the difficulty of trying to bring in years of my hand-coded zine pages over!)
We’d been selling ebooks on the old site since 2005 but the PayPal cart architecture made selling both formats complicated. As is still true, Am*zon was dominating ebook sales and part of their method was to remove or threaten to remove the buy button on a on a book’s page. I did not want to have all the Small Beer ebooks in one basket so I self-distributed them to Fictionwise, Google, and B&N as well as Am*zon — as then, they dominate the ebook market. However, if we had our own site we’d never need to worry that one company could make all of our books disappear.
When it comes to publishing, I always like seeing if I can do something myself so we decided to try building a website that could automate some of the ebook delivery work. Michael is the technological heart of the website and he coded it. At the start, we had some Small Beer interns who helped – shout out to Diana Cao and Felice Ling! — but over the years it has been Michael on the tech side and then both of us doing everything else: importing ebooks, sending them out, fixing our own and publisher errors, paying royalties, hunting down missing ebook formats, importing yet more ebooks, dealing with hosting failures or PayPal and WordPress blips where sales did not come through, &c., &c. In the weeks since the new year I’ve already found it odd not to be regularly checking the Weightless email to see if there are questions. We designed the site as one that we’d be happy to buy from — although no matter what we did, it would always have been better if we’d had more money to make it load faster — so:
- there are no pop-ups
- we never sold ads
- we never sold anyone’s information
- we only stocked DRM-free ebooks.
In early 2011, friends of ours who run Blind Eye Books published a huge ten-part serialized novel by Ginn Hale called The Rifter which was incredibly popular and it helped us realize how much people like subscriptions. We approached mostly sf&f publishers and some of them tried the site and left and some are still there. We found that genre (primarily science fiction, fantasy, & horror and to a small extent, mystery) ebooks generally outsold nongenre ebooks. We worked with big and small publishers although given the time constraints of two people working in the interstices of their lives we had to set limits to what we could bring on — some of the parts we’d hoped to automate had never quite worked — so after bringing on many small magazines (closer to my heart on paper than ebook, but still) we eventually closed to new publishers although since we are both interested in forefronting diverse voices in recent months we did manage to bring on khōréō and Constelación.
But Also
In the past 11 years Michael and I have done a lot of other things. Most of my time has been taken up with our kid or Small Beer Press and a few years ago Michael founded Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice.
Then in 2018 a used and new bookshop came up for sale in the next town over, Easthampton, where our Small Beer office is. I met my wife, Kelly, while working at a bookshop in Boston and I love the diversity of viewpoints independent bookshops put out into the world. At Small Beer we can only publish 6-10 books a year. At a bookshop we could put hundreds of books in front of people.
Kelly and I had long played with the idea of running a bookshop — but it was play. I knew we couldn’t afford to buy or open one in Northampton and since I hope never to move house again it was safe to think it would never be more than play. Our bookstore could be four stories with an elevator; 10,000 sq ft on one floor; it could only sell books by 19th century left-handed Scots writers. Besides, although we’d both worked at a couple of bookshops, we didn’t know how to run one. But on inquiring, it turned out the bookshop was much quieter than we’d known, and therefore affordable, and in 2019 Kelly used part of her MacArthur grant to buy it.
Kelly’s a full-time writer as well as the art director and editor of many Small Beer books, so as we imagined how our lives would be if bought the shop (and while we bounced hundreds of possible names for it off one another), it became clear we could only do so if I spent a fair amount of time there — which I wanted to — and if we found people we could work with.
The bookshop, Book Moon, has been fun and I’m happy to say we found great people to work with — although the first few months of the pandemic were a grind and as I type two booksellers are out with Covid (fingers crossed) and we are back to being only open for Curbside Pickup again. But over the past two pandemic years I kept running into the problem of there being too little time or not enough me to do all I wanted and I realized that something had to go: Small Beer, Weightless, or Book Moon.
3, 2, 1, You’re Out!
During one of our regular discussions on the future of Weightless, Michael said he would be happy to run it himself. Even though I knew I had to leave, I didn’t jump at this quite as fast as I expected I would. Not surprisingly, I found it quite hard to give up something I’d helped start, worked on, and still enjoy. But it seemed better for the site if I stood down since Michael was re-energized and excited about future possibilities. Michael has built a strong community with Reckoning which made me think that perhaps he could grow Weightless, too. Besides, if needed, I can still pitch in.
I’ve found the hard part is not to think I have lots of free time so I should go start something else. So far that’s been somewhat easy as (sorry, writers) there’s a lot of Small Beer reading to catch up on, 1099s are due, and our next book, Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, is coming out soon.
So now I’m part of the great resignation. Michael has registered the business in Michigan, the PayPal and bank accounts are now his, the hosting and url registration has been transferred. Historically Weightless didn’t made tons of money. It wasn’t volunteering but it was more that the site was a service that we liked providing, a place for readers to find something interesting and not just be part of the datacloud Am*zon etc. are eating every day. The site pays does not pay anything resembling Michael’s actual coding rates so so I did not “cash out” my half of the business. I transferred it to Michael and walked away.
Thanks to everyone who has ever bought a book or subscribed to a magazine on Weightless. It was, believe or not, fun. It’s much better to have tried it, it did ok, than not try it. I strongly believe in the principles we founded the site on so Small Beer ebooks will still be distributed DRM-free on the site and I look forward to working with Michael for years to come.
Shipping, some free books, Janelle Monae, a big blue cat
Wed 15 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Interviews, Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin
Despite the pull of the couch and the shiny shiny kettle suggesting that it is time for tea and biscuits, we’re still shipping here books from Book Moon and from our distributor, Consortium. Ordering on this site means includes free media mail shipping — great if you are not bothered about books in time for the holidays. If you do want them to arrive in time, choose priority mail or ground shipping at Book Moon. The Post Office says they might get there in time but maybe take that with a pinch of salt and a deep relaxing breath letting the shipping gods know that you know they’re in charge and we mortals are not in the know and ok with it.
To make up for that possibly slow shipping, we’re throwing in a free backlist title with each new book order. Get some for yourself, your Little Free Library, your good friends, your friends who are not so good and maybe worry you a little but they’re fun and as long as they can keep it together (cf Eddie Murphy, Bowfinger) one day they’ll get a Nobel prize or a first look deal with Netflix.
All copies of LCRW are being delivered by a big blue cat, so please forgive that cat if it gets distracted by a shiny thing on the way and it is delayed.
Not sure which book to order? How about some short story collections?
Janelle Monae just picked Alaya Dawn Johnson to co-write the title story of her forthcoming first short story collection, The Memory Librarian. (That sentence is just amazing to write. Wow.) See why she picked Alaya by picking up Alaya’s wide-ranging and lauded collection Reconstruction: Stories.
I just heard the excellent news that Elwin Cotman sold his debut novel The Age of Ignorance to Scribner at auction so while looking forward to that I’m going to throw his collection Dance on Saturday onto this list.
Recently Samantha Cheh interviewed Zen Cho for Electric Lit about her novel Black Water Sister and her joy-filled expanded debut collection, Spirits Abroad. I just listened to Zen’s novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and loved it so that gets a recommendation here, too.
Isabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever has a couple of new long stories which are not to be missed, the meet cute “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls” — the latter, about older males in positions of power over young women at a camp is a sharp distillation of what has gone wrong in so many fields over the years. The reaction is harsh, effective, disturbing, and deserved.
And lastly one day I’ll sit on an uncomfortable chair in a convention hall or hotel and have the happy experience of listening to Jeffrey Ford read a story. While I can’t do that, at least I have his latest collection, Big Dark Hole.
Anyway, order a book — or a box of books — and we’ll throw in a freebie and all our thanks for helping keep the wolves from the door for another year for this small press.
Caught up in the Supply Chain
Thu 2 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., housekeeping, Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
Despite all the warnings I had thought I was in the sweet spot with our next book, Richard Butner’s debut collection, The Adventurists. Little did I know I was walking through the letters p, r, i, d, and e, and what do you know, down I go.
The new date for the book is March 22, 2022, a lovely palindromic date in anywhere the date is sensibly written day/month/year, 22/3/22. Maybe that’ll give us more time for the pandemic to burn itself out as we all get our next boosters and mask up and we can actually get Richard out to some bookstores.
In the meantime, here’s one of Richard’s stories, Circa, on Interfictions.
Kate Challis RAKA 2021 Commendation
Fri 19 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kim Scott| Posted by: Gavin
“The Kate Challis Ruth Adeney Koori Award, or RAKA, which means ‘five’ in the Pintupi language is awarded to an Indigenous artist in one of five categories annually, including: creative prose, poetry, script writing, drama and visual arts” and this year’s winner is Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield, a novel I read and highly recommend. Although I think all the awards it has piled up — including the Miles Franklin Award, sort of like the Australian Booker Prize — might be strong enough rec. Of the award, Ms. Winch says:
I’m a Wiradjuri woman, who grew up on Dtharawal country. I want to acknowledge the Country on which you read these words, and acknowledge my fellow writers whose beloved work was published in the last five years. I also want to recognise those writers commended, my mentors, colleagues and friends — Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott. I feel as if I’m only still at the beginning of my career as an interrogator and questioner of the past, present and future of ourselves and our nation, so it is a distinction that I will endeavour to work to, and pay respect to, in my ensuing works and years.
Kim Scott’s novel Taboo is one of three commended novels. We published Taboo in North America and I was lucky enough to attend the Library of Congress National Book Festival and spend some time with Kim, one of the highlights of pre-pandemic time. Here’s a short video of him reading from Taboo during the panel.
The full commendation for the three novels can be found here and here’s an excerpt from the note on Taboo:
‘Takes the reader along a spiritual path deep into the land and its stories, with characters as earthy, as real, as stumbling, as flawed and enlightened, and as courageous as any characters you would want to find in an epic tale.’
Second Interview in New Series
Thu 18 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alaya Dawn Johnson, Book Moon interviews| Posted by: Gavin
We recently posted a new interview with recent World Fantasy Award winner Alaya Dawn Johnson in our occasional Book Moon Small Beer author interview series. As with the first, the interview was carried out by the inimitable Franchesca Viaud.
Reconstruction: Stories is Alaya’s first collection of stories collecting stories from as far back as 2005 and as new as the eponymous title story that first appeared in the collection. “The Mirages” was going to be published for the first time in the book but the pandemic got the better of us, the book was moved to January of this year, and the story first appeared in Asimov’s last issue of 2020. In between those times Alaya has published many stories and novels, started a band, and moved to Mexico.
Alaya’s first novel, Racing the Dark, was published in 2007 by Agate and her latest, Trouble the Saints, that World Fantasy Award winner mentioned above, was published in 2020 by Tor with the paperback edition coming out just this past August. We have some signed bookplates at Book Moon will be included free with any of her books ordered from there.
Read the interview here.
Author photo by Armando Vega.
An Essential Travelers’ Guide
Wed 17 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
Received by packet mail over the internet from a writer who knows a good travel book from the inside out — besides his award-winning fiction he is also the author of Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff — this note about Richard Butner’s The Adventurists:
“Richard Butner has taught me so much about the art of short fiction, and The Adventurists is an essential travelers’ guide to packing a small space with all the wit, craft, invention and heart needed for the journey. Thank you, Richard Butner — once again!”
— Andy Duncan, World Fantasy Award-winning author of An Agent of Utopia
Full of love and pain
Tue 16 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Isabel Yap| Posted by: Gavin
Isabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever gets a shout out in this Book Riot very solid list of Out of This World SFF Short Story Collections:
Last but not least, this is another collection that mixes the magical and the horrific. It is full of urban legends, Filipino folklore, and immigrant tales that explore the lives of women and girls. Yap’s unique voice is oft-praised for a reason — her stories are unique and lyrical. Full of love and pain. They also include things like ghosts, vampires, androids, and elementals to name a few. Watch out especially for “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Good Girls,” and the heartbreaking “Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” which talks about the Philippine drug war.
Every reader pulls different favorites from a collection — for instance this reader highlighting Asphalt, River, Mother, Child. I’d like to highlight the three stories that appear in Never Have I Ever for the first time, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Syringe,” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls.”
“Syringe” — as the title promises — is a short sharp shock while the two other stories are much longer, albeit very different. They’re both stories about friendship, love, and magic but while the first is a sweetly seductive story the second is a much darker story that will stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.
Hot Chocolate
Fri 12 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., chocolate, fundraiser| Posted by: Gavin
Me & our kid have just signed up again for the annual Hot Chocolate Run Walk fundraiser for Safe Passage. Is it true we only walk a couple of miles on a cold December morning so that we will get a mug of hot chocolate. No? No! We raises the money for the programs and we get hot chocolate. Win? Win!
We’ve been doing this fundraiser for the last few years — except 2020, which must have been virtual. I can barely remember although I just checked and Ursula raised $585 which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who donated for that. Ursula has turned into a powerhouse fundraiser over the years — I am so glad she is older and I do not have to carry her part of the way anymore. Little does she know that soon she’ll have to carry me.
Anyway, back to posts about books and supple chains (pretty sure that’s what’s all over the news), and thanks again for support in the past and any and all donations for Safe Passage are welcome, thank you!
Holiday Deadlines 2021
Wed 3 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., holiday, housekeeping, shipping, shipping news, usps| Posted by: Gavin
Time for our annual posting of the USPS Holiday Shipping Deadlines.
I usually post these later but you may have seen in the news that all the manufacturers are expecting holiday shipping to be slow, more expensive, and unreliable this year. So far our experience at Book Moon has proven that to be correct. If you can order early for the holidays, go for it!
As usual, the Small Beer office will be closed from December 23, 2021 – January 3, 2022. However, we can still get books to you because what we most want to do, book-wise, is get books to readers:
- Weightless Books is always there, 100% solid, 100% independent with DRM-free ebooks in the format of your choice. They can also be sent as gifts on the date you specify.
- How about just any about old ebook in any genre? Got them here.
- Audiobooks: we have them. (I love Libro.fm — it’s very simple to use and they have pretty much everything.)
- Bookshop can ship books and toys to you or direct to your family and friends. We’re always adding book recs there.
- Book Moon will be open.
So here are the last (domestic) order dates for Small Beer Press. (International.) Along with a reminder that orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.
And this year this annual reminder should probably just be bolded:
Media Mail parcels are the last ones to go on trucks. If the truck is full, Media Mail does not go out until the next truck. And if that one’s full, too . . . it could be very late in December before there’s space. So, if you’d like to guarantee pre-holiday arrival, please add Priority Mail:
| Domestic Mail Class/Product | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Media Mail (estimate, not guaranteed) | Dec. 5 |
| First Class Mail (LCRW/chapbooks) | Dec. 17 |
| Priority Mail | Dec. 18 |
| Priority Mail Express | Dec. 23 |
Here are the books we published this year:
Trifecta
Tue 2 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
Dropping today like a bear into a bookshop near you today is Elizabeth Hand’s third Cass Neary novel, Hard Light — Cass is in England, there’s murder, photography, bad behaviour (UK spelling this time, of course) and now all three have matching covers. If winter is coming down on you like a henge stone tipping over in a thousand-year storm these are the books to step into and escape.
TL;DR?
riveting tour-de-force . . . mysterious death . . . Helsinki . . . stunning images . . . Reykjavik . . . corpse . . . vortex . . . ancient myth . . . betrayal, vengeance . . . Icelandic wilderness.
Here’s a picture of all three of them on the bench in Book Moon where all 3 of them are sitting on the shelf looking beautiful and appropriately scary. Come by or order them online today!
Hard Light
Tue 2 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731920 | ebook · 9781618731937
Third in the Cass Neary series: Generation Loss · Available Dark · Hard Light
Punk photographer Cass Neary, “one of noir’s great anti-heroes” (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love), rages back in the series that began with Generation Loss and Available Dark. Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.
Only Quinn doesn’t show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party’s host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.
Forced to run Mallo’s contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England’s Land’s End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history―if she survives.
Strobe-lit against an apocalyptic background of rock and roll, rave culture, fast drugs and transgressive photography, Hard Light continues the breathless, breathtaking saga of Cassandra Neary, “an anti-hero for the ages. We’d follow Cass anywhere, into any glittery abyss, and do.” [Megan Abbot, author of The Fever]
Watch: Elizabeth Hand & Hannah Pittard & Library of Congress Book Festival
Elizabeth Hand presents Hard Light and Hannah Pittard presents Listen to Me in a panel discussion on suspense thrillers with Maureen Corrigan from NPR at the 2016 Library of Congress Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Reviews
“Hand’s supernaturally inflected Cass Neary crime novels make mincemeat out of the assumption—still held by many an unwary reader—that mysteries are mere diversions, designed to pass an empty hour and then be forgotten. No way that’s true of Hard Light: This third novel in the Cass Neary series fades away as stubbornly as a bloodstain.” — Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
“Nerve-jangling and addictive, Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light offers up a signature Cass Neary tale of moral ambivalence, keen betrayal and a dark lushness that leaps off the page. And with Cass―relentless in her dangerous curiosity, her ruthless art of survival―Hand has created an anti-hero for the ages. We’d follow her anywhere, into any glittery abyss, and do.” —Megan Abbott
“Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels, rightly praised for their icy tension and remarkable darkness, are threaded, like the best of punk in any medium, on a bloodied yet admirably stubborn humanism.” —William Gibson
“As a huge mystery and noir buff, I love Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels―they’re tough-minded, beautifully written, and unique. One of the best series out there. In Hard Light, Hand has created another fascinating puzzle―and another instant classic. If you’re a fan of intelligent page-turners, this one’s for you.” —Jeff Vandermeer
“Brutal, elegant, rich and strange, Hard Light is noir at it’s very best. This fast paced marvel of a book beats with the exultant energy of Punk rock and hums with the mysterious beauty of a Delphic hymn. Elizabeth Hand is not only one of the great American novelists, her influence on a generation has changed the face of Literature. This novel will haunt your dreams.” —Cara Hoffman, author of So Much Pretty and Be Safe I Love You
“Brilliant! A punk-scene runaway train. Welcome to Liz Hand. Buy this book.” —Sarah Langan, author of The Missing and The Keeper
“Elizabeth Hand is quite simply one of our best living writers. Her Cass Neary books are the ne plus ultra of modern noir, and Hard Light is the best one far: A riveting story that gets going at nosebleed pace and never slows down, anchored by the voice of the iconic Cass Neary, the greatest main character in modern detective fiction. I never knew I had a thing for Scandinavian punk rock noir until Liz Hand showed me what’s up. Now I want more.” —Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game and Midnight Picnic
“Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light is a pitch-perfect punk noir that makes a speed-fueled, mad-dash tour through an avant garde underbelly London and the lost landscape of rural England. It’s about the lost, the heartbreakingly ephemeral, and the melancholy timelessness of art and love and murder. It’s a tour de force. It’s a great goddamn book. If you haven’t met Cass Neary yet, do so before you get a well-deserved steel-toe to the knee.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep
“Beloved scrapper, fight-picker, and trouble-finder Cass Neary returns for another installment in Elizabeth Hand’s gorgeous, searing, speed-fueled bender of a series. Both fearless and vulnerable, heroic and haunted, Neary is a heroine like no other: a punk-rock valkyrie whose fierce intelligence and harrowing quests, rendered in Hand’s flawless, ice-clear prose, have redefined a genre. Hard Light is Hand at her best, and I cannot think of any higher praise.” —Sarah McCarry, author of The Metamorphoses Trilogy
About the Author
Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 44
Sat 30 Oct 2021 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
December 2021. 64 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732033
Who is ready for the fourty-eleventh issue of LCRW? It has stories, poems, a cooking column.
Cometh the hour
cometh the zine
but wait
it is written
that a zine
must sometimes be delay’d
Reviews
“All are very well written.” — Paula Guran, Locus
“Read it slowly and savor the language.” — Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
fiction
ArLynn Leiber Presser, “Napier’s Constant”
James Blakey, “The Last Mission”
Kate Francia, “A Minor Demon in Adams B-12”
Jen Sexton-Riley, “All I’ve Ever Learned from Love”
Laurie McCrae, “A Kindling”
Richard Butner, “Holderhaven”
James Moran, “A Story Isn’t a Story Until it’s Heard by Someone Else”
poetry
Brady Rhoades, Three Poems
Ben Corvo, The Slipper Ships
nonfiction
Raymond J. Barry, “I Had a Meeting Then with My Agents”
Nicole Kimberling, “Hot & Cold: Meatballs & Mash”
Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 44, December 2021. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732033. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is (usually) published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. twitter.com/smallbeerpress · Printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Subscriptions: $24/4 issues. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c. Contents © 2021 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration “Mother Cat” © 2021 by Ashley Wong (ashlwong.com). Thank you authors, artists, and readers. Celebrating! Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria appearing on NPR’s 50 Favorite SF&F Books of the Past Decade; Kim Scott’s Taboo receiving a Kate Challis Ruth Adeney Koori Award (RAKA) commendation; and Vandana Singh being selected as a Climate Imagination Fellows by ASU’s Center for Science. Petra Mayer, RIP. Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above.
About the Authors
Raymond J. Barry’s career began during the sixties and seventies when he became a member of three of New York City’s major, avant-garde theater companies: the Living Theater, the Open Theater, and the Wooster Group. He also performed in numerous productions both Off Broadway and Broadway, including two dozen productions at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. After twenty-three years of New York theater, he embarked upon his film career, performing approximately fifty major films and dozens of television roles, including Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon; Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July; Neil Burger’s Interview with the Assassin; Falling Down; Flubber, and, of course Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, directed by Jake Kasden, among many others. He also played roles in dozens of television series, highlighted by his six-season role as Arlo on the FX Series, Justified. He is the author of a memoir, Never a Viable Alternative, and a volume of plays, Mother’s Son and Other Plays, and his paintings can be viewed on his website, raymondjbarry.org.
James Blakey lives in the Shenandoah Valley where he writes mostly full-time. His story “The Bicycle Thief” won a Derringer Award. When James isn’t writing, he can be found on the hiking trail—he’s climbed forty of the fifty US state high points—or bike-camping his way up and down the East Coast. Find him at JamesBlakeyWrites.com.
Richard Butner’s story “Holderhaven” was first published in Crimewave and was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. His first collection, The Adventurists: Stories will be published in early 2022. He has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, and Urban Garden Performing Arts. His nonfiction, on topics ranging from computers to cocktails to architecture, has appeared in IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, The News & Observer, Triangle Alternative, and Southern Lifestyle. He lives in North Carolina, where he runs the annual Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference. He and Harry Houdini have used the same trapdoor.
Kate Francia is a writer in the New York area. Her stories have appeared in Electric Lit, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Speculative Fiction. You can find her at katefrancia.com.
Nicole Kimberling has only just now started cooking dinner for guests again after almost two years without offering anyone except her wife a plate of food. She’s barely able to contain her excitement about it long enough to function in her day job as editor of Blind Eye Books. She also written several novels and even an audio drama podcast called “Lauren Proves Magic is Real!” which, like her column in this zine, is also about food and cooking—just on the supernatural level.
Too restless for his own good, Laurie McCrae is a Canadian immigrant to Scotland by way of England and Ireland. He lives by the sea with his partner and their young son.
James Moran is a professional astrologer and author who regularly publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His published work can be found at jamesmoran.org and he can be found on instagram @astrologyjames.
ArLynn Leiber Presser comes from a long line of writers, including notable science fiction and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber who devised the first modern Dungeons & Dragons game. She is the author of thirty-seven books, almost all romances. The most recent is This One Last Palmer’s Kiss which combines elements of true love, phlebotomy, guns, and otherworldly murderous intentions.
Brady Rhoades’ work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Antioch Review, Faultline, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, William & Mary Review, and other publications. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. Rhoades is a journalist who works and lives in Fullerton, California.
Jen Sexton-Riley’s short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, on Cape Noir Radio Theater, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and she writes a monthly comedy/horror advice column, Dear Agony, for the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. She can be found at jensextonriley.com, on Twitter @sextonfleur, and on Instagram @jensextonriley.
Soaked in Myth
Wed 27 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jon Langford, Robert Wexler| Posted by: Gavin
We are happy to announce a new novel — Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Silverberg Business, coming in trade paperback and ebook in 2022 — and reveal the cover today. The cover art is by a long time favorite of ours, musician and artist Jon Langford, whose art is a perfect fit for this novel of 19th-century Texas where everything is weirder than it first seems.
We have long admired Robert’s stories since we first published his story “Suspension” in the eighth issue of LCRW. One of the early readers of the novel, Daryl Gregory, author of Revelator, had this to say:
“The Silverberg Business hits like a hurricane—there’s strangeness and beauty on every page. The novel is that rare thing, a weird western that’s truly weird, set in a Texas that’s simultaneously gritty, violent, and real, yet soaked in myth. Don’t miss this.”
There’ll be lots more posted about it before, on, and after the publication date, August 22, 2022, and in the meantime, hey, Jon Langford!
Meet the new boss
Mon 25 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin
Quite different from the old boss. Cass Neary, allergic to bosses, sensitive as a brick through a window, deeply intimate with the relationship between light and dark and the photography of same, is coming back. Hard Light comes out on November 2.
Early Adventurer Says
Thu 21 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
Here’s an excuse to post the near-final cover of Richard Butner’s forthcoming collection — John Kessel sent us this report from perusing The Adventurists:
“Richard Butner’s stories are funny, scary, personal, dispassionate, satirical, and heartfelt, if those incompatible adjectives can be assembled to describe the same work. He writes about the subtle losses we suffer (often without noticing) as we get older, about love and loyalty, about how the past is never completely past and can come sweeping back over you at the slightest opportunity like a tidal wave, so you’d better be ready lest you drown.”
Ready to adventure but don’t want to wait until February? There are 10 copies to be had on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers here.
Beginning the adventure
Thu 23 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
Next year we’re looking forward to publishing The Adventurists, a collection of stories by a long time favorite writer, Richard Butner. Butner’s stories have been published in Interfictions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Crimewave, Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic, SciFiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, When the Music’s Over, and Strange Horizons among others.
We’ve sent advance copies to booksellers and more are going out to a few readers and reviewers every week. For those who like electronic hunting and gathering you can now download or request it on Edelweiss.
I love to hear what other readers think of the books and am happy to share a couple of early reactions:
“A Richard Butner story is an invitation to discovery alongside his characters. It’s a left turn off of reality’s highway and into its old business district: defiantly shabby, casually weird, and occasionally surreal, perfect in every grounding detail. Every story zigs when you expect it to zag. You only think you know where they are going, but it turns out you are on the same adventure as the protagonist, discovering as you go that the world is stranger than it was the minute before, and the minute before that. Well worth the journey.”
— Sarah Pinsker, author of We Are Satellites
“At last, one of the contemporary masters of the uncanny and darkly humorous, Richard Butner, has his stories in one place where we can get at them. With a toe (just a toe) in the literary pool, and the rest of him splashing happily in the spec fic/sci-fi/surreal swimming hole, Butner’s tales deal in the deadly habits of nostalgia, and the surprises waiting for the wistful and the obsessive whose march forward obliges a look backward. Linkean, Barthelmean, Saundersean . . . hm, okay, these guys do NOT lend themselves to sonorous adjectivization but, nonetheless, they’ll have to welcome a new storyteller beside them on the shelf.”
— Wilton Barnhardt, author of Emma Who Saved My Life and Lookaway, Lookaway
Cass Neary Dark Mode Now Available
Mon 13 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
This month we are putting out our first paperback edition of Elizabeth Hand’s second Cass Neary novel, Available Dark — available in paperback and ebook now at your favorite bookstores. The ebook wasn’t connected to the print book because I missed the new switch added to the massive flowchart of How To Publish A Book. Oops. It’s up there and should be connected by Thursday or later. Will it matter to anyone but me? Don’t know.
I sometimes find it hard to find the right words to recommend these books because Cass Neary is such a walking car crash — although that’s not right as it doesn’t capture her relentless forward-moving energy. (So maybe it’s more like she’s always crashing in the same car.) If she looks back she might turn into a pillar of salt (or something slightly more illegal) and blow away so she is always moving, almost on the run, looking forward for a place where she won’t be surrounded by and immersed in the damage she can see on some people. Well, no such luck this time, Cass.
Available Dark immediately follows Generation Loss as Cass takes on a photo authentication assignment and leaves the US for Helsinki (what, no Covid fit-to-fly test?) and then goes onto Reykjavik. It’s beautiful up there in the Iceland, but for Cass and others, it’s getting deadly.
Hand will be down in DC this Saturday as part of the 20201 National Book Festival for this event celebrating the new paperback edition of the 4th book in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners (which I think comes out this month):
Live Event (virtual link to come)
September 18, 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT
Elizabeth Hand, author of The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland), and Alex Michaelides, author of The Maidens (Celadon), discuss their new books with NPR Books editor Petra Mayer.
A direct link to the virtual event will be available here closer to the date of the Festival. Attendees may register during the event to submit questions for the live Q&A at the end.
Too Too Solid Paper
Fri 10 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
Here’s a fun one: do you work at a lit nonprofit and like getting boxes of free Small Beer books? Email us!
For a limited time Small Beer Press is offering donations of mixed boxes of books to literary nonprofits. Email us at info@smallbeerpress.com if you’re interested.
— Surely Jackson (@haszombiesinit) September 10, 2021
Available Dark
Tue 7 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731906 | ebook · 9781618731913
Second in the Cass Neary series.
Generation Loss · Available Dark · Hard Light
Elizabeth Hand’s writing honors include the Shirley Jackson Award, the James Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and many others. Now, this uniquely gifted storyteller brings us a searing and iconoclastic crime novel, in which photographer Cass Neary, introduced in the underground classic Generation Loss, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of crime in Scandinavia’s coldest corners.
As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. In Available Dark, the eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.
Reviews & Praise
“Available Dark works well as a thriller, but it’s Cass who makes the book extraordinary. It’s rare to find a strong female character – especially a middle-aged one — who likes sex and drinking and drugs and doesn’t feel the need to apologize about it. Eight pages into the book she’s offered some crystal meth. She takes it. Why the hell not? Neither she nor the narrator blinks. There’s nothing coy or exhibitionistic about it, it’s just who she is.” — Time Magazine
“In this brilliant sequel to Hand’s acclaimed literary thriller, Generation Loss (2007), Cassandra Neary, “a burned out, aging punk with a dead gaze,” who subsists largely on alcohol and speed, confronts darkness nearly beyond her comprehension. . . . A flash of incandescence counters final threats of death, and the all-encompassing darkness is leavened by a glimmer of hope. Stunning.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Norwegian collector Anton Bredahl, an admirer . . . offers Neary a tidy sum to fly to Helsinki to give her opinion on some photos he’s thinking of purchasing. She finds herself blown away by the photographer’s technique, notwithstanding the grim subject matter—corpses. The bloody aftermath of the assignment places Neary in grave danger as she confronts a significant figure from her past. The scenes of violence advance the plot while helping the reader to understand Hand’s uncompromisingly compromised main character.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Buy this book!” — Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde
“Tense, compelling, and beautiful.” — Christopher Farnsworth, author of Blood Oath
“Available Dark is dark stuff indeed. . . . This book disturbs and delights.” — Paul Doiron, author of The Poacher’s Son
“I hate modern fiction; it usually sucks. Available Dark is the exception to my rule. It is wonderfully depressing—the locations, the characters, the mood, the murders. It’s so well written, it reads true. I can think of no higher compliment.” — Legs McNeil, cofounder of Punk magazine
About the Author
Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books.
50 of the Best
Fri 20 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin
We’re delighted to see Sofia Samatar’s two Olondria novels included in NPR’s big fun list — how many have you read?
We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade
In Olondria, you can smell the ocean wind coming off the page, soldiers ride birds, angels haunt humans, and written dreams are terribly dangerous. “Have you ever seen something so beautiful that you’d be content to just sit and watch the light around it change for a whole day because every passing moment reveals even more unbearable loveliness and transforms you in ways you can’t articulate?” asks judge Amal El-Mohtar. “You will if you read these books.”
Which reminds me it was also on a big list last year: Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time
“This slowly-unraveling, exquisitely-detailed novel made the poet Sofia Samatar a World Fantasy Award winner and a Nebula Award finalist. It follows Jevick, a young writer who is obsessed with the fantastical, distant world of Olondria, where his father is a merchant. But when Jevick is called there after he inherits the family business, he becomes haunted by a ghost—and is unwittingly pulled into Olondria’s power struggle. The novel unfolds in waves of A Game of Thrones-level twists, all while its fantastical world-building pulls from South Asian, Middle Eastern and African cultures to offer a welcome departure from Eurocentric fantasy.”
Vandana Singh, Climate Imagination Fellow
Tue 17 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., climate change, Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin
I was delighted to see via Locus that Vandana Singh (author of Ambiguity Engines among others) is one of 4 new Climate Imagination Fellows, hosted by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The fellowship “seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world.”
I have Xia Jia’s collection from the Clarkesworld Kickstarter but the other 2 writers are new to me:
- Libia Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City. She writes speculative fiction as well as nonfiction and criticism about science fiction and fantastic literature. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian and Portuguese. She is one of the co-founders of the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, with a special focus on science fiction; and Mexicona: Imagination and Future, a series of Spanish-language conversations about the future and speculative literature from Mexico and other planets. She was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for the bilingual and bicultural anthology “A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia.” After that, she was so excited that she edited “A Timeline in Which We Don’t Go Extinct,” a bilingual anthology that is also a video game, which is free to download and play. She edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine “Strange Horizons,” published in November 2020.
- Xia Jia is a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, a city in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. Seven of her short stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. She has published a fantasy novel, “Odyssey of China Fantasy: On the Road” (2009), and four collections of science fiction stories: “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” (2012), “A Time Beyond Your Reach” (2017), “Xi’an City Is Falling Down” (2018), and “A Summer Beyond Your Reach” (2020), her first collection in English. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Nature and Clarkesworld magazine. Her nonfiction academic collection, “Coordinates of the Future: Discussions on Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Globalization,” was published in 2019. She is also involved in science fiction research, translation, screenwriting, editing and teaching creative writing and is currently working on a new science fiction book, titled “Chinese Encyclopedia.”
- Hannah Onoguwe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies “Imagine Africa 500” (2016), from Pan African Publishers, and “Strange Lands Short Stories” (2020), from Flame Tree Press. Her work has appeared in publications including Adanna, The Drum Literary Magazine, Omenana, Brittle Paper, The Stockholm Review and Timeworn Literary Journal. In 2014, “Cupid’s Catapult,” her collection of short stories, was one of 10 manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She won the ANA Poetry Competition in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ibadan and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Jos. She works at a software company, providing support for the Nigeria Immigration Service.
- Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” (2014) and “Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories” (2018), the second of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2014, she traveled to the Alaskan North Shore to create a case study on climate change for undergraduate education as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Her work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis is part of a forthcoming volume from UNESCO, “Charting an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Radical, Transformative Change in the Midst of Climate Breakdown.” Her short fiction has been widely published, including the short story “Widdam,” part of the interdisciplinary climate-themed collection “A Year Without a Winter” (2019). She was born and brought up in New Delhi and now lives near Boston.
It is quite an exciting program. The fellows will write short fiction, short flash fictions, and essays and so on to be collected in a Climate Action Almanac next year. They also will be doing workshops around the world including the countdown summit to COP 26 in Scotland later this year.
Congratulations to Vandana and all the Fellows. Looking forward to seeing what they do.
Read Liyana on Lithub
Mon 16 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin
Lithub just dropped an excerpt from Zen Cho’s story “Liyana” — read it in the book or check it out here.
Recent notes about the book can be found in the infinite pages of Bustle
“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”
and Buzzfeed:
“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”
Here, There, and Everywhere
Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
I’ve been looking forward to this day for a while as it’s the publication day for our expanded edition of Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad. The book was originally published a few years ago and was a co-winner of the Crawford Award. I hadn’t read it until more recently when it came across my desk with nine additional stories including the Hugo Award winner — and such a good story! — “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.”
We were a bit late with getting the cover finalized but when it came in from Wesley Allsbrook we were over the moon, what a cracker! The book is about as much fun as can be with the whole gamut of stories, running from here, there, to everywhere.
The book is available everywhere in print, audio, and ebook. Dive in!
Spirits Abroad
Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 352 pages · $17 · 9781618731869 | ebook · 9781618731876
2nd printing: December 2022
LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize winner
Locus Award finalist
A new expanded edition of Zen Cho’s award-winning debut collection.
Nineteen sparkling stories that weave between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead. Spirits Abroad is an expanded edition of Zen Cho’s Crawford Award winning debut collection with twelve added stories including Hugo Award winner “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian. A teenage pontianak struggles to balance homework, bossy aunties, first love, and eating people. An earth spirit gets entangled in protracted negotiations with an annoying landlord, and Chang E spins off into outer space, the ultimate metaphor for the Chinese diaspora.
Read an interview on Electric Lit: On Writing Fantasy Inspired by Malaysian Chinese Folklore
Read a story: 七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)
Reviews & Praise
“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”
— Bustle
“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”
—Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed
“The first iteration of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad came out a few years ago, but this new collection is bigger and bolder, including the delightful ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ which won a Hugo Award.”
— Washington Post
“The most stylistically adventurous, even experimental stories are included in the final section, ‘Elsewhere’, in which supernatural figures may be the main characters – a minor earth spirit narrates ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote’, while a tricksterish Monkey King confronts a quite traditional Faerie Queen in ‘Monkey King, Faerie Queen’. My favorite story here is also the only one in the book which hints at science fiction. In ‘The Four Generations of Chang E’, the title character escapes a nightmarish, dying Earth by winning a lottery to migrate to a moon colony, where she learns to live with moon rabbits and eventually has herself surgically altered into a Moonite with ‘long, ovoid eyes.’ She never escapes family responsibilities, though, and, after her mother dies, returns to Earth with the ashes. There she gains an insight that seems to haunt several of Cho’s stories, including perhaps Black Water Sister: ‘Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.’ The tension on that thread of narrative, which adds subtle meaning to the title Spirits Abroad, is what gives Cho’s short fiction, even at its wittiest, a kind of haunting – and haunted – sensibility.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
“Highly recommended for those interested in well-written fantasy fiction outside of the post-Tolkien mold.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Powerful but subtle magic woven into the fabric of intricate worlds make Cho a sure favorite for readers of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A collection of speculative stories that play on Malaysian folklore and fantasy tropes with humor and compassion. . . . The stories are told with the precise and almost sparse voice of fairy tales. . . . the collection’s most moving stories harness seamless worldbuilding, intriguing character development, and thematic complexity. A swath of delightful and intricate stories from a wildly inventive storyteller.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Sorcerer to the Crown author Zen Cho writes stories that slide easily between genres, and characters who hop nimbly between our world of banal bustle and a supernatural world that often seems just as annoying. This collection of ten stories, originally published in 2014 by Buku Fixi and the joint winner of 2015’s IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, is now being re-issued by Small Beer Press, and gives us new takes on ancient lore—especially the tales of Malaysia.
“A vampiric teen pontianak finds it hard to keep up with her schoolwork and her constant need to feed upon people. The moon goddess Chang E heads further into outer space—but is it in a spirit of adventure or to get away from Earth? An elderly Datin looks back at her failed love affair with an orang bunian, a type of spirit who would normally favor a deep forest or mountain home to avoid humans. Cho’s stories look at the intersection of those mundane and uncanny worlds—and the ways life among the humans can drive the spirit to distraction.”
— , The Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of 2021
“Zen Cho’s stories manage the rare and precious feat of being smart, witty, wise, horrific, and comforting all at once.” — Kate Elliott author of Unconquerable Sun
“An excellent collection.” — Abigail Nussbaum, Strange Horizons
Table of Contents
Here
The First Witch of Damansara
The Guest
The Fish Bowl
First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia
Odette
The House of Aunts
Balik Kampung
There
One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland
起狮, 行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)
七星鼓 (Seven Star Drum)
The Mystery of the Suet Swain
Prudence and the Dragon
The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again
Elsewhere
The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote
Monkey King, Faerie Queen
Liyana
The Terra-cotta Bride
The Four Generations of Chang E
Praise for Zen Cho’s Books:
“An enchanting cross between Georgette Heyer and Susannah Clarke, full of delights and surprises. Zen Cho unpins the edges of the canvas and throws them wide.” — Naomi Novik, New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education
“A warm, funny debut novel by a brilliant new talent.” — Charles Stross, award-winning author of the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series
“Fabulous! If you like Austen or Patrick O’Brian, or magic and humor like Susanna Clarke, or simply a very fun read, you will really, really, enjoy this!” — Ann Leckie, Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of Ancillary Justice
“Zen Cho’s SORCERER TO THE CROWN is inventive, dangerous, brilliant, unsettling, and adorable, all at the same time. It shatters as many rules as its characters do. Historical Britain will never be the same again, and I can’t wait for the next book.” — Courtney Milan, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author
“A deliciously true tale of politics and power in a charming, cruel world — it demands and deserves to be read again and again. Cho has humor and flair to match Pratchett and Heyer plus her own marvelous style.” — Karen Lord, award-winning author of The Best of All Possible Worlds
“A delightful and enchanting novel that uses sly wit and assured style to subvert expectations while it always, unfailingly, entertains. I loved it!” — Kate Elliott, author of the Spiritwalker series
“Magic, manners and dragons in Regency England — this alone would be awesome, but Zen Cho adds a veneer of comment on English colonial politics …. Like a mix of Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and all its own thing. Glorious.” — Aliette de Bodard, award-winning author of Obsidian and Blood and The House of Shattered Wings
“A sheer delight from beginning to end. Cho perfectly conjures the opulence, absurdity and conflict of the period.” — Samantha Shannon, author of The Bone Season
“A delightful follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown! Cho applies her characteristic wit and charm to a tale of cursed sisters — a story I found as enchanting as her Faerie Court.” — S.A. Chakraborty, author of City of Brass
“Cho continues to confront class and gender roles in an alternate Regency England while showcasing entertaining prose and characters. A delightful historical-fantasy novel that will capture readers in its layered story line.”—Booklist
“Reading the clever deployment of weaponized manners never gets old; in Cho’s charming prose, The True Queen weaves a very pleasant spell indeed.” — NPR
“A winning combination of magic and thrill set in an alternative version of Regency England.” — Washington Post
“A captivating debut that, aside from examining both gender and racial prejudice, tells an entertaining story with wit and consummate skill.” — The Guardian (UK)
“Fans of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will flock to this historical fantasy debut for its shared setting and be rewarded with an exciting story and nuanced, diverse characters who make this novel soar on its own merits.” — Library Journal (starred review; debut of the month)
“Combines magic and the Regency period in the manner of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but adds an Austenian piquancy . . . Cho’s debut has much to recommend it, particularly its implicit critique of colonialism and its frothy good humour.”— Financial Times
“A classic, gently barbed upper-crust comedy mixed with magical thrills, modern social consciousness, and a hint of political intrigue. A decidedly promising start.”— Kirkus Reviews
“Zacharias brings to mind another orphaned young wizard whose combination of grit and melancholy captured readers’ hearts, and ingenious, gutsy Prunella simply shines.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Sorcerer to the Crown exceeds expectations. It’s a very entertaining and deeply enjoyable novel—and if this is what Cho gives us for her debut, I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does next.” — Locus
About the book
“The original print edition of Spirits Abroad was published by Fixi Novo in 2014. It was also released as an ebook containing extra stories and author’s notes. The Small Beer Press edition is an expanded edition published in August 2021, containing nine added stories including Hugo Award winner ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again’.”
Zen Cho is the author of Black Water Sister, the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad. She is a Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.
Cover by Wesley Allsbrook.
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