Free LCRW Ebook Subscriptions

Fri 12 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 33 cover - click to view full sizeWe’re celebrating moving to our new webhost, Dreamhost, with a special that will run all month:

Buy any ebook on our lovely DRM-free indie ebookstore WeightlessBooks.com between 12 a.m. February 1 and 11:59 p.m. February 29(!) 2016 and receive a free 4-issue LCRW subscription (worth $9.95!). If you’re already a subscriber, you will receive a 4-issue subscription extension. And if you buy an LCRW subscription, this will basically double it, but this offer applies to any ebook bought from this store this month.

(If you’d rather not receive this bonus, please email us, thank you.) The bonus LCRW subscription will be added to your Library in the first week of March.

Why? We had an awful experience at the end of the year when our previous webhost dropped all our sites for a whole week. When we asked about back ups, they said the back ups were in the same place as the actual site . . . and could not be reached. Which means they were nonfunctioning backups. Not impressive.

So now we have signed with Dreamhost who promise 99.9% or higher(!) levels of uptime and it is time to celebrate and thank all the readers who choose Weightless!

Here are some Small Beer bestsellers as a place to start:

  1. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Subscription(!)
  2. After the Apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh
  3. A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
  4. Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord
  5. Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison
  6. North American Lake Monsters: Stories, Nathan Ballingrud
  7. At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson
  8. Solitaire: a novel, Kelley Eskridge
  9. What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler
  10. Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Kate Wilhelm

The Chemical Wedding moves to

Thu 11 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Final typesetting after a second round of proofing. Jacob McMurray has designed a beautiful book, including using a suitably fabulous illustration by Theo Fadel for the cover. We should have the Kickstarter going in a couple of months and then a 400th anniversary trade paperback(!) edition available this autumn. Details will be here and here.


Joan Aiken giveaway

Thu 4 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

No, we don’t have Joan Aikens to give out, but we are giving away 5 advance copies of The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories on Goodreads!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The People in the Castle by Joan Aiken

The People in the Castle

by Joan Aiken

Giveaway ends February 12, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway


Networking the not a journal

Tue 2 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin


Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

Mon 1 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Hope you will consider backing this if you can!


New LCRW coming

Wed 27 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

It’s been all audio video with Ayize Jama-Everett‘s fab BCAF interview, Sofia Samatar’s SF Signal podcast interview, and Julie Day’s podcast of Mary Rickert’s “Cold Fires.”

So next month we’ll try and take it back to where it all began: the zine, in print!

I’ll post the table of contents soonish. The cover is by none other than Kathleen Jennings. There are excellent stories. There will not be blood. There will be poetry. There will not be political posturing. Wait, there may be. We may misspell the acronym: LCWR, CLWR, MEHH, WHUT, LWRW, WWLCD? (She’d marry another younger man, start a fannncy lit mag, join a hospital ship, get a tattoo, have some fun.)


2016 Best Fiction for Young Adults

Wed 13 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Archivist Wasp cover There’s a huge list of Best Fiction for Young Adults here and it includes Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Archivist Wasp. Yeah! Go librarians!

How is this book doing? The second printing is flying out so we’d better start working on the next printing (such happy words). But how will we fit all this on the cover??

Kirkus Reviews: Best Teen Books of 2015
Book Riot: Best of 2015
Buzzfeed: 32 Best Fantasy Novels of 2015
ABC Best Books for Young Readers Catalog
Flavorwire: The 10 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2015 So Far
LA Times Summer Reading
Locus Recommended Reading


Interview on Ploughshares

Tue 5 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Those lovely people who turned all their swords into ploughs interviewed Kelly and me. Read all about it here.

 

small beer press


A . . . website?

Sun 3 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

We’ve just spent a week or more with no website. It was surreal! Anyway, hello 2016!


A little more about Peter Dickinson

Fri 18 Dec 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

A great bio.From Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press: “We are immensely sorry to hear of Peter Dickinson’s death. Publishing his collection Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures was an honor and we considered ourselves very lucky to have been able to bring four more of his titles back into print in recent years. Working with Peter, who had published so many good books, won so many awards, worked with so many publishers, was nerve wracking at first but he was so calm, dry, and funny that he soon put us at ease. He will be much missed.”

From Peter Dickinson’s family: “We are devastated to have lost him, but very, very grateful to have known him. He gave us so much, in his love for us and his stories which inspired us. He has left us with many memories and we will treasure them all.”

From The Guardian: “He was admired for the originality and range of his stories and the variety of settings he explored in them.”

From The Telegraph: “Dickinson’s stories combined riveting plots with a deep historical awareness and insight. Philip Pullman observed that they carried “a charge of excitement, and a restless exploration of large ideas, which I find unfailingly thrilling. . . . Dickinson had an unusual gift for putting himself into the shoes of his youthful protagonists — imagining how it feels to be a missionary’s son, orphaned in the Boxer Rebellion and lost in the mountains of Tibet (Tulku, 1979); describing what it would be like to be a 13-year-old girl in an over-populated future dystopia, whose memory has been transplanted to the brain of a chimp (Eva, 1989); portraying the life of a child guerrilla in a fictional African country (AK, 1990) or a Byzantine slave boy, fleeing rampaging Huns in the company of a tame bear (The Dancing Bear, 1972). “It is not part of fiction’s job to tell the reader what to think,” he explained. “But it can be fiction’s job to show the reader how it feels, because that can only be done through the imagination.”

From The New York Times: “Mr. Dickinson’s appetite for arcane knowledge and his taste for unusual situations, often those from the past, made him a highly unpredictable genre writer. . . . Although well plotted, Mr. Dickinson’s mysteries appealed to readers looking for something besides ingenious clockwork mechanisms. As often as not, his puzzles offered an excuse to explore deeper human and scientific issues.”

From Publishers Weekly: “His eldest daughter Philippa, the former managing director of Random House Children’s Publishers U.K., shared this remembrance: “There are so many images I have of my father, but perhaps the one which shines brightest at this moment is of him at the wheel of the family car, driving us all somewhere — to visit relatives, perhaps. In the days before radios in cars, the amazing stories he would tell us all the way there, and all the way back, was our ‘in-car entertainment.’ It was an extremely effective way of keeping four lively children amused during a long journey,” she said. “Some of these stories eventually became the beginnings of books which were published. Others never made it. I vividly recall a hilarious space adventure with giant spiders that had us all, including Dad, in fits of laughter — luckily there were fewer cars on the roads in those days. It was brilliant — and he did eventually get it down on paper but somehow it never quite worked as well . . . If it wasn’t a story, it might be an epic poem that he had learned by heart as a child. He also read to us every night at bedtime and continued to do so until we were into our early teens.” ”

———

Peter’s family has suggested that rather than sending flowers, donations in Peter’s memory may be sent to his nominated charities: Save The Children; The Alzheimer’s Society; Medecins Sans Frontieres.

 


Peter Dickinson, R.I.P.

Thu 17 Dec 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

From the website of Peter Dickinson, 16 December 1927 – 16 December 2015:

It is with very great sadness that the death is announced of author and poet Peter Dickinson O.B.E. Peter died in Winchester on 16 December 2015 (his 88th birthday) after a brief illness. His family was by his side.

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson was born in Africa, but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and then earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for adults and children. He wrote almost sixty books and has been published in 53 languages around the world.

Amongst many other awards, Peter Dickinson has been nine times short-listed for the prestigious Carnegie medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice: Tulku (1979) and City of Gold (1980).

Peter Dickinson was also the first author to win the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger for two consecutive novels: Skin Deep (The Glass-sided Ant’s Nest) (1968), and A Pride of Heroes (The Old English Peepshow) (1969).

His books have been nominated for and won many awards, including: The Boston-Globe Horn Book Award; The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize; The Whitbread Children’s Fiction Prize; The Michael L. Printz Award.

A collection of Peter Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2009. His last book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Peter Dickinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. He has also served as chairman of the Society of Authors. He was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009.

Peter is survived by his four children from his first marriage, six grand-children and his second wife, author Robin McKinley.

Peter’s family has suggested that rather than sending flowers, donations in Peter’s memory may be sent to his nominated charities: Save The Children; The Alzheimer’s Society; Medecins Sans Frontieres.


Get cold

Wed 16 Dec 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

You Have Never Been Here cover - click to view full sizeDavid Abrams at the Quivering Pen included You Have Never Been Here on his list of Best Book Cover Designs of 2015:

Take a minute to admire that cover design. Notice how, through the magic of perspective, this woman seems to fly right at you with a pair of hands serving as wings. (The photo by Emma Powell is called ‘Angel.’) It’s the kind of off-putting, and yet beautiful, reaction one can get from reading Rickert’s fiction, short stories designed to scrape the skin from within.

It is weirdly warm in Western Massachusetts, many degrees above the norm, no snow on the ground — no real snow yet at all in fact, just as few of the lightest flurries one day and then nothing since — and people have been walking around without jackets. It is very strange, I hope it’s not the new norm. It seems odd to wish for cold weather but here in the northern hemisphere in mid December it’s what we’ve known for many years and unseasonal changes are getting more common.

So here’s a story from You Have Never Been Here about cold to remind me (weather-wise, at least!) what is to come.

“Cold Fires” by Mary Rickert:

It was so cold that daggered ice hung from the eaves with dangerous points that broke off and speared the snow in the afternoon sun, only to be formed again the next morning. Snowmobile shops and ski rental stores, filled with brightly polished snowmobiles and helmets and skis and poles and wool knitted caps and mittens with stars stitched on them and down jackets and bright-colored boots, stood frozen at the point of expectation when that first great snow fell on Christmas night and everyone thought that all that was needed for a good winter season was a good winter snow, until the cold reality set in and the employees munched popcorn or played cards in the back room because it was so cold that no one even wanted to go shopping, much less ride a snowmobile. Cars didn’t start but heaved and ticked and remained solidly immobile, stalagmites of ice holding them firm. Motorists called Triple A and Triple A’s phone lines became so congested that calls were routed to a trucking company in Pennsylvania, where a woman with a very stressed voice answered the calls with the curt suggestion that the caller hang up and dial again.

It was so cold dogs barked to go outside, and immediately barked to come back in, and then barked to go back out again; frustrated dog owners leashed their pets and stood shivering in the snow as shivering dogs lifted icy paws, walking in a kind of Irish dance, spinning in that dog circle thing, trying to find the perfect spot to relieve themselves while dancing high paws to keep from freezing to the ground.

It was so cold birds fell from the sky like tossed rocks, frozen except for their tiny eyes, which focused on the sun as if trying to understand its betrayal. read on


Winged Histories giveaway

Mon 7 Dec 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar

The Winged Histories

by Sofia Samatar

Giveaway ends December 16, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway


Always free US/Canada shipping

Wed 2 Dec 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

A reminder since we are getting lots of lovely orders: here’s a link to the holiday deadlines.

We have signed books available and will ship them until they’re gone:

Alan DeNiro · Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead

Eileen Gunn · Questionable Practices

Kelly Link · Stranger Things Happen

Benjamin Parzybok · Couch

Geoff Ryman · The King’s Last Song

Howard Waldrop · Horse of a Different Color

Howard Waldrop · Howard Who?

 


Howard Waldrop interview

Mon 30 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

I am swamped with Cyber Monday and Holiday Sale emails (I am unsubscribing to as many as I can!) and they weigh me down so much I can’t get it together to do our own promo. Hey, it’s the holidays soon and, you know, we publish books, and, argh!

So here’s to one of our authors speaking for himself: this past weekend at Malvern Books in Austin, TX, Brad Denton interviewed Howard Waldrop “on JFK, George R. R. Martin ‘and stuff’.”

During the interview — really a diverting conversation between old friends — Howard mentions that two of the stories in Howard Who? (“The Ugly Chickens” and “Mary Margaret Road-Grader“) plus “Night of the Cooters” have been turned into screenplays and will either be episodes in a TV show parts of an omnibus film produced by . . .  George R. R. Martin. Excited, yes I am. More exciting: we just bought a story by Howard for LCRW: a story that brings together Ben Hur, Truman Capote, Billy the Kid, “and stuff.” There’s only one Howard!

ETA: Longtime Waldrop readers (including my wife, Kelly, who introduced me to his stories!) will be happy to know that I talked to him recently and he is once again promising to get back to work on his much delayed novel The Moone World.


Are you writing like a person whose pen keeps the world alive?

Tue 24 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The question above comes from the pen of Mary Rickert, who unquestionably is keeping the world alive with her words. We’re publishing a new collection of stories by Mary today You Have Never Been Here and in writing this post I am frustrated that I have to put words in front of you at all as all of Mary’s are better and more worth your time.

“Gothic literature, diluted, over time, into its architecture of moors and castles, is actually an exploration of the human experience as cohesion of the beast and the divine.”

“I try to remember that in every culture, in every age, there were things believed as universally true that later were proven false. We are all victims of the illusion of our time. I try to look beyond the veil, and I’m sure I fail. I try to remember the veil exists.”

— from “Process as Photosynthesis” An Interview with Mary Rickert by Annie Bilancini on SmokeLong Quarterly.

You can also read Mary’s letter to a young writer on the Story Prize blog:

Dear Young Writer,
I know many people have told you to make the language invisible, but what if they are wrong? Consider the possibility that words are not mere instruments of description but tools of alchemy.

Of course you can read some of her stories online: World Fantasy Award winner “Journey into the Kingdom.”
“The Mothers of Voorhisville.” “You Have Never Been Here.”

This is Mary’s fourth book after publishing two collections and an amazing novel last year, The Memory Garden. Of herself she writes:

“Mary Rickert grew up in Wisconsin but moved to California as soon as she was eighteen. She still has fond memories of selling balloons at Disneyland and learning to boogie board in the ocean. Sometimes she would go to the beach early in the morning, before any one else was there, sit in the lifeguard’s tower and write poetry. After many years (and through the sort of “odd series of events” that describe much of her fiction) she got a job as a kindergarten teacher in a small private school for gifted children. She worked there for almost a decade before leaving to pursue her life as a writer. Her first novel, The Memory Garden was published in 2015. There are, of course, mysterious gaps in this account of her life and that is where the truly interesting stuff happened.”

I have no idea what went on in those mysterious gaps. I know she sold her first painting before her first story. I know that her stories have won awards. I know that when Mary writes a story I have no idea where it will go. I have no idea what the spaces will be. What the rhythms, the rhymes will be. I know I’ll have to get off this treadmill. Push aside the idea that I’ll get stuff done. Push aside the world as I know it. Step into the world as Mary sees it.


You Have Never Been Here

Tue 24 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $16 · 9781618731104 | ebook · 9781618731111
New and Selected Stories

None of this has ever happened. You haven’t either.

World Fantasy Award finalist
Shirley Jackson Award finalist
Locus Recommended Reading List

Locus interview.

Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.

Mary Rickert has long been an undiscovered master of the fantastic. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, received the Crawford and World Fantasy awards, and stories from this collection of new and selected work have received the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.

Read an interview.

Reviews

“Each protagonist deals with their own fantastical yet distinctly human interactions with love. In ‘Memoir of a Deer Woman” for example, when the protagonist hits a deer on New Years’ Eve, it is her relationship with her husband that holds the reader’s attention as impossible events and repercussions unfold.”
— Mary Kay McBrayer, BookRiot

“My favorite collection of the year – a voice that is chilly, sharply intelligent and quite unique.”
— Henry Farrell, Washington Monthly

“A few years ago Mary Rickert achieved the rare distinction of winning two World Fantasy Awards in one year, for a story and a collection. That story, ‘Journey into the Kingdom,’ is a highlight of this retrospective collection. . . . The strangeness of Rickert’s fiction is more than balanced by her acute insights into families and disturbed minds.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

“Reading a Mary Rickert story quite often is like sinking through layers of such worlds. We begin in one place, blink, and open our eyes to somewhere—something—else.”
— James Sallis, F&SF

“There are writers able to create stories where the world becomes a place full of magic and human life, with its joys and its sorrows, a wonderful ride across time and space, full of mystery and enchantment. Mary Rickert is one of those writers, endowed with a remarkable imagination and an extraordinary ability to mesmerize the readers with her spellbinding narrative style.”
— SFRevu

“You Have Never Been Here is stupid good. There’s no other way to say it. This collection of short stories is at once uniform and eclectic; the stories share threads—both thematic and aesthetic—that bind them together, but each story is clearly and uniquely its own thing. The book opens with the story of a woman slowly turning into a deer, a story that begs to be metaphorized but actually thrives better without the clunkiness of questions like “But what does her turning into a deer represent?” And this is true for many of the stories in Rickert’s collection: fantasy tales that at once ask the audience to find truth in them and at the same time question the nature of that truth. Reading this stories is an experience, and it’s one everyone should have. And buoying up each story is Rickert’s unbeatable prose. . . . I could go on about each of these stories. The way Rickert plays with form, always experimenting: in “Cold Fires,” she tells stories within the story, embedded narratives that, like a few of these pieces, draw on fairy tales and ricochet off one another. Or in “You Have Never Been Here,” the title story, how she messes with second person in a way that is at once creepy and fascinating. These stories stick with you after the reading, begging you to consider them further, to take another peek inside the book, to dig deeper into the characters and narrative. There’s so much to say about each one, but I’ll leave some of the mystery for you to discover on your own.”
— Hazel and Wren

“Rickert’s work, its superbly subtle handling of deepest human yearning for something to heal the howling void behind our increasingly demythologized world, shows the ineffable power—and value—of fantastical storytelling.”
— See the Elephant

“Rickert’s latest collection contains haunting tales of death, love, and loss. In stories that are imbued with mythology, beasts, and fantastical transformations, Rickert captures the fanciful quality of regret and longing. . . . Rickert’s blend of dark and whimsy is reminiscent of Angela Carter. Perfect for readers looking for something unique, melancholy, and fantastical.”
— Booklist

“Beautiful, descriptive prose enriches tales of ghosts, loss, and regret in this leisurely collection. . . . Fans of Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link will appreciate Rickert’s explorations of myth and memory.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Short stories about people haunted by loss and transformed by grief. Ghosts walk through this collection. Witches are rumored. People collect bones, sprout wings, watch their feet turn into hooves. Above all, people tell stories—stories that cast spells, stories that change the world. In “Journey into the Kingdom,” a tale about ghosts who walk out of the sea has a powerful effect on a young widower. In “Anyway,” a mother asks herself what she would sacrifice to save her son’s life. In the collection’s longest story, “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” a group of women are drawn together when they realize their newborn babies have something very strange in common. Not every piece sings, but those that do have a powerful, haunting effect. As the mother of a dead girl puts it in “The Chambered Fruit,” the best of these stories show how “from death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create,” how “this is what it means…to be alive.” Rickert’s (Holiday, 2010, etc.) writing is crystal-clear, moody, occasionally blood-chilling. Her characters maneuver through a world where strange, troubling transformations are possible, but they live and breathe on the page, fully human. The worlds Rickert creates are fantastical, but her work should appeal not just to fantasy fans, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told tale.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Mary Rickert’s latest collection, You Have Never Been Here, packs a punch with stories that are quietly devastating and haunting in their strange imagery.” — Campus Circle Holiday Booklist

Table of Contents

Memoir of a Deer Woman
Journey into the Kingdom
The Shipbuilder
Cold Fires [audio]
The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece
The Christmas Witch
Holiday
The Chambered Fruit
The Mothers of Voorhisville
You Have Never Been Here

Cover photo “Angel” © 2015 by Emma Powell.

Reviews of Mary Rickert’s writing:

“I’ve seldom read a book as gentle, and yet as powerful as The Memory Garden.”— io9.com

“The Memory Garden is a lovely book of women, friendship, sadness and healing, and it is genuinely uplifting. Like the garden of its title, this is a book to take in slowly, to spend time in, to wander through; you’ll likely find yourselves the better for it.”
— NPR

“This is a novel haunted by mortality — with people who died young, with people now old and dying, with ghosts. But it is often a joyful novel, a novel of life, forgiveness and good meals with friends and strangers.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Rickert writes with a blend of poetical language and dark suspense . . .” — Washington Post

”Best of all, in a brilliant alchemical turn, Rickert transforms the lead-weight problem of indecisive identities into storytelling gold in this bewitching marvel of a book.”
— BookPage

“A potent brew of guilty secrets and tragic histories, but also of enduring friendship and love. Add a pinch of the botanical. Serve on a luminous night faintly reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Eve. A totally charming, totally engaging story told by Rickert, a magus of the first order. Magic in every line.” — Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Rickert writes with a blend of poetical language and dark suspense… The Memory Garden is a tale of tragedy, hope and kinship.” — The Washington Post

“A wise portrayal of the way women relate to each other, of how communities deal with their outsiders, of how secrets are held among friends, with the strands of narrative united by the garden and its flowers. But it’s also a superb fantasy novel. The supernatural elements may be as carefully measured and restrained as in a Graham Joyce novel… but the magic is real.” —  Chicago Tribune

“Unwinds the magic and mystery of a mother and daughter and three old friends, all at the fragile juncture of truth and forgiveness. Rickert can build an audience that will marvel at her witchy talents.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With its fairy-tale qualities, this debut novel is sure to charm … Readers who enjoy the magical realism of novels by Sarah Addison Allen, Laura Esquivel, and Alice Hoffman will savor Rickert’s mesmerizing and magical novel of friendship and family.” – Library Journal

“Tiny fireballs shooting across the reader’s brain, delving into dark and scary parts of our imagination that other writers don’t reach. . . . Rickert’s writing is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, Connie Willis or Doris Lessing, writers who are unapologetically political and who use mythology as the underpinning to explore modern life. As with those writers, Rickert occasionally uses humor to heighten the darkness of her writing. But, in this collection at least, Rickert is very comfortably settled in the use of science fiction and fantasy to explore the lives of the outsiders and misfits who populate her work. All of this comes together in stories such as “Peace on Suburbia,” an odd Christmas tale about a family dealing with a grandparent’s Alzheimer’s, snowflakes that might be angels and the random suburban paranoia triggered by worries about who is knocking on the front door. Rickert has a satisfyingly vigorous imagination which scales from the smallest detail to the grandest conceit, and she corrals and controls it in an incredibly skilled manner.”
— BookPage

“Mary Rickert’s debut novel is absolutely stunning. An emotionally complex story bridges the divide between the past and the present, between generations, and between age-old friendships compromised by a web of secrets and lies. Be prepared to fall under this novel’s strange and sensuous spell.” – Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow

“Rickert has created a slew of magical and unforgettable characters that will steal readers’ breath away. This is a great story that must be devoured in one sitting.” — RT Book Reviews

About the Author

Mary Rickert has worked as kindergarten teacher, barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and in the personnel department of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She is the author of two collections and a novel, Locus Award winner The Memory Garden. She has a Masters of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Wisconsin. Find her online here.


Electric Lit: Diff’rent Strokes for Different Folks

Sat 21 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Yep, Ayize Jama-Everett has a great short personal essay on Electric Lit:

“Yo, Dudley a faggot!”

“What happened?” . . .

That’s what my childhood friend got out of the very special two-part episode of “The Bicycle Man” on Diff’rent Strokes. I’m going from memory, rather than re-watching the episode on YouTube because I want to talk about how the show impacted two black kids living in the city where the show itself took place. Diff’rent Strokes often put episodes in front of us we were supposed to watch as a family. But not all families are the same. . . .

Read it.


Win a free copy of You Have Never Been Here

Sat 14 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

You Have Never Been Here cover - click to view full sizeTor.com want to give you a fab book and all you have to do is go post a comment to enter!

What’s the book about?

Why, here’s a handy review in Booklist!

“Rickert’s latest collection contains haunting tales of death, love, and loss. In stories that are imbued with mythology, beasts, and fantastical transformations, Rickert captures the fanciful quality of regret and longing. . . . Rickert’s blend of dark and whimsy is reminiscent of Angela Carter. Perfect for readers looking for something unique, melancholy, and fantastical.”


It was never the Lovecraft award

Thu 12 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Dear H.P. Lovecraft fan who are upset that the World Fantasy Award statuette will no longer be Gahan Wilson’s bust of HPL: you have my sympathies. It’s hard to see the cultural assessment of someone you love and respect change as time passes.

But: being rude and insulting writers? That can stop now, thanks.

Winners returning the award seems a bit over the top to me — I just got one and I’m not giving it back! — especially as the HPL publishing biz seems to grow and grow and no one is saying don’t read his books. He’s taught all over the country and there are so many of his books out there that even if all his titles were . . .  by some eldritch and unspeakable pact . . . (sorry) taken out of print right now there are so many copies in used book stores there is no way people would stop reading him.

I’m curious what the new design will be, although I don’t envy the board the choice. But this was never the Lovecraft award, it’s the World Fantasy Award. Who knows: from now on it may change every year, every 40 years.

I’m proud of — and grateful to — everyone in the writing, reading, and publishing community who worked towards this change and for the World Fantasy Convention Board for recognizing the need for change.

Peace in our time!

Screen Shot 2015-11-12 at 12.29.40 PM

 


Quick thoughts on WFC 2015

Mon 9 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Buy this from Powell's!Holy bananas, that ended surprisingly well!

  • This is why I never write these things. There’s too much I’ll miss and that’s an hour I should have been napping after the weekend working working!
  • The book room was a huge, great well-lit space with tons of space for the crowds of eager readers ready to snap up hot hot books. Sadly said readers seemed to be seduced by Saratoga Springs’s lovely streets and great restaurants and mostly did not appear. Or they couldn’t get memberships or something. Darn it.
  • That said, Ninepin Press sold tons of copies of The Family Arcana from our table. People love Jed’s story-as-pack-of-cards.
  • Lovely restaurants: Karavalli (Indian, wow); Hattie’s (all the sides = dinner for this happy vegetarian); Four Seasons (very handy for a box lunch for still happy parent and child); Cantina (Mexican: can you sit 10 people with no reservation for Sunday lunch? No problem — nice, thank you!).
  • Out-of-con experiences: taking a 6-year-old to a con immediately changes everything. There are too many people, it’s chaotic, it’s an unfamiliar space — and, yes, that’s just me. But she made half a dozen books and met some friends so it was not all bad. And: hotel swimming pool, of course! Kid’s museum: high five for pre-arranged play dates! Another of course: the park. Hooray for finding the Triton’s pool and the statues of Pan, Dionysus, and the Maenads as well as leaves, man, leaves. You can do a lot with leaves and a bit of Greek mythology goes a long way.
  • Meanwhile: Gary K. Wolfe reviewed Mary Rickert’s new book You Have Never Been Here in the Chicago Tribune. All right!

The Three Ps:

  • Panels: they were epic! I suppose as I did not go to any, see out-of-con-experiences above, previously mentioned (and sometimes coldly abandoned) table in book room, and the theme was Epic Fantasy. There were some people I’d have loved to see on panels but I did not. C’est la vie.
  • People: it is great to see friends and meet people only known online or . . . once-were complete strangers. I had one meeting at the con with Ron Eckel of Cooke International who does a fab job of selling our books abroad (dammit, that reminds me I have a list of things I have to send him) and otherwise “relied” on happenstance, which worked out mostly ok but for everyone I did not actually see. Oops.
  • Parties: I got to two (er, I think), Kickstarter and Ellen Kushner et al’s Tremontaine, and they were both busy and well supplied, yay! The latter was such a happening that I ended up sitting on the floor outside chatting for a long, long while with many good people.

Also:

  • The art show was great! We got a tiny skull with crown papercut by Kathleen Jennings and a fantastic painting we’ve admired for years by Derek Ford.
  • I sneaked a galley of Sofia Samatar’s forthcoming novel The Winged Histories to one of the happiest people I know, Amal El-Mohtar. Yay!
  • Chatted with Jeffrey Ford and Christopher Rowe. Why pick those two out of the hundreds? Because we like to transmute art into commerce and 2016 will see Jeff’s new collection A Natural History of Hell coming out and 2017 will see Christopher’s debut collection for which you should put in an extra pair of socks because it will knock them right off you and fortunately he is a much better writer than me so his book is actually good while my blog posts are, well, here we are, it never will end, will it?

Happily:

  • The bust of H.P. Lovecraft is done and gone as the World Fantasy Award. Well done Gahan Wilson for making it in the first place and the board for making the decision. The world changes and we change with it and everyone I know is happy about this change.

Goofy story:

  • On Sunday we went out to lunch with friends rather than taking the kid to the banquet. At 1:30 or so I got a phone call from Gordon Van Gelder (one of the award administrators) who asked if we’d be at the award ceremony later as he was wondering if our kids could have another play date while the adults droned on about awards. I thought this was a great idea so we made a play date.
    Which made sure we were back at the hotel.
    In time for the awards ceremony.
    In which we received an award.
    Ha!
    I swear I am not usually this dense (um, honestly . . .) but since the kids had had such a good time on Friday I figured this was legit. Ha again! I’ve even been party to wrangling unknowing award winners in the past. If anything I thought, hey, maybe Kelly’s story . . . ? but I really thought, ooh, playdate = happy kid. Hats off to Gordon, nicely done.

And the awards!

Congratulations to all the winners — and the nominees — especially Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory at ChiZine whose work ethic and determination to push great, dark books into the world is unequaled. It was fantastic to see the collection award shared between Angela Slatter and Helen Marshall. I hate awards because it is silly that not everything gets the prize. I was happy to remember Kathleen Addison’s The Goblin Emperor had won the Locus Award and I cannot wait until Kai Ashante Wilson starts racking them up. I wish Life Achievement award winner Sherri S. Tepper had been there because some of her books blew me away and I’d have liked to thank her.

It is an honor to have been nominated and a surprise to win. I did not have a speech — not hubris, I just thought the jury would go for something else as these awards tend towards the darker side of fantasy and as ever it was a very strong category. But afterwards I realized how silly I was: the book had a decent chance: it is called Monstrous Affections, the stories are bleak, amazing, dark, scary, fantastic. Of course I think it should win all the awards (hello Mr. Nobel Prize, do you do YA anthologies? Have you read Alice Sola Kim’s story that ends the book? Dare you to read it all alone late at night . . .) but still. And. Also. Anyway.

Thanks to the writers and artists in the book — this award is obviously really all about their stories. Thanks to Deborah Noyes our editor at Candlewick Press as well as Nathan Pyritz the designer and everyone at Candlewick who have made working on this book (and Steampunk!) such a joy. Thanks also to cover artist Yuko Shimizu and as always to Kelly’s fabulous and steadfast agent Renée Zuckerbrot. We’re grateful to the judges for their hard work and to the readers everywhere who have allowed us to keep living the dream.


2015 Holiday Shipping

Mon 9 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

This is our annual post about holiday mail dates: like the zombies, they’ll be here slightly faster than expected. As usual, our office will be closed over the holidays, this year that’s from December 24 – January 3, 2016. It is unlikely we will ship over that period. (Weightless is always open.)

Order now, order often!

Here are the last order dates for Small Beer Press — which, in case you’re thinking about waiting until the last minute to order some chocolate Christmas trees are about the same as every other biz in the USA. Dates for international shipping are here.

All orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.

But: Media Mail parcels are the last 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, . . . you get the idea. So, if you’d like to guarantee pre-holiday arrival, please add Priority Mail:

Domestic Mail Class/Product Cut Off Date
First Class Mail Dec-20
Priority Mail Dec-20
Priority Mail Express Dec-23

Order now, order often!

 

 


Travelling back to 1975

Thu 5 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Or, at least, the WFC in Saratoga Springs this weekend. (It’s not the town, it’s just some of the panels.) We’ll be in the Dealers’ Room with a tower of books so high you can see the present from the top. We have deals! Come on by! (Ok, if you’re not there are are in the US and want the same deals, Send Money by Paypal and you’re on.)

Also on the plan for the weekend: swim (maybe not in the Springs . . . ), visit the new Northshire Books, visit the kids museum, visit the bar, visit the bar, you know how it it. We are also transporting secret whiskey for someone who is not us, very exciting. Say hi if you’re there! I’m the one arguing with the 6-year-old while Jedediah Berry and Emily Houk of Ninepin Press sell our books and their cards!


Google Plays so fair

Thu 5 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

This is what GooglePlay advises publishers who get pirated copies of their books taken down:

This message is to inform you that the book you reported, “TITLE”, provided by PIRATE, has been removed from Google Play and should no longer be available for sale within approximately 48 hours.

You have the choice to allow customers to keep copies they already purchased. Alternatively, you may choose to revoke customers’ access to the book. We urge you to consider allowing customers to keep copies already purchased because, in our experience, revoking access creates a poor user experience.

Right. How about the poor publisher experience? That’s right, no one cares. Yay.


Consistently resisting easy categorization

Sat 24 Oct 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The Entropy of Bones cover - click to view full sizeI think that’s my new favorite description, a t-shirt or a mug waiting to happen. When people ask what kind of books we publish they often have an idea already: short story collections that resist easy categorization — except Ben Rosenbaum’s collection, The Ant King, it being what it says on the label: Plausible Fabulism. But while that thing about short story collections is true, it’s only one part of a whole that changes half a dozen times or more every year when we publish another book.

Last week Charles Yu used that phrase to describe Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Entropy of Bones in the New York Times Book Review. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like books that consistently defy being stuck in a category, give it a shot:

“Jama-Everett’s book consistently resists easy categorization. Chabi’s mixed racial background offers a potentially nuanced look from a perspective that seems underserved. And by setting the book in a weird, if recognizable, Bay Area, ­Jama-Everett captures something about the way it feels to live so close to so much money and yet so far; he traces the differences between postindustrial East Bay towns, the gray melancholy of an older city, the particular feeling of struggling while surrounded by otherworldly wealth. If the book veers among different approaches — now a philosophical kung fu master story, now a seduction into a rarefied subculture, now an esoteric universe made from liner notes and the journal entries of a brilliantly imaginative teenager — there’s nevertheless a vitality to the voice and a weirdness that, while not always controlled or intentional, is highly appealing for just that reason.”

Read the first chapter on Tor.com.


David Mitchell on Ursula K. Le Guin

Fri 23 Oct 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

“Adulthood brings more demanding critical standards and many a childhood favourite has been booted off my podium of most cherished books, but my admiration for Le Guin’s artistry has only grown with every rereading.”

I imagine that many people I know feel the same way.

Read the whole thing on the Guardian.


Sending All Your Love—In the Form of Brownies Through the Mail

Tue 20 Oct 2015 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, , , | Posted by: Gavin

This column is the first Nicole Kimberling wrote for us and was originally published in LCRW 27. As new issues come out we will keep adding columns and at some point there will be enough for a book!

Equipment: cupcake tin & baking liners, waxed paper, plastic wrap, rigid shipping container, packing material, packing tape, pen, a piece of cardboard big enough for ten cupcake-sized brownies to sit on, oven, timing device, mixing bowl, measuring cups and spoons, cooling rack, a little cash, hands, and at least some love to spare for another.

Time: Approximately three hours total, plus travel time. Actual labor time: 30 minutes.

Step Zero: Read whole recipe. Read more


Meanwhile

Mon 5 Oct 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015Out there in the world, the peoples they reads the books. What do they say? They like ’em! Just wait to see what’s going to be reviewed next week. Oh? Oh yeah, mmmhmm.

But I am meanwhiling here first about Sofia Samatar who has two stories in the inaugural edition of HMH’s latest addition to their Best American series: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015. Also: are there more SBP authors  in this book? Yes! See Nathan Ballingrud,  Kelly Link, and two stories (Holly Black’s and Paolo Bacigalupi) from Monstrous Affections received honorable mentions.

It’s interesting to look at the list of stories passed on to Joe Hill by series editor John Joseph Adams to see where they were first published.

You can read Joe Hill’s introduction to the book on Entertainment Weekly where he calls Sofia ” a rising star in the genre” and “a young she-can-do-anything star” and describes her two stories as “incredibly different and equally breathtaking stories.” Absolutely!

More fun Best American fun news? Yes! Owen King’s story “The Curator” from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 31 got a honorable mention nod in T.C. Boyle’s Best American Short Stories 2015.

Meanwhile over in bookland, Mary Rickert’s You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories received two lovely trade reviews from PW and Kirkus. We’re sending out our last few galleys now and fingers crossed we will have the book on hand at World Fantasy Con in Saratoga Springs in a month or so! Mary will be there and we will not be running out of books the way we did with Archivist Wasp at Readercon. Dammit! (Sorry again, Nicole!) See below for links to the reviews. Suffice to say if you’ve enjoyed collections we’ve published by Elizabeth Hand, Nathan Ballingrud, Kelly Link, etc., etc., this one is for you.

And we are working on another collection, this one for July of next year by none other than Jeffrey Ford. But, hey, enough for today. More on that manana!

“Beautiful, descriptive prose enriches tales of ghosts, loss, and regret in this leisurely collection. . . . Fans of . . .  Kelly Link will appreciate Rickert’s explorations of myth and memory.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Short stories about people haunted by loss and transformed by grief. Ghosts walk through this collection. Witches are rumored. People collect bones, sprout wings, watch their feet turn into hooves. Above all, people tell stories—stories that cast spells, stories that change the world. In “Journey into the Kingdom,” a tale about ghosts who walk out of the sea has a powerful effect on a young widower. In “Anyway,” a mother asks herself what she would sacrifice to save her son’s life. In the collection’s longest story, “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” a group of women are drawn together when they realize their newborn babies have something very strange in common. Not every piece sings, but those that do have a powerful, haunting effect. As the mother of a dead girl puts it in “The Chambered Fruit,” the best of these stories show how “from death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create,” how “this is what it means…to be alive.” Rickert’s (Holiday, 2010, etc.) writing is crystal-clear, moody, occasionally blood-chilling. Her characters maneuver through a world where strange, troubling transformations are possible, but they live and breathe on the page, fully human. The worlds Rickert creates are fantastical, but her work should appeal not just to fantasy fans, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told tale.”
— Kirkus Reviews


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