The Unreal and the Real: Outer Space, Inner Lands

Tue 27 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

Selected Stories Volume Two
Second Printing: January 2013
9781618730350 · trade cloth · 333pp · $24
9781618730374 · ebook · $14.95
Audio book available from Recorded Books.
[Volume 1.]

Available in one volume from Simon & Schuster/Saga.
— Four Questions from Publishers Weekly

Don’t miss Ursula K. Le Guin’s acceptance speech upon receiving the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
— Profiles in: Boston Globe · The Guardian · NPR · Los Angeles Times · New Yorker · Salon ·

Read the Paris Review interview.

Oregon Book Award winner.
World Fantasy and Locus award finalist.

For fifty years, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have shaped the way her readers see the world. Her work gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power. Le Guin’s writing is witty, wise, both sly and forthright; she is a master craftswomen.

This two-volume selection of almost forty stories taken from her eleven collections was made by Le Guin herself, as was the organizing principle of splitting the stories into the nominally realistic and fantastic.

Outer Space, Inner Lands has twenty stories, including such modern classics as “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” and “Nine Lives” (both of which have been reprinted more than twenty times); Tiptree Award winner “The Matter of Seggri”; Nebula Award winner “Solitude”; and the secret history “Sur,” which was included in The Best American Short Stories.

Le Guin’s stories range from somber (“Small Change”) to hilarious (“The First Contact With the Gorgonids”), from fairy tales (“The Poacher”) to the quiet end of the world (“She Unnames Them”).

Stories in this volume were originally published in venues as varied as Amazing Stories, Playboy, Universe, The New Yorker, and Omni, and received the Hugo, Tiptree, Nebula, Asimov’s, and Locus awards.

Companion volume Where on Earth explores Le Guin’s satirical, political and experimental earthbound stories. Both volumes include new introductions by the author.

The Unreal and the Real is a much-anticipated event which will delight, amuse, and provoke.

Reviews

“Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.”
—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal

“The Unreal and the Real guns from the grim to the ecstatic, from the State to the Garden of Eden, with just one dragon between. (Every collection needs one dragon.) In every good career-spanning collection, you can observe an author growing into her authority. Here, every story, in its own way and from its own universe, told in its own mode, explains that there is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.”
—Slate, “No Better Spirit”

“The metaphorical language of fantasy has the capacity to touch us in the most profound ways. But many otherwise great fantasy writers, including JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, fall too easily into the traps of dogma and moral superiority, making their medicine sometimes hard to swallow. The stories of Ursula K Le Guin manage the sublime trick of touching our hearts while also satisfying our cynical, modern minds. For this reason her stories will pass into legend, to touch many generations to come.”
—The Guardian

“Consistently excellent.”—Nerds of a Feather

“Only ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ and ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ are among the author’s well-known classics. On the other hand, read ‘Hand, Cup, Shell’ or ‘The Matter of Segri.’ Then consider that there may really be no such thing as minor Le Guin, particularly if one is disposed to savor a command of the English language that remains nearly unequaled in the ranks of English-language sf and fantasy. Equally good as an introduction to the author’s short fiction or to fill in gaps that may remain in larger collections.”— Booklist

“Second of a two-volume set, this bare-bones collection focuses on SFWA Grand Master Le Guin’s overtly fantastic visions. Settings of 20 stories, all previously anthologized, include both the science fictional Ekumen, a community of worlds populated by humans shaped by the hubristic Hain of the distant past, to such fantastical realms as the West Reach, “where dragons breed on the lava isles.” Le Guin’s imagination ranges widely; the most interesting sequence involves the world Seggri, whose gender politics are charmingly different from ours but equally constrained. This short collection, offering samples from across Le Guin’s career to date, shows why she has been a major voice in science fiction and fantasy since the 1960s.”
—Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands

“Introduction”
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“Semley’s Necklace”
“Nine Lives”
“Mazes”
“The First Contact With the Gorgonids”
“The Shobies’ Story”
“Betrayals”
“The Matter of Seggri”
“Solitude”
“The Wild Girls”
“The Fliers of Gy”
“The Silence of the Asonu”
“The Ascent of the North Face”
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds”
“The Wife’s Story”
“The Rule of Names”
“Small Change”
“The Poacher”
“Sur”
“She Unnames Them” [podcast, read by the author]

Praise for Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story collections:

“She is the reigning queen of…but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom? Or, in view of her abiding concern with the ambiguities of gender, her queendom, or perhaps—considering how she likes to mix and match—her quinkdom? Or may she more properly be said to have not one such realm, but two?”
—Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books

“She is a splendid short-story writer…. Fiction, like Borges’s, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Ursula Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own.”
—The Boston Globe

“Admirers of fine literature, fantastic or not, will cherish this rich offering.”—Publishers Weekly

“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen… and while science fiction techniques often buttress her stories they rarely take them over. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”
—Newsweek

“Le Guin’s powerful work illustrates that fantasy need not be escapist, that gender studies need not be dry or strident, and that entertainment need not be mindless.”
—The Onion

Cover by John D. Berry.
Cover art: “Golden Apple Tree” copyright 2010 by Paul Roden & Valerie Lueth, Tugboat Printshop.

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Award and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes, among others.

In recent years she received lifetime achievement awards from Los Angeles Times, World Fantasy Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legends award. Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award.

Her recent publications include three survey collections: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas; The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories; and The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena, Stories and Songs (Library of America) as well as a collection of poetry, Late in the Day, and a nonfiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Her website is ursulakleguin.com.

 

 

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Saddest email of the weekend

Mon 26 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin

Suffice to say, another copy of Errantry is on its way:

I write book reviews for XXXXX. You were nice enough to send a copy of Elizabeth Hand’s ERRANTRY, which I have been planning to write up for December — but today my bag went missing after a screening of Lincoln, of all things. (I’m fascinated trying to work out who it is who go to see Lincoln on a Saturday afternoon while keeping an eye out for bag-thieving opportunities.)

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Friends on film & elsewhere

Wed 21 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Gwenda Bond, movies, Ted Chiang, to be watched| Posted by: Gavin

Ok, so Gwenda Bond’s book Blackwood is (ok: may be) going to be made into a TV series! Cool? Cool! . . .

. . . and our neighbor one-town-over Cassandra Clare’s bestselling Mortal Instruments series breaks into movieworld next summer in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones! (“Everything you’ve heard about monsters . . .  all the stories are true . . . “)

We went to see Cloud Atlas the other night. I think it was the first good film I’ve seen in ages. Ok, so I might not have seen anything in the cinema since The Avengers, but have I missed anything good? I’m glad we made the trip out to see Cloud Atlas. Even with the weird and bad choices (and I’m not just talking casting Tom Hanks here) the producers made, they did a good job of making a big, complicated book into a big, complicated film.

Meanwhile over in Chicago, The Chicago Nerd Social Club (what a great name!) are featuring Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others at their next book club meeting:

When: Monday, December 10, 2012 – 6:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Filter, 1373-75 N Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL
Cost: Free

And in Uppsala, Sweden (hello everyone in that lovely city!), Wired’s Noah Schachtman unwinds a fabulous story of a philologist who, gifted with a mysterious manuscript, eventually helps decode it:

. . . in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn’t even have an Internet connection at home. But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation—the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another.

Then, down in North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer has a great story on Kelly’s cousin Bryan Jones who with his friend Mark “Hootie” Bowman (I never knew his name was Mark, I’ve only ever heard of him mentioned as Hootie!) are selling “interactive hardbacks that introduce children to popular colleges and universities.” In other words, if you have a sports-obsessed parent in your life, hie thee to Collegiate Kids Books and get them a book now.

Action movie!

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A new LCRW

Tue 20 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

News!

We’ve got a table of contents for Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 28, the one that is a little late! It should be out next month. (Have you heard that before?) Partly this was inspired by finding five new stories and poems to buy for the next issue! This issue is missing a column from our Dear Aunt Gwenda, so if you have questions for our Dear Auntie, send them along and we will see if we can bring her back for the next issue. Which may come sooner than you might expect!

Without further witherwathering, here’s the table of contents for the June December 2012 issue of LCRW:

Fiction

Michael Penkas, “Coffee with Count Presto”
Krista Hoeppner Leahy, “Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest”
Kevin Waltman, “Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts Are Like Broken Hands”
Erica Hilderbrand, “Akashiyaki (Octopus Dumplings, serves two)”
Brian Baldi, “Springtime for the Roofer”
Andrea M. Pawley, “Vanish Girl”
Kamila Z. Miller, “Neighbors”
Helen Marshall, “The Book of Judgment”

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, “Feeding Strays”

Poetry

John McKernan, “Prayer to Oatmeal”

Cover

Junyi Wu

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Low stock warning

Mon 19 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kij Johnson, Maureen F. McHugh, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

As we head into the holiday season, I’m happy to see we have some hit books that will soon be out of stock:

It looks increasingly likely that our two volume Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin will be sold out by publication day (November 27).

We just got copies in of the second printing of Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees so, it won’t be out of stock but for those who collect first editions, we will keep shipping them out from the office until we run out.

And although it’s now in its third printing, we still have a few first printings of Maureen F. McHugh’s collection, After the Apocalypse. 

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Listening to Ursula K. Le Guin

Mon 19 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Right now I’m listening to Francesca Rheannon’s interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on the Writer’s Voice.

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Trafalgar’s chaste light

Thu 15 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin

Before you know it we’ll be publishing our second novel by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar, translated by U. of Oregon professor Amalia Gladhart. Originally published in Argentina in 1979, it’s a very light and funny book. We had some good news recently: the book is getting a small grant to help with translation costs from the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Culture of the Argentine Republic. (Obra editada  en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de  la República Argentina.) How cool is that? It is awesome.

We’re also working with Ron Guyatt on the final cover.

Trafalgar is a novel-in-stories and the first one, “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” is more bawdy than the others, which is a funny way to set things up! But it also starts right in with Trafalgar Medrano, salesman and storyteller, who, given time and seven double coffees, will tell all about his sales trips to the farthest parts of the galaxies. Another of the stories, “Trafalgar and Josefina,” is forthcoming on Belletrista, but you can get a tiny taste of the first story here:

“By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon”

I was with Trafalgar Medrano yesterday. It’s not easy to find him. He’s always going here and there with that import-export business of his. But now and then he goes from there to here and he likes to sit down and drink coffee and chat with a friend. I was in the Burgundy and when I saw him come in, I almost didn’t recognize him: he had shaved off his mustache.

The Burgundy is one of those bars of which there aren’t many left, if there are any at all. None of that Formica or any fluorescent lights or Coca-Cola. Gray carpet—a little worn—real wood tables and real wood chairs, a few mirrors against the wood paneling, small windows, a single door and a façade that says nothing. Thanks to all this, inside there’s a lot of silence and anyone can sit down to read the paper or talk with someone else or even do nothing, seated at a table with a cloth, white crockery dishes, and real glass, like civilized people use, and a serious sugar bowl, and without anyone, let alone Marcos, coming to bother them.

I won’t tell you where it is because one of these days you might have adolescent sons or, worse, adolescent daughters who will find out, and goodbye peace and quiet. I’ll give you just one piece of information: it’s downtown, between a shop and a galería, and you surely pass by there every day when you go to the bank and you don’t even see it.

But Trafalgar came over to me at the table right away. 

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Errantry: publication day

Wed 14 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, Errantry| Posted by: Gavin

Everyone’s favorite writer of strannnnge, uneasy, disquieting, disturbing, itchy and scratchy stories, Elizabeth Hand, has a new book, Errantry: Strange Stories (print | ebook), out today.

Errantry collects ten of Liz’s recent stories and includes the very popular “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” as well as Shirley Jackson Award winner, “Near Zennor.” (Between this, the forthcoming Le Guin Selected Stories and Kij Johnson‘s book, we’ve had a great year for short story fans!) And I should  mention that next year we’ll be reprinting one of our favorite of Liz’s novels, Mortal Love. More Liz, all the time!

As for Errantry, Stefan Raets writes in his review on Tor.com today:

These are stories of the overwhelmingly mystical breaking into our world in small, almost unnoticeable ways, seen from the point of view of the few people who get to witness those minor intrusions and who then have to try and process their meanings. The subtlety is deceptive: there’s something huge going on, but it’s as if we and these characters are peeking at it through a keyhole, only seeing a small glimpse of what’s on the other side and only being hit by a small portion of the light it sheds. The suggestion that that door may open further is only part of what gives these stories their “slightly sinister” atmosphere.

Liz’s stories definitely get under your skin. There’s nothing quite like reading these stories late at night with the light pooled around you and being aware that you can’t quite see what’s going on in the darker corners of the room. Is that something moving?

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Errantry: Strange Stories

Wed 14 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books, Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin

November 2012 · trade paper · 9781618730305 / ebook · 9781618730312
Second printing: January 2019

Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

“Near Zennor” is a Shirley Jackson Award winner.
Listen to Liz reading “Hungerford Bridge.”

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand’s new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

“At her best, Hand does just this: We find ourselves wrapped in an evocation without knowing fully how she got us there, shivering with fear at an image of lights or blinking with awe at the modest beauty of a small, rare creature living its life, seen from a distance.”
—Aimee Bender, Washington Post

“With grand feeling and inventiveness, Hand writes of modern life edging just into the impossible. Her ragged modern characters, often lost or stoned or just unfixed in their lives, set out over moors or into hidden parks in search of realities less dispiriting than our own.”
—Village Voice

“As I was reading Errantry: Strange Stories, the phone rang. I answered it and whispered ‘Hello?’
“‘Why are you whispering?’ asked my friend.
“‘I’m reading this really bizarre book of short stories,’ I said. That was my short answer. But the long answer is this: I’m whispering because as I was reading Hand’s stories in my quiet house on a cold December day, the threads of my reality frayed a bit along the edges and it would take more than a telephone’s ring for me to pull myself back together. I’m whispering because I’m scared to disturb the intricate and delicate worlds that Hand has created in this collection of stories that alternately draw me in and scare me away.”
—Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

I thought of this tendency a lot when reading Elizabeth Hand’s collection Errantry: Strange Stories. Though I know that Hand’s background is in work that’s less overtly realistic, I know her best through her kinda-mystery Generation Loss, which is as much a meditation on art and the passage of time, and an evocative description of an isolated coastal town in Maine, as it is a book in which someone must solve something. What makes Hand’s collection notable are those moments where the fantastical (or at least the surreal) briefly collides with the mundane, but doesn’t necessarily lead to transcendence. A couple of the stories involve brief encounters with the strange, but it’s less about the existence of the supernatural than it is on the effects of having one’s worldview fundamentally altered. In the two stories that open the collection, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” and “Near Zennor,” strange things occur, but they’re within the larger contexts of memory and grief, and they’re as difficult for their characters to put together as more earthly mysteries.”
— Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Hand’s strangeness is redolent of the sort of disturbing, uncanny children’s books that gave you nightmares at the age of nine (for me, Alan Garner): books with malevolent forces lurking under sunny hillsides, where adults aren’t going to save our heroes, and whose endings are staggeringly bleak.”
— Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons 

“Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky.”
—Helen McCrory, Pank

“The stories confound yet delight, blurt unanswerable questions yet hold their tongue. Each will leave you scratching your head and asking, “Well, what if . . . ?” Overcoming the constraints of genre, Errantry is strange fiction at its finest.”
—Rain Taxi

“No writer has cornered the market on darkly beautiful, unsettling stories. But it’s a niche that Elizabeth Hand inhabits with uncanny ease.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram

“Talented Hand has won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Tiptree Award and the Nebula Award, among many others. The reason for this lies less in her imaginative worlds, as impressive as they can be, and more in her skill at crafting words, each phrase and each sentence carefully shaped and laid in place to create the singular diadem that is a Hand story. The tales here are all recent, and are all evidence of Hand’s prolific, fertile imagination. Hand enthusiasts should, of course, have already pre-ordered this collection; those new to her work should acquire it as soon as possible.”
—Romantic Times Book Review

“Explores the odd and impossible dreams that can motivate and dishearten people in everyday life.”
—Bangor Daily News

Omnivoracious: The Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Collections of 2012
“Just more evidence of the self-assurance and complexity Hand has brought to fiction in the middle part of her career.”

“When novelist and short story author Hand (“Available Dark; Generation Loss”) subtitled this collection “Strange Stories,” she gave readers a hint about what to expect. Lord Byron said “what a strange thing man is…” and it is true, everyone is a little strange, life is a little strange. This original, varied, collection of stories is not strictly fantasy, and certainly not horror, for Hand is more subtle than that. The stories are so different from each other it is hard to find a common theme or thread, but whether reading about ordinary people sharing peculiar experiences, people undergoing fantastic transformations, a young woman with supernatural powers, or a pair of witches, each story leaves the reader curious, thinking about what they read, but disquieted, with a lingering, though not necessarily unpleasant, sense of unease. VERDICT An enjoyable trip to the dark side, certainly worth a try for those who enjoy short stories but not necessarily elements of fantasy, and a must for fans of Hand’s previous work.–Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
—Library Journal

“Ten evocative novellas and stories whisper of hidden mysteries carved on the bruised consciousness of victims and victimizers. Memories and love are as dangerous as the supernatural, and Hand often denies readers neat conclusions, preferring disturbing ambiguity. The Hugo-nominated “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” marries science fiction and magical realism as three men recreate a legendary aircraft’s doomed flight for a dying woman. A grieving widow in “Near Zennor” unearths a secret of spectral kidnapping in an ancient countryside. “Hungerford Bridge,” a lesser piece, shares a secret that can only be enjoyed twice in one’s life. Celtic myth and human frailty entangle in the darkly romantic “The Far Shore.” The vicious nature of romantic love is dissected with expressionistic abandon in the dreamlike “Summerteeth.” Hand’s outsiders haunt themselves, the forces of darkness answering to the calls of their battered souls. Yet strange hope clings to these surreal elegies, insisting on the power of human emotion even in the shadow of despair. Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”
—Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Near Zennor
Hungerford Bridge [audio]
The Far Shore
Winter’s Wife
Cruel Up North
Summerteeth
The Return of the Fire Witch
Uncle Lou
Errantry

Cover image “The Hunt in the Forest” by Paolo Uccello by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Read more

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P&W article

Fri 9 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ig Publishing, Publishing, Small Beer Press, To Read Pile, Two Dollar Radio| Posted by: Gavin

Did you see the huge lovely article by Michael Bourne featuring family-run presses in the current issue of Poets & Writers? There’s a big old photo of Kelly and me (we’re the stern ones!). The article features Ig, Two Dollar Radio, and Small Beer, and looks at the joys and sorrows (er, pros and cons?) of running a publishing house together. First up: Ig Publishing, run by Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson (their photo is nice and cheery!). Ig have a nice line of Dive Bar books but are perhaps best known for their popular politics titles. Next: Two Dollar Radio, run by Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf—who have a fab, informal photo!—who published Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps along with other books you may know. You may want to get your Two Dollar tattoo now—they’ll send you free books for life. But seventeen people have already done it and they are capping the offer at 25!

It was fun to be interviewed for the article. I always want people to talk about the books, not the press—Wait, what’s that you said about us? Oh, do tell! Let me not protest too much—and it’s hard to talk about the press without talking about our lives since the public/private split in indie press publishing can be near nonexistent.

That said, there was a fabulous article written in alternating first person by two poets, Brenda Shaughnessy and Craig Morgan Teicher, in the summer issue, “Enduring Discovery: Marriage, Parenthood, and Poetry.” The couple are married and are both published poets with new books out this year. Everything went well until:

“After a healthy pregnancy with no complications, our son suffered a catastrophic brain injury at delivery…. Our beautiful, amazing boy is now five years old and he has severe cerebral palsy. He’s nonambulatory, nonverbal, and has a smile that lights up a room like nothing else. Yes, we’ve been through hell, but we’ve had this angelic, loving, marvelous child with us the whole time.”

Both poets speak about their own lives, their family, and their work so clearly and strongly that I had to stop and read the whole article at once and then put their new books on the To Be Read list. So I like other people talking about their lives! Thanks for the write-up, Poets & Writers!<

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The Diary of a Young Monster Hunter

Thu 8 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

Next year we are reprinting Peter Dickinson’s novel Eva Tupper’s Diary. Guess who did the cover? Kathleen Jennings, yay! Publishing being what it is, we’re telling the sales reps about the book now so that they can take it to the booksellers and then when you wander into your local bookshop next May, boom! there it is. Emma arrives in Scotland to spend the summer with her cousins, the McAndrews. The McAndrews have the typical kid’s book family: a late mother, a distant father, and an assortment of cousins four years apart from 14 onup.

There’s also a mini-submarine and perhaps more. Here’s an excerpt from early on in the book:

“Creature?” said Emma. “Do you mean a monster?”

Andy laughed.

“Oh yes, we’ve got one of those,” he said. “It’s made of rafts of weed which get carried up from the bottom by gases from decaying stuff underneath them. They make black hummocks, quite long sometimes, so that you see several things in line that might be the humps of a sea-serpent, and then the gas gets out and they sink again. That’s what all the monsters really are—Loch Ness and Loch Morar as well as ours. How long since anybody saw its head, Mary? Mouth, eyes, teeth?”

“Och, you’ll not see them and live,” said Mary placidly. “But there was poachers came up from Glasgow when you were in your cradle, Master Andy—an ignorant class of men, as everybody knows there’s no fish worth poaching in our loch. But they brought two boats by night, and nets, and by morning both boats were overturned and three of the men vanished. Those were the last poachers I heard of coming this way.”

“And the first,” said Roddy, “if everyone knows there’s no fish worth poaching. Hey!”

Mary had walked round behind his chair while he was talking, and now biffed him hard on the ear with her open palm; then she nodded to Emma and walked out smiling. Roddy rubbed his ear and went on eating his toast.

“Even if there’s only a story about a monster. . .” said Emma. “I mean there’s only a story about Loch Ness.”

“That one’s had two hundred years to spread,” said Andy.

“But things happen so much faster now,” said Emma. “I mean if only you could get your story on television . . .”

“Cousin Emma,” said Andy, lordly and handsome, “you have only just reached civilisation after a formative childhood in the desert. Understandably you are besotted by the television set. But you will later learn that it cannot do everything—in particular it cannot make one stretch of water which might have a monster in it look more interesting than another stretch of water which might not.”

“He’s the expert,” said Roddy. “His girl’s in the Glasgow studios.”

 

 

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A Better Day

Wed 7 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

After a shorter night than expected, this is a better day than expected. Mitt Romney’s speech, when at last it came, was gracious. At some point soon perhaps he will be relieved to be off the campaign trail for the first time in many years.

President Obama’s speech was strong. He won the popular vote and the electoral college. He speaks to everyone, not only just communities. In immediately reaching across the aisle and offering to work together in government with the Republican party he offered a way forward for a polarized nation.

I am proud of this country’s continued ability to peacefully run elections and transfer power. That said, I’d vote for election day being a paid, Federal holiday at the drop of a hat. In a participant democracy, voting should be easy, not hard. The NYTimes says the country drifted rightward. No matter which way the country leans, I hope it will continue to tack toward a future where health care, inclusiveness, and the common weal—looking after the 100%—is in the forefront.

As hundreds of thousand of people are still without power—the latest victims of ever worsening weather—I recommend that the PACs and SuperPACs on all sides of the political spectrum send what is left of their funds here:

Red Cross.

First Books.

(Further suggestions welcome!)

Also: yay!

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Endorsing President Obama

Thu 1 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

On Election Day, I am voting for President Obama. I hope you will, too.

Hurricane Sandy really brought home to me the differences between the two candidates and how important it is that Mr. Romney is not elected. He would close FEMA (because New Jersey and New York—like Louisiana before them—can pay for all the damage themselves?) and believes that 47% of the country is outwith his remit. He seems not to realize that the President is the President to all Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

Given that the Republican Party’s strategy of government has been to try to stop any bills with presidential support being passed instead of trying to work with the elected government, I don’t suppose he is just toeing the party line. For four years they’ve tried to block any actual governing from happening. The GOP would rather the country ground to a halt instead of having Obama as president. It is hard to believe that a party would seriously choose this strategy and expect to be elected.

Hurricane Sandy only meant high winds and some rain in Western Mass. We were very lucky. We have spent the last 3 years and 8 months feeling lucky. Our daughter, Ursula, was born prematurely in February 2009 and spent her first 14 months in the hospital. We were lucky that the emergency generators kicked in during the worst storms while she was in hospital. We didn’t have to carry her (or watch while the nurses did it) out of the hospital while attached to all her tubes and machines. Reading about the kids and patients being evacuated from NYU Hospital was horrifying. While Ursula was in hospital we walked along beside her on the way from one room to another while nurses hand pumped her ventilator. It was no fun in a bright, daylit hospital. I cannot imagine in at night, without power, in a hurricane. Those nurses are fantastic.

Sometimes a person needs taken care of by someone other than themselves and their family. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has looked after Ursula in ways that we never expected and for which we will be eternally grateful. Ursula’s care has cost somewhere around a couple of  million dollars. We would be bankrupt and homeless if we had had to pay for it. So I am extremely grateful to Governor Romney for the work he did to instill safety nets and to widen the health care coverage in Massachusetts. If he had the courage of his convictions and was supporting extending this very successful plan nationwide, I would consider supporting him. Instead he intends to cut these programs and continue the transfer of wealth to his own people, the 1%.

Sometimes a group of people need to be taken care of by someone other than themselves and their family. Hurricane Sandy illustrated that even New York State (with almost 20 million people) and New Jersey (8.8 million) need help.

In The New Yorker‘s endorsement of Obama they included this:

“A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: ‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.'”

I don’t want a nanny state. I don’t want government health care to be the only option. But I want it to be an available option. If people have the money or will to pay for private health care, that option should be available. But in a civilized country there should not be 44 million people without health insurance.

The last four years, following directly on a terrible financial crash, have been hard. The eight before that were desperate: two wars kicked off, off-the-record prisons around the world, the USA used (uses?) torture as an everyday tool, individual rights were trampled, the people’s voices were ignored. Going back to that, but adding on contempt for the middle and working class (never mind the working poor, homeless, and all other disenfranchised groups) and a focus on money flowing to the monied over the weal of the common people is a nightmare that would send this country into the past, rather than into the future.

This country was founded by a bunch of individuals who managed to get together, despite their differences, and form a government. That government has been a living changing idea ever since. I believe that this country deserves a government who will look after the people first, not the corporations, and that is why we will be voting for President Obama on Tuesday.

Gavin J. Grant
Kelly  Link

 

 

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2012 Holiday Shipping deadlines

Thu 1 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., holidays, post office, shipping, usps| Posted by: Gavin

Here are the last mailing dates before Christmas/your holiday of choice from the US Post Office.

Media Mail shipping is included in all our prices and Priority Mail can be added.

Remember that all mail slows down at the holidays. Media Mail packages are only included by the post office if and when there is space so they can languish for days during the holidays. If you are ordering after December 1st, 2012, and you would like your books to arrive for Christmas we recommend choosing Priority Mail.

You can also buy Gift Certificates to Small Beer or Weightless.

Holiday Dates for Military Mail

Calculated for December 25, 2012.

Addressed to	First-Class Mail® Service	Priority Mail® Service
APO/FPO/DPO AE ZIPs™ 090-092	Dec. 10	Dec. 10
APO/FPO/DPO AE ZIP 093	Dec. 3	Dec. 3
APO/FPO/DPO AE ZIPs 094-098	Dec. 10	Dec. 10
APO/FPO/DPO AA ZIP 340	Dec. 10	Dec. 10
APO/FPO/DPO AP ZIPs 962-966	Dec. 10	Dec. 10

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Suggested reading for Sandy

Mon 29 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Hurricanes, To Read Pile| Posted by: Gavin

Here’s a scary comparison pic on the WSJ of Hurricane Irene (2011, $15bn damage) and Hurricane Sandy (2012, flooding NYC and surrounds already; picture below from the NYT live update feed).

How big is Sandy? It’s bigger than the Random Penguin merger. Boo merger! Wonder who HarperCollins will merge with now? They were thinking $1.6bn in cash for Penguin and you know how it is when you go shopping but they don’t have the publisher you wanted in stock, might as well see who else is up for sale . . .

I love Penguin books and all the tat that they sell: we have the mugs and cards and tea towel and are quite happy to keep stacking the shelves with those old and new classics. And, they published Kelly’s YA collection, Pretty Monsters. But! I also love the name Random House. It was (was? erk.) one of the best names for a publishing house. What’s coming next? A cookbook? A collection of poetry? A science fiction novel? Yes to all of the above! And, one of their imprints published The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. RHP? Meh. And, only 1 letter away from RIP. (Hmm, that’s a bit too much reading the bones, methinks.)

While Random Penguin is a publishing behemoth in the making (they’ll be awaiting government approval: Obama says, “Hmm, maybe.” Romney says, “Merger? Assets stripped, jobs outsourced, big dividend to stockholders? Do it!”) they’re fleas on the back of the other players in publishing, as someone tweeted today:

Charlie King ‏@charlietheking

Interesting context RT @arhomberg Market value of Apple $567 billion, Google $221 billion, Amazon $108 billion, Random Penguin ~ $3 billion

Anyway.

Recommended reading for the next few days: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain wherein Washington DC is flooded and the politicians (and the taxed-but-not-represented locals) are the ones who have to deal with the Katrina-like events. I reviewed it tho those many years ago for BookPage:

There are flood warnings throughout (beginning with the Biblical reference in the title) but the blinkered D.C. politicians won’t pay attention until the rising water is lapping at their doorways. Robinson skips between the domestic, scientific and political spheres without missing a beat and delivers a hot-topic page-turner that leaves the reader gasping and stranded at high tide, eager for the next book from this science fiction master.

Once you’ve read that you’re going to want the sequel, Fifty Degrees Below, (“an intensely positive book, brimming with ideas and hope for the future real or imagined.” Review), and the final one: Sixty Days and Counting. (“Every senator, especially the ones with presidential aspirations, should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sixty Days and Counting.” Review).

These books should be on the must-read list for all politicians, but then again I think Robinson’s books should be on everyone’s to-be-read stack.

Be safe.

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Saddest email of the week

Fri 26 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kathe Koja, post office, tracking is a must| Posted by: Gavin

It’s hard to imagine the disappointment of reader C.H. who ordered the new paperback edition of Under the Poppy and instead, well, read this:

Hi Small Beer Press-

I had ordered a paperback copy of Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja and received notification on October 19 that it had shipped, USPS Tracking #xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.  I received the envelope today, but there the book was not inside the envelope. Instead there is a a booklet and several discs for Microsoft 98. Very confused, and then I noticed on one side of the package there is a USPS Rewrapped/Resealed packing tape. Obviously the package was tampered with some where along the order coming to my address. Is there anything that can be done to rectify this?

Thanks for your time,
C.H.

Suffice to say we quick smart dropped another copy of the book in the mails. With tracking of course. If there is someone out there looking for the Microsoft 98 discs, I can put you in touch with the person who has them!

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Proud to be you and me

Thu 25 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Just in time for the upcoming election, here’s some nice stuff.

Yo, politicos, don’t step on the immigrants! You were only born here, adult immigrants chose this country. Besides, apart from Native Americans, everyone’s family here were immigrants at some point. And soon enough immigrants get legal status and we remember who was putting us down. So instead of that, let’s play nice with one another and work together to, as Stephen Colbert puts it, Re-become the Greatness We Never Weren’t!

 

   

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Chris Abani says

Thu 25 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

of A Stranger in Olondria:

“Sofia Samatar has an expansive imagination, a poetic and elegant style, and she writes stories so rich, with characters so full of life, they haunt you long after the story ends. A real pleasure.”
—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames

Absolutely!

Since Stranger  doesn’t come out until next April, you can catch up with Sofia in the meantime on her blog where she answers 10 questions about Stranger in Olondria, writes about her experiences as a debut author at the debut author at the Heartland Fall Forum, and introduces her Weird Fiction Review essay on Mervyn Peake.

Sofia published a fabulous poem on Strange Horizons this summer, “Lost Letter” which starts:

we were going to start an artists’ commune
we were going to start an avant-garde artists’ commune
we were going to live on youth good looks and music

but you should go read it!

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Where I Write by Lydia Millet

Wed 24 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Lydia Millet| Posted by: Gavin

Loved the photos and the advantages/disadvantages listed with each of Lydia Millet’s writing destinations:

“Fitness.” . . . Advantage: Puffy armchair; fitness potential, chiefly latent. Disadvantage: Half-naked, hard-bodied individuals saying bad things; many have pink acrylic talons.

Read more.

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Brian Conn: yay!

Tue 23 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Brian Conn, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Fully ganked from Shelf Awareness this morning: fantastic, cheery news for a writer we love, Brian Conn has won the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize. How awesome is that? That is awesome. Ten years ago (well, probably eleven, given how slow we read submissions) we were thrilled to read his story “The Mushroom” and published it in LCRW #10. Five years later he sent us “The Postern Gate” and in it went to LCRW #21. Besides being a fascinating writer, Brian also co-edits Birkensnake, a journal you can either download for free or buy a lovely print edition of.

From Shelf Awareness:

Awards: Bard Winner

Brian Conn has won the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize, intended to support promising young fiction writers. The prize has a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for a semester.

Conn won for his debut novel, The Fixed Stars (Fiction Collective 2), published in 2010. The prize committee praised the science fiction book for “the remarkable way the weird, perplexing bleakness of the imagined society is firmly held in place by a narrative style at once bewildered and lucid–it has the air of a kind of deadpan tragedy, of the sort Kafka scared us with, and made us yearn for more. The Bard Fiction Prize has been anxious to celebrate innovation in the novel–and in Conn’s The Fixed Stars we found a perfect match of inventive fable with disquietingly radical storytelling. The prose sparkles with unique images, and the narrative itself is wonderful, at times wondrous even, and a highly original formal work, full of life.”

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Win the audiobook of The Freedom Maze

Tue 23 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., audio books, Delia Sherman| Posted by: Gavin

All you need to do is leave a comment here—and there are only a few, so your chances are high!—on this interview with The Freedom Maze’s narrator, Robin Miles.

Can’t wait to hear this!

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Coming this week: book, podcast, freebies, &c

Mon 22 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Parzybok, Julie Day, Michael J DeLuca, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

Monday: Publication day for our latest Big Mouth House title: Peter Dickinson’s new collection, Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures. It’s now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions. The first story “Troll Blood” is also available in F&SF’s September/October issue. Here’s a short interview on F&SF about the story.

There are two strong reviews (from Faren Miller and Rich Horton) in the latest issue of Locus and Tom Shippey gave it a marvelous review in the Wall Street Journal:

“Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”

Tuesday:

1. A new podcast from a lovely triumverate, Julie Day, Michael J. DeLuca, and Benjamin Parzybok—which I am listening to right now, awesome! Michael reads Benjamin Parzybok’s story “The Coder” from Lady Churchhill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 21. Come back tomorrow (or subscribe now) and you too can get your coding joy on, too.
2. The Humble Bundle ends. 77,000 people have partaken of the first ebook Humble Bundle so far. I think it’s a pretty incredible thing: pay what you want for a baker’s dozen of DRM-free ebooks. It’s been hugely popular, especially internationally, and I can’t wait to see 1) how it ends and 2) what the next one will be!

Thursday:

1. We send out 15 free copies of Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry to the Goodreads giveaway winners.
2. Kij Johnson reads at 7 p.m. at the Big Tent at The Raven in Lawrence, Kansas.

Will there be more news and more goings on? Probably. Unless the debates fill us with such lethargy that we become slugs and end our days in a bowl of beer. Which, you know, is going to happen one way or the other.

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Mac laptops

Mon 22 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Apple| Posted by: Gavin

As noted before, I seem to be somewhat rough on my laptops: Kelly and I have twice bought new laptops (new white MacBooks sometimes in the 2000s, then used MacBook Pros in March 2011) at the same time and I have worn mine out first.*

So now I have a question for Mac laptop users (as I will be Time Machining my current laptop & software over to the new one). I am probably moving from a 15″ MBPro to a 13″ and would love to hear user’s experiences with both the 13″ MacBook Pro and the 13″ MacBook Air. (I am tempted to buy the former with a steady-state drive.)

As I mentioned, I appear to be somewhat hard on my laptops—it goes to and from home with me and most of the press’s work is done on it. At any given day I will have Mail, Firefox (which seems to be crashing the current laptop, so I may switch to Chrome), Safari, Word, InDesign, PhotoShop, Preview, QuickBooks, Cyberduck, and I don’t know what else running so I would love to hear from people who are using their laptops for such things. Can the little laptops do these things or should I just go back to the 15″ (5.6 pounds/2.56 kg) monster?

Any help appreciated!

* There is a chance that I wear my laptops out for the same inherited reason I can’t wear a wind-up watch. I was horrified as a kid when I go a watch for the first time from Santa (memory serves: it was a Sekonda!) and it stopped working within a few hours. There’s nothing like the secret horror of thinking you’ve broken your big new present before lunch. I was hugely relieved to discover that my mum can’t wear a wind-up, either. I had a few more watches as a kid, then carried a robot pocketwatch for a while and now with the ubiquity of phones I don’t bother. I might be able to wear a modern, quartz watch, but I’m happy without one now. Besides, why give my “talent” with machinery more opportunity to express itself?

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Earth and Air

Mon 22 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Big Mouth House, Books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin

October 2012 · 208pp · 9781618730589 · trade cloth · $17.95 | 9781618730381 · trade paper · $14.95 | 9781618730398 · ebook · $9.95

Tales of Elemental Creatures

A Junior Library Guild Selection

Wall Street Journal: The Best Fiction of 2012
“Much modern fantasy draws upon myth and folklore, but not many authors can enter wholly into the surprising and novel logic of myth. In this brilliant collection of stories, Peter Dickinson recasts Beowulf and Orpheus, investigates tales of earth-spirits, explains the footwear of Mercury and accounts for the survival of Athena’s owls in Christian Byzantium. These beautiful stories, our reviewer believed, ‘deserve to become classics of the genre.'”

“Enjoyable surprises await those who pick up this latest and last addition to the Tales of Elemental Creatures series. Peter Dickinson, working alone (he co-authored the first two collections, Water and Fire with wife Robin McKinley), once again proves his expertise in fantasy and short story writing…. The pleasure of reading a short story by this author stems from his complete control over the essentials of fiction writing…. A true delight, this engrossing collection will lead many readers back for second and third readings.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”
—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal

Peter Dickinson has long been one of our favorite authors and we are very proud and happy to announce that we are publishing a new collection of stories by Dickinson—and we will go on from here to reprint many of his novels for both children and adults.

In this collection, you will find stories that range from the mythic to contemporary fantasy to science fiction. You will find a troll, gryphons, a beloved dog, the Land of the Dead, an owl, a minotaur, and a very alien Cat. Earth and Air is the third and final book in a trilogy of shared collections connected by the four classical elements. It follows previous volumes Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits and Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits, written by both Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley.

Ridiki is Steff’s beloved dog, named after Eurydice, whom the poet Orpheus tried to bring back from the dead. When, like her namesake, Ridiki is bitten by a snake and dies, Steff decides that he too should journey to the Underworld to ask the King of the Land of the Dead for his dog back.

Mari is the seventh child of a family in which troll blood still runs. When her husband goes missing in a Scottish loch, she must draw upon the power of her blood to rescue him. Sophie, a young girl, fashions a witch’s broomstick out of an ash sapling, and gets more than she bargained for. An escaped slave, Varro, must kill a gryphon, in order to survive. A boy named Yanni allies himself with an owl and a goddess in order to fight an ancient evil. A group of mind-bonded space travelers must face an unknown threat and solve the murder of a companion before time runs out.

All of these stories are about, in one way or another, the contrary and magical pull of two elements, Earth and Air. Each story showcases the manifold talents of a master storyteller and craftsman who has twice won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award, as well as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.

A short interview on F&SF about “Troll Blood.”

Reviews

“I particularly enjoyed “Ridiki”, a version of the Eurydice story substituting a boy’s beloved dog Ridiki for Eurydice, and “Wizand”, which cleverly portrays the unusual lifecycle of the wizand, which confers power on witches, including, in this story, a 20th-century girl named Sophie. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the final story, “The Fifth Element”, which doesn’t as obviously deal with an “elemental creature” as the other stories. Instead, it’s an odd science fiction horror story, that reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub”, and Robert Sheckley’s “Specialist”, in telling of the multispecies crew of a sort of tramp starship, and what happens when their “ship’s Cat” dies.”
—Rich Horton, Locus

The prevailing spirit of Earth and Air seems to be Mercury, the sardonic trickster. Read it with your mind open, senses alert… and prepare for a marvelously bumpy ride.
–Faren Miller, Locus

“Dickinson completes the series of “elemental” tales he began with his wife Robin McKinley (Water, rev. 7/02; Fire, rev. 11/09). Though links to the theme can be tenuous, these six new stories are provocative in both variety and ideas. . . .and with Dickinson’s usual command of imaginative imagery and beautifully tooled language, this is a fitting capstone to the series.”
—Horn Book

“The prevailing tone of all six is somewhat dark, even saturnine, though not without flashes of hope. In content and style, they are sophisticated and challenging to the extent that the volume might have been published as an adult book. Certainly it has strong crossover appeal. Older teens and Dickinson fans of all ages will find the stories rewarding despite the investment of effort in the reading experience.”
—Booklist

“Noted fantasist Dickinson concludes the cycle of elemental stories he began with Robin McKinley in Fire (BCCB 11/09) and Water (BCCB 7/02) in a solo outing with tales of earth and air spirits. Aside from the sci-fi influenced final story, “The Fifth Element,” the five preceding tales evoke an old-world flavor of magic, incorporating pieces of Greek mythology and European folklore, sometimes placing archetypal beings in the modern world of cars and email. Appropriately, the two tales focusing on earth creatures, “Troll Blood” and “Wizand” (yes, that is the right spelling), are characterized by densely loaded prose and deal with themes of love, lust, and possession. Without McKinley’s more adolescent-focused contributions, the stories lean more toward a new adult audience, though the two animal-centered stories, “Ridiki” and “Scops,” will appeal to pet-friendly readers, particularly dog lovers. These stories are nonetheless thoughtful and provocative, and they will find an audience among Dickinson’s usual fans.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“This is ultimately a wonderfully hopeful work, with glimpses at some of the best of human nature: compassion, love, a sense of right and fairness, and a correspondingly humane response from the supernatural powers.”
—School Library Journal

“These unusual, memorable tales from a much-admired writer should appeal both to teens and Dickinson’s adult fans.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Strange, sometimes beautiful tales.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“They are beautifully told and move so effortlessly that I was startled to discover I’d read the book in one sitting.”
—Don D’Ammassa

Reviews of “Troll Blood”

“Another story which will stay with me is Peter Dickinson’s “Troll Blood.” Mari is a young researcher of Old Norse, with a curious family history. She develops a friendship with her professor, marries the love of her life, and through these relationships she explores her ancestral connections. This is a heart-warming fantasy story of love, trust and honour, held together by lush, sophisticated prose. My one criticism is it jumps about geographically, making is a bit hard to follow at times, but overall this is a beautiful story.”
—Barbara Melville, Tangent

“If some crafty Tilton-hunter were setting a snare, there could be no better bait than a piece like this. Old manuscripts. Old Norse. Beowulf. Even for those readers not so predisposed to love manuscript neep, the story of the troll and the bargain works well, for a story of a troll. I’m not quite so smitten by the biology and the verse, but it’s still another win for this issue.
—Lois Tilton, Locus

Table of Contents

Foreword

Troll Blood
Ridiki
Wizand
Talaria
Scops
The Fifth Element

Praise for Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits

World Fantasy Award finalist

“There is plenty here to excite, enthrall, and move even the pickiest readers.”—School Library Journal

“… a collection of enchanting tales.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

“This collection of beautifully crafted tales will find a warm welcome.”—School Library Journal

“Dickinson’s offerings are notable for their sophisticated magical thinking and subtlety of expression.”—The Horn Book

“Dickinson’s stories are told with a storyteller’s cadence.”—Booklist

“This collection … offers something for every fantasy fan.”—Library Media Connection

Read more

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Free copy of Errantry anyone?

Fri 19 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin

Here we go again, not back in the country two days and here we go again giving away books! And, we’ll be giving some away on LibraryThing next month. All in the name of getting the books out there. These are physical books, so we’re only sending them to the US & Canada, sorry international readers—but we send out free ebooks through LibraryThing, sometimes, too. The post office here has killed sea mail, so mailing 1 book costs $17, just for the mail. Eek!

We are having quite the month: Peter Dickinson’s new collection, Earth and Air, is about to be released, Errantry is about to ship out(!), and we are promised that the two huge Ursula K. Le Guin volumes of Selected Stories are about to ship from the printer.

All of which is to say: this is fun!

 

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Stranger Things … & Magic for Beginners on the Humble Bundle

Fri 19 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., DRM-free, ebooks, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Now with 5 extra books!

Please welcome the debut of a new kind of offering: the Humble eBook Bundle!

Here’s a brief primer on this sensational deal: for two weeks, you can pay whatever you want to get these six digital, DRM-free books: Pirate Cinema, Pump Six and Other Stories, Zoo City, Invasion: The Secret World Chronicle, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners. If you choose to pay more than the average, you will also receive Old Man’s War and graphic novel Signal to Noise!

This is the first Humble ebook offering and is only available for two weeks,
so head over to the site and pick up your Humble eBook Bundle right now!

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Kij Johnson in Locus

Thu 18 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kij Johnson| Posted by: Gavin

Back. Not awake. Catching up slowly. Just read the great Locus interview with Kij Johnson:

Excerpts from the interview:

Ha! More: print / ebook.

ETA: Added a reading at the Raven and another starred review!

10/25  7 p.m. The Big Tent at The Raven, 6 East 7th St., Lawrence, KS, 66044
11/24  1 p.m. Uncle Hugo’s Books, 2864 Chicago Avenue South, Minneapolis MN 55407

“[The] stories are original, engaging, and hard to put down. . . . Johnson has a rare gift for pulling readers directly into the heart of a story and capturing their attention completely. Those who enjoy a touch of the other in their reading will love this collection.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

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The Humble Bundle

Thu 11 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

I am guessing that by now you’ve heard about the new ebook Humble Bundle which contains the full DRM-free ebooks of Kelly’s first two books, yes? I’m going to put up a sticky post with the HB counter on so on that will be nice and obvious for the next two weeks.

If you don’t know what I am on about, below the cut I have cut-n-pasted the intro from their blog. Basically you can pay what you want for a rather awesome ebook bundle. The monies get split between the authors, the charities, and the Humble Bundle people. If you pay more than the average (currently $12.43 and which, interestingly, has risen over the last two days) you get two extra books. The HB people usually do ebooks, although they did a cool music one earlier this year which I bought for the OK GO extras—addicted to those videos. Cory Doctorow put the ebook edition together and I think tapped a bunch of people who have released their books under Creative Commons licenses and/or as DRM-free books. (There being really no point in buying DRM’d books if you ever expect to read them again.) It really is the simplest, neat, and lovely idea and it is awesome to have Kelly’s books involved.

Introducing the Humble eBook Bundle!

Get ready to feast your eyes on this new bundle! Please welcome the debut of a new kind of offering: the Humble eBook Bundle! Read more

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