Home and Security
Sat 1 Nov 2003 - Filed under: Chuntering On, Free Stuff to Read| Posted by: Gavin
Homeland Security
Gavin J. Grant
With thousands of like-minded others, I went to the big peace rally in New York City on February 15th, 2003. It was a cold day, and my wife and I walked up Third Avenue from 32nd to 68th Street before we could cut over to First Avenue and join the rally. Which was really a slow march, but since the city government wouldn’t give us a permit to march, let’s call it a rally.
What do we want?
So many things.
When do want them?
It doesn’t seem possible, but now, please.
…March 5th, 2003, Local News: Writer and editor Gavin J. Grant, 33, (picture) of Northampton, Mass., is believed to be one of hundreds of detainees held after police and other government agencies moved in to calm a noisy and potentially-violent peace rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park….
Other Cities
Sat 1 Nov 2003 - Filed under: Books, Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
First printing, November 2003, 48 pp.
No.6 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Other Cities. Twelve of the stories in Other Cities were previously published as a weekly series on Strange Horizons. The entire series is presented here for the first time and each story is illustrated with the art of Boston artist and architect Peter Reiss.
The author requested that instead of a royalty, his payment for Other Cities be sent to the Grameen Foundation USA (see below). So on publication we sent along a check for $625 and we are still passing on payments on, thank you. If you would like to donate more to the Grameen Foundation when you buy Other Cities please use this link here and fill in the amount (including $6 for the chapbook). Thank you!
Please replace the 6.00 with your donation in this link:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/SmallBeerPress/6.00
Cities are seemingly inevitable, seductive, depressing, and inebriating. In his Other Cities series Benjamin Rosenbaum takes us on a tour of fourteen imaginary cities:
- from “The White City” — where two sisters fight one another and their fate — to Bellur — which celebrates its censors —
- from Ponge — that’s already enough about that — to Zvlotsk — where by 1912 detective work accounted for a third of the economy
- from Jouiselle-aux-Chantes — the city of erotic forgetting — to Stin — the city for those who are tired of other cities —
Rosenbaum’s stories illuminate the hidden corners of the world the train rider suspects exist at the stop after theirs, the tourist knows the locals will never reveal, and the mapmakers keep for themselves.
Reviews
“Rosenbaum’s fertile sense of invention and his sly humor (“Ponge, as its inhabitants will tell you, is a thoroughly unattractive city. ‘Well,’ they always say at the mention of any horrible news, ‘we do live in Ponge.'”) make these parables a real treat.”
— Asimov’s
“Throughout Other Cities, compressed insight and wonder are compressed into but a handful of words. This small book’s crisp design and illustrations mirror the elegance of the writing: recommended.”
— Xerography Debt
“Charming…”
— Locus
“I enthusiastically urge you to get a copy and enjoy the exciting and odd metropolises in Other Cities.”
— Washington Science Fiction Association The WSFA Journal Dec. 2003
“And though the stories are tiny, they do not disappoint as a result of their brevity. When you leave one fantastic destination behind, there is another city right around the corner.”
— Tangent Online
Contents
The White City
The City of Peace
Bellur
Ponge
Ahavah
Amea Amaau
Ylla’s Choice
Zvlotsk
New (n) Pernch
Maxis
Jouiselle-Aux-Chantes
Penelar of the Reefs
The Cities of Myrkhyr
Stin
“Other Cities by Ben Rosenbaum is a collection of fourteen gems, expertly cut and highly polished. Each contains, within its myriad facets, a metropolis, brimming with mystery, insight and wonder.”
— Jeffrey Ford (The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant)
“Rosenbaum’s little book of cities is like a box of very good chocolates, picked out by a dear friend with an intimate understanding of both confectionary and you. These vignettes are urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic. Cities are the pinnacle of human acheivment: if you have any doubt, read this.”
— Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and A Place So Foreign and Eight More)
“Benjamin Rosenbaum’s miniature stories are like tiny arrows aimed straight at the heart of Mystery.”
— Walter Jon Williams (Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis)
“The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.”
— Bradley Denton (One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality)
(Want to see the rest of Bradley Denton’s quote?)
About the author:
Benjamin Rosenbaum is troubled but hopeful. He used to live near Basel, Switzerland, but now he is moving back to the tangled superhighways of Northern Virginia, with his wife Esther, his daughter Aviva, and Aviva’s imaginary friends: Kiko, Makke, and the Happy Boy. He is the author of the collection The Ant King and Other Stories and his stories can be found in Asimov’s, Harper’s, Argosy, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Vestal Review, McSweeney’s, The Infinite Matrix,and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 11.
About the artist:
Peter Reiss was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended The Cooper Union in New York City; Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy; and the University of Virginia School of Architecture. His artwork focuses on paintings of urban landscapes and abstracted aerial views. He now lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, his sons, and his cats.
About the Grameen Foundation USA:
25% of the gross revenues from the sales of this book go to the Grameen Foundation USA, which fights poverty all over the world by establishing banks that loan very small amounts to very poor people to start businesses, and helping them to coordinate and pool their resources. The effect of microcredit loans is transformative rather than palliative: every year Grameen-style loans lift hundreds of thousands of people above the poverty line. Because of the high repayment rate (typically over 95%), money donated to Grameen is highly leveraged: each dollar donated will be loaned again and again. As borrowers become successful in their businesses and begin saving, a Grameen-style bank becomes independent of donations. The original Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which loans $3.8 billion dollars to 2.54 million very poor people, is now self-sufficient.
You can find out more on their website.
Some of the stories in Other Cities were previously published in the following places:
Bellur, Ponge, Ahavah, Amea Amaau, Ylla’s Choice, Zvlotsk, New (n) Pernch, Maxis, Jouiselle-Aux-Chantes, Penelar of the Reefs, The Cities of Myrkhyr, & Stin, Strange Horizons; The White City, The Vestal Review. The City of Peace appears here for the first time.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 13
Sat 1 Nov 2003 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Gavin J. Grant. Cake is love.
Kelly Link. Cake is cake.
Diane Kelly, Vanessa Scott. Interns is interns.
Contents
Fiction
David J. Schwartz — The Ichthymancer Writes His Friend with an Account of the Yeti’s Birthday Party
Eliot Fintushel — Kukla Boogie Moon
Leslie What — The Changeling
Richard Polney — The Faith of Metal in Ghosts
M. Thomas — The Poor Man’s Wife
Tim Pratt — Rowboats, Sacks of Gold
E.L. Chen — White Rabbit Triptych
Philip Brewer — Salesman
F. Brett Cox — Legacy
Veronica Schanoes — Serpents
Karina Sumner-Smith — A Last Taste of Sweetness
Hannah Bowen — Pinned
Sarah Monette — Sidhe Tigers
Geoffrey H. Goodwin — The Magnificent Dachshund
K.Z. Perry — Mama’s Special Rice Tin
Spencer Keralis — The Meat and the Mushrooms
Nonfiction
Gavin J. Grant — Home and Security
— Zine Reviews
Gwenda Bond — Dear Aunt Gwenda
Lucy Snyder — The Guest Film Column: The Salton Sea
Poetics
Mario Milosevic — Lunar Fate
Jason Stewart — The Greebles
David Blair — Four Poems
Art
Mieke Zuiderweg — Anticipation (Cover)
James Campbell — Untitled
Contributors
David Blair‘s poems have appeared in AGNI, The Greensboro Review, International Poetry Review, and Chicago Review.
Gwenda Bond is not a senior administration official.She writes screenplays and fiction, usually in the environs of lovely downtown Lexington, Kentucky, though not usually set there. Her scripts have placed in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting and Austin Heart of Screenwriting competitions, and her fiction has been published in The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives and …is this a cat? She co-edits the magazine Say… with writer Christopher Rowe.
Hannah Wolf Bowen is a Philosophy major, an assistant editor for the Fortean Bureau, and the person of an ungrateful (yet adorable) horse and a neurotic (yet adorable) dog. Some of her stories have found homes. Others have not. These things happen.
Philip Brewer has a day job as a software engineer, but his work is writing science fiction and fantasy stories. He speaks Esperanto and uses it to communicate with people all over the world. He graduated from Clarion in 2001.
James Campbell writes and draws somewhere to the west of this magazine.
E.L. Chen works hard for the money, so you’d better treat her right. She has been previously published in On Spec and Challenging Destiny. Everything else that she doesn’t mind you knowing can be found here.
F. Brett Cox‘s fiction has been published Century, Black Gate, The North Carolina Literary Review, Indigenous Fiction, Carriage House Review, Say…, and elsewhere. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Quarterly, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paradoxa, Science Fiction Studies, Locus Online, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, and Science Fiction Weekly. He is co-editor, with Andy Duncan, ofCrossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic (Tor, 2004). Brett has served as a juror for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and as a member of the advisory board for the current edition of Contemporary Novelists. He holds an M.A. in English with emphasis in creative writing from the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in English with emphasis in American literature from Duke University. A native of North Carolina, Brett is Assistant Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield,Vermont. He lives in Northfield with his wife, the playwright Jeanne Beckwith.
Eliot Fintushel is an itinerant showman now living in Santa Rosa, CA, hard by the fairgrounds and between the transmission shops and the horse stalls. He has written many stories, mostly published in Asimov’s. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards. He has twice received the NEA Solo Performer Award. His current touring show, employing masks and ancient music in the original tongues, is Apocalypse, a solo performance comprising the entire Book of Revelation word for word in the translation commissioned by King James in 1611!
Geoffrey Goodwin is a generous man who works in a bookshop outside Boston, MA. This is his second story for LCRW. He is not worried by this.
Amy Hannum is an interior designer based in New London, CT. She is the subject and the artist of the cover photo, “Anticipation,” by Mieke Zuiderweg.
Spencer Keralis grew up in Wyoming but now lives in Minneapolis, which is colder. His written work has appeared in The Dry Crik Review of Contemporary Cowboy Poetry, The Owen Wister Review, stet Magazine, and The Plastic Tower, among others. In another life he co-authored a textbook on Asynchronous Transfer Mode circuits now in use at a major telecommunications corporation, but that’s a long story and really not very interesting. (Also: see Zine Reviews.)
Mario Milosevic‘s poems and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and in the anthologyPoets Against the War. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, novelist Kim Antieau.
Sarah Monette collects ghosts in books, pressing them between the leaves like dried flowers. She has sold stories to LCRW, Alchemy, Tales of the Unanticipated, All Hallows, and Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries. Her story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” from LCRW 11, won the 2003 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.
K.Z. Perry‘s stories have recently appeared in MOTA 3: Courage, Talebones, Book of More Flesh, The Urban Bizarre, and Problem Child. She lives in New York.
Rick Polney is an adjunct professor of English and Humanities, a former Army officer, a sometimes performance artist, and an unrepentant risk-taker. He is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop and studied writing under Chip Delany at Temple University. He has been published in TurboCharged Fortune Cookie and Schuylkill.
Tim Pratt lives in Oakland, California, where he works as an assistant editor for Locusmagazine. His stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, and other nice places, and he has work upcoming in The Third Alternativeand The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. His first collection, Little Gods, was published by Prime Books in September 2003. With his fiancee Heather Shaw he co-edits a zine calledFlytrap.
Veronica Schanoes is from New York City. She won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Prize from the Academy of American Poets. This is her first non-academic publication. She’s very, very pleased.
David J. Schwartz is the reincarnation of a famous dancing bear who once entertained thousands of Bolivian mine workers. He is indigenous to the Midwestern United States, and traces of his spoor have appeared in On Spec and Flashquake.org. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop and prefers tea, thank you. He keeps a reading journal and he would be humbly pleased if you would read it.
Lucy A. Snyder lives in Columbus, OH. Her writing has appeared in publications such asChiaroscuro, Snow Monkey, Strange Horizons, The Midnighters’ Club and Cumberland House’sGuardian Angels anthology. More information about her can be found here.
Jason Stewart lives between the toes of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. With his two cats, he watches a tiny door in his living room which he has never opened, for fear of finding greebles. When he’s not consumed by these fears, he spends his time at Colorado University where he works in the library and is finishing his BA in English. His work has appeared inAlmagre, Riverrun, and BLAH.
Karina Sumner-Smith is a student, a writer, a Clarion grad and an adventure racing fanatic. She listens to others’ conversations on the bus without hesitation or regret, worries over pennies and scribbles stories on the back of in-class handouts. She is irritated that she must wear her glasses to read signs at distances or distinguish the faces of friends from strangers in a faraway crowd; is it too much to ask to retain one’s vision at the age of 22? She lives in Toronto.
M. Thomas is a writer and teacher in Austin, Texas. She is a short story editor and contributor for the ezine Deep Magic. Her fiction has previously appeared in Deep Magic, Abyss & Apex,and Strange Horizons. She dabbles in magic realism, humor, and young adult fantasy. She maintains a website for writers, and welcomes your visit.
Leslie What is a Jell-O artist and writer from Oregon. Her writing has won awards for drama, nonfiction, and fiction, including a Nebula Award for short story. Her comic novel Olympic Games will be published in 2004. Bigger Better Bio.
Mieke M. Zuiderweg is a photojournalist in Western Massachusetts who is trying to work up the courage to walk away from taking pictures of angry mourners and burning buildings to pursue a career soley based on her photo illustrations and picture experiments. She resides in Northampton but is originally from the Netherlands. Hence the unpronounceable name. “Anticipation” is a photograph of the work of interior designer Amy Hannum.
—
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.13 November 2003. ISSN 1544-7782 Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996 LCRW has usually appeared twice a year. As of 2004, there will be three issues per year: April, July, & November. LCRW springs forth from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Except, as the sharp-eyed observer may have noticed, this issue is $5. This is an experiment (look at that art! look at that binding!) and may or may not be a good idea.
Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. If there were torpedoes, we’d have to build a dam. As it is, how about a new ship of state?
Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories
Sat 1 Nov 2003 - Filed under: Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
No.7in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is author and publisher Christopher Rowe’s Bittersweet Creek, with a cover illustration by the wonderful Shelley Jackson.
Rowe takes his storytelling seriously and, if he can, with a generous bourbon on the side. (His readings are not to be missed.) Rowe’s recent stories, including “The Force Acting on the Displaced Body” (the lead story in the anthology Trampoline) and “The Voluntary State”, have taken him into new, deep, and exciting literary territory and have brought him many new and appreciative readers. Bittersweet Creek gathers together some of his best stories from recent years and solidifies his reputation as one of the up and coming writers in the speculative fiction field.
Reviews
“Rowe’s work might remind you of that of Andy Duncan. Both exemplify an archetypically Southern viewpoint on life’s mysteries, a worldview that admits marvels in the most common of circumstances and narrates those unreal intrusions in a kind of downhome manner that belies real sophistication.”
— Asimov’s“As smooth and heady as good Kentucky bourbon”
— Locus“‘Men of Renown’ is a herald of what Rowe can do best: deal with time and place without limits.”
—Tangent Online
Contents
Baptism on Bittersweet Creek
Sally Harpe
The Dreaming Mountains
Kin to Crows
Men of Renown
What is This?
This smart, sleek, scary little book is all about strange arrivals: girls coming up out of their graves, giants from their junkyards, dragons from their river beds. Add Rowe himself– striding out of the Kentucky hills into the sunlight of literature’s regard. And he looks good doing it.
— Terry Bisson (The Pickup Artist)Christopher Rowe’s stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter’s night when the fire starts burning low. They dance through godfearing communities in the deep country with the unerring steps of a shaman’s rite to show that the division between Biblical and primal deities is a perilous conceit. Reverent and irreverent in the same breath, chilling and funny by turns, they deliver the full measure required of short story tellers the world over; entertainment plus x, where x is a measure of internal vertigo caused by a sudden glimpse of a sheer drop. Terrific.
—Justina Robson (Natural History)Christopher Rowe was a fine writer when he was one of my students back at Clarion West, in 1996; and he has only gotten better. Much better. And as good as he is now, he’ll keep getting better. Read these excellent stories, and see what I mean.
–Jack Womack (Going, Going, Gone)
About the Author:
Rowe’s story, “The Force Acting on the Displaced Body”, is the lead story in the anthology Trampoline — for which he answered these questions. He lives in Lexington, KY. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, JPPN, Pulp Eternity, The Dead Mule, and the anthologies Beyond the Last Star and Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold.
Rowe’s poem “Our Prize Patrol Will Find You” was published in LCRW 9. He is the editor and publisher (with Gwenda Bond) of the magazine Say….
Earlier this year Ideomancer posted an interview and three of Rowe’s stories: Horsethieves and Preachermen, Kin to Crows, and VFD Adventures. Here’s another short story.
This is not him.
This is his new blog.
About the Artist:
Shelley Jackson lives in a dark hole in a dark, dark hole in a dark, dark, dark hole.
Some of the stories in Bittersweet Creek originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following places:
“Baptism on Bittersweet Creek,” Realms of Fantasy, 1999; “Sally Harpe,” Realms of Fantasy,1999; “The Dreaming Mountains,” Ideomancer Unbound, 2002; “Kin to Crows,” Realms of Fantasy, 1998. “Men of Renown” appears here for the first time.
Trampoline – Readings
Sat 18 Oct 2003 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
Trampoline: an anthology
Edited by Kelly Link
Readings
Many authors, many cities, a grand time, thanks to all involved! (Apologies for the camera destroying the Mac’s Backs pictures.)
August 5, 7 PM — Quail Ridge Bookshop, 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27607 — 919-828-1588
Dave Shaw, King of Spain
Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
Kelly Link
O
August 7, 7 PM — Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 161 Lexington Green Circle, Suite B1 Lexington, KY 40503 — 800-248-6849
Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
Kelly Link
September 9, 7 PM — Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, 1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 — (216) 321-2665
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
John Gonzalez, Impala
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
Kelly Link
O
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September 11
— 11 AM — KFAI Radio
— 7.30 PM — Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105 — (651) 699-0587
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
Kelly Link
O
September 18, 7 PM Housing Works, 126 Crosby Street, NYC 10012 — (212) 334-3324
Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Shelley Jackson, Angel
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
Kelly Link
Special Guest: Karen Joy Fowler
Subway: S,F,V, 6 to Broadway-Lafayette. N, R to Prince St.
Download flier
O
October 12, 1.30 PM — Lilish Fair, Central Florida — (407) 929-4348
Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
O
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October 16, 7 PM Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, 353 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115 — (617) 266-7746
Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Kelly Link
Download flier
Trampoline – Bios
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Authors, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
Trampoline: an anthology
Contributors
Christopher Rowe, Ed Park, Shelley Jackson, John Gonzalez, Samantha Hunt, Alex Irvine, Greer Gilman, Alan DeNiro, Maureen McHugh, Dave Shaw, Susan Mosser, Vandana Singh, Glen Hirshberg, Jeffrey Ford, Beth Adele Long, Carol Emshwiller, Christopher Barzak, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Richard Butner, Karen Joy Fowler
O
Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
— interview
— chapbook
Christopher Rowe lives in Kentucky. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in many magazines, webzines and zine zines. He runs a small press, the Fortress of Words, and edits a zine, Say… He likes outside better than inside, brick better than vinyl and made better than bought.
You can buy Say… if you poke around on this site a little bit more. You can read some of his stories online at The Dead Mule, Ideomancer, and maybe even Small Beer.
Bittersweet Creek, a chapbook
— “Sally Harpe“
O
Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Ed Park is the author of a few published stories that have changed the way we see the world, two unpublished novels that haven’t, an unpublished memoir in which every paragraph begins with “In,” and two books illustrated by the fabulous Michael K. Carter. He is a senior editor at The Village Voice, where he reviews films, books, theater, and music. With Heidi Julavits, he co-edits The Believer. He contributes to the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope and belongs to the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, the New York Society Library, and the Duane Reade Dollar Rewards Club.
O
Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, and several children’s books. She lives in Brooklyn.
O
John Gonzalez, Impala
— interview
John Gonzalez grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, the Cereal Capital of the World. He spent much of his early life trying to escape, but the attack dogs seemed to anticipate his every move. After several years in graduate school and employment as a social worker, John landed a job as the house writer for Outrage Games, a videogame developer in Ann Arbor whose next game, the fantasy-SF action-adventure Alter Echo, is due out in August 2003. In 2001 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. “Impala” is his first publication.
O
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Samantha Hunt is a writer and artist from New York. Much to her delight, her stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney’s, Jubilat, Swerve, The Iowa Review, Literary, Colorado and Western Humanities Reviews. Her first play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, is currently in production. Hunt’s artwork can be found at the New York Public Library. Of late, she is completing a novel.
O
Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Alex Irvine‘s first novel A Scattering of Jades appeared in 2002 from Tor Books. His second, One King, One Soldier, is scheduled for July 2004. In between, a short-story collection, Unintended Consequences,will appear from Subterranean Press. He has published short fiction inF&SF, Asimov’s, Sci Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and anthologies including Starlight 3, Polyphony 2, and Live Without a Net.He teaches English at Gardiner Area High School in Gardiner, Maine — the home of Edwin Arlington Robinson — and lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, Beth, and twins, Emma and Ian.
O
Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
— interview
Greer Gilman’s novel, Moonwise, is decidedly thorny. It won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. “A Crowd of Bone” is one of three linked stories, variations on a winter myth. The first, “Jack Daw’s Pack,” was a Nebula finalist for 2001, and the subject of a Foundationinterview by Michael Swanwick. A sometime forensic librarian, Gilman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.
O
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
— interview
Alan DeNiro is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and he also attended Clarion in 1998. His fiction has appeared in many literary and genre venues, including Santa Monica Review, 3rd Bed, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fence, Talebones, and his work has been shortlisted for the O. Henry award. Along with Chris Barzak, Kristin Livdahl, and Barth Anderson, he is a member of the writerly and publishing co-op known as the Ratbastards. He has recently completed a novel, The Memory Palace of Ray Fell, which involves the perils of dating imaginary people. He regularly reviews fiction for Rain Taxi, and is a correspondent for the weblog Ptarmigan. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Black Hare and Atari Ecologues. Finally, he is a failed trapeze artist…no, just kidding.
O
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
— Mothers and Other Monsters
Maureen McHugh (1959) has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award. Her latest novel is Nekropolis, which was a BookSense 76 pick and a New York TimesEditor’s Choice. Right now she lives with her husband, son and two dogs next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins look over the fence at them.
O
Dave Shaw, King of Spain
— interview
Dave Shaw lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife Natalie, three-year-old daughter Mia, and newest child, Henry (born May 17, 2003). Father was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Here Comes the Roar, which will be published by University of North Texas Press in 2003. His stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in England, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S., including Best American Mystery Stories, The Southern Anthology, Literal Latte, Stand Magazine, and publications you’ve never heard of. He has received The Literal Latte Fiction Award, The Southern Prize for Fiction, a North Carolina Arts Council Writer’s Fellowship, and other awards for his work, and he completed his MFA in Fiction Writing at UNC-Greensboro. With that out of the way, he’d like now to point out that in 2000, 2001, and 2002, his team won Carrboro, North Carolina’s Co-Rec Softball Championship.
O
Susan Mosser has been writing for a while now and finds it to be just the very best part of sentience. By grace of unemployment, in the steamy wastelands of central Florida, she is writing two books (one novel and one mostly not) and ghost-editing a third, and lately has taken to scribbling bits of subtly rhythmic verse on gasoline receipts while driving. Susan is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
O
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
— interview
Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and now lives in the United States with her husband, daughter, dog and innumerable books. She draws upon her background in physics and her experience as a woman and an Indian to spin wild tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her first published story appeared in the original anthology Polyphony, Volume 1.
O
Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach
Glen Hirshberg‘s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was published by Carroll & Graf in December, 2002. Kelly said she liked it. His ghost stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Dark Terrors 6, and have been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and twice for the World Fantasy Award. Carroll & Graf will publish The Two Sams, a collection of his supernatural fiction, later this year. When he sent this bio, Glen lived in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and daughter, but he probably doesn’t anymore.
O
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
— interview
Jeffrey Ford is the author of a trilogy of novels from Eos Harper Collins — The Physiognomy (winner of the 1998 World Fantasy Award and a New York TimesNotable Book of the year for ’97), Memoranda (a New York Times Notable book for ’99), The Beyond ( a selection for Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2001 list). His most recent novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Morrow/Harper Collins), was published in June 2002 as was his first story collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press). His short fiction has appeared in the magazines — Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Event Horizon, Black Gate, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, MSS, The Northwest Review, Puerto Del Sol — and in the anthologies — Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Vols. 13 and 15, The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, Leviathan #3, and The Journal of Pulse Pounding Narratives. “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant,” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2001, and “Creation” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula in 2002. Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.
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Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
— interview
Beth Adele Long‘s short fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Electric Velocipede. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s workshop and a former writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. By day she works as a graphic arts jack-of-all-trades for a fantabulous little company in Cape Canaveral. She lives in Florida and still complains about the cold winters, much to her northern friends’ disgust.
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Carol Emshwiller, Gods and Three Wishes
— interview
“I was a dreadful student. Just squeaked by with Cs and a few Ds. Failed freshman English and had to repeat it. Almost failed again.”
I went all the way through music school, playing the violin, but I had slow fingers so failed at that.”
I went to war. ALL! the men were gone so, though I was a pacifist, I went with them. After war, I went to art school. First thing I didn’t fail at.”
I always hated writing. It’s too hard. But, like finally learning to love lobster, now Lobster is my favorite. I’ve failed at even that though. I’ve become allergic to it. Now I love writing. I love that it is so hard–that you never stop learning how to do it.”
I’ve just had two new books with Small Beer Press. These are my seventh and eighth books.”
O
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
— interview
Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of literary and speculative fiction magazines, including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy,Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has recently completed his Master’s Degree in English at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. He grew up in rural Ohio, now lives in post-industrial Ohio, has lived in California and Michigan, now lives in an attic back in post-industrial Ohio, has no pets to speak of, no longer smokes except socially, and likes to dance. He is 27.
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Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
— interview
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s fiction and prose poems have appeared in Conjunctions (Web Conjunctions); Washington Square; Skidrow Penthouse; Phantasmagoria; Literal Latte; Reflections (published by the United Nations Society of Writers); No Roses Review; and White Crow, among other literary journals. Her prose poems “The Maria Axiom” and “Soul Murder” have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her short story, “The Guest,” won the Anne and Henry Paolucci fiction contest for Italian-American writing, and the Negative Capability annual fiction contest. Rosalind lives in New York City where she is currently completing a second collection of short fiction.
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Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
— interview
— chapbook
Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you.
Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference with John Kessel. For some reason he holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering (with an English minor) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from North Carolina State University.
His stories have appeared in magazines such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,(read “Other Agents” here), Scream, and RE Arts & Letters, as well as in anthologies such as Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, which he co-edited with John Kessel and Mark L. Van Name. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
O
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of two story collections and three novels and is a frequent teacher of writing workshops. She lives with her husband in Davis, California. She wishes someday to have published more books than you can count on the fingers of both hands. She wishes this more often than she manages to actually make herself work on book number six. She’s starting to think the opposable thumb is not all it’s cracked up to be.
O
Kelly Link co-edits the zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her first collection,Stranger Things Happen, was nominated for the Firecracker Award and was selected as a best book of the year by Salon, Locus, and The Village Voice. She is working on more short stories.
Kalpa Imperial
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
paper · 9781931520058 | ebook · 9781618730190
March 2025: Out or print. Rights reverted to author’s estate.
Prix Imaginales winner
Emperors, empresses, storytellers, thieves . . . and the Natural History of Ferrets
Kalpa Imperial is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer’s many award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial’s multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories.
But Kalpa Imperial is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and acclaimed writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who has translated Kalpa Imperial, are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.
- Read an excerpt: The End of a Dynasty or The Natural History of Ferrets
- Gabriel Mesa interviews the author: 20 Questions with Angélica Gorodischer
- Kalpa Imperial Reader’s Guide
Reviews
Selected for the New York Times Summer Reading list.
“1. You should read everything Angélica Gorodischer writes. She is spectacular. 2. This one is a great story of several tellings of a famed empire that rises and falls multiple times. 3. This one is translated by none other than one of the giants of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin!”
— Liberty Hardy, Book Riot
“Due to the pandemic, the election, and the numerous other distractions of 2020, reading — and concentrating on reading — has been difficult at times this year. Because of this, I’ve been revisiting old favorites. The one I’m most thankful for is Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial. Published in English translation by the great Ursula K. Le Guin back in 2003, the book is like a warm blanket to me, a perfect little fantasy collection — irreverent, fun, mythical, and a beautiful piece of world building. A truly special book not on most people’s radars.” —Justin Souther, Malaprop’s Bookstore, Buzzfeed: 46 Books Our Favorite Indie Booksellers Were Grateful For This Year
“The history of an imaginary empire in a series of tales that adopt the voice of a marketplace storyteller. . . . While the point of each tale eludes paraphrase, the cumulative burden is the imperfectibility of human society . . . Le Guin’s translation, which ranges from blunt to elegant to oracular, seems like the ideal medium for this grim if inescapable message.”
— New York Times Book Review
“A novel that evokes weighty matters lightly and speaks of self-evident wisdom while itself remaining mysterious.”
— Washington Post
* “This Scheherazade-like collection of linked tales, loosely connected by a storyteller, form the rich history of an imaginary civilization from its hunter-gatherer origins to its peak as a technologically sophisticated empire. Each story is concerned with the use and abuse of power, especially the inequities of power between men and women, the rich and the poor, and the state and the individual. Never heavy-handed, the stories flow like fables and gradually show the futility of seeking power and trying to rule others. The dreamy, ancient voice is not unlike Le Guin’s, and this collection should appeal to her fans as well as to those of literary fantasy and Latin American fiction.”
—Library Journal (Starred Review)
“There’s a very modern undercurrent to the Kalpa empire, with tales focusing on power (in a political sense) rather than generic moral lessons. Her mythology is consistent — wide in scope, yet not overwhelming. The myriad names of places and people can be confusing, almost Tolkeinesque in their linguistic originality. But the stories constantly move and keep the book from becoming overwhelming. Gorodischer has a sizeable body of work to be discovered, with eighteen books yet to reach English readers, and this is an impressive introduction.”
— Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Those looking for offbeat literary fantasy will welcome Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, this is the first appearance in English of this prize-winning South American fantasist.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Ursula Le Guin’s translation of Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial is wonderful.”
—Jo Walton, Tor.com
“The only thing more amazing than the stories about this nonexistent empire is the fact that it has taken them so long — twenty years — to appear in English.”
— Scifidimensions
“It’s always difficult to wrap up a rave review without babbling redundant praises. This time I’ll simply say “Buy this Book!””
—Locus
“The elaborate history of an imaginary country . . . is Nabokovian in its accretion of strange and rich detail, making the story seem at once scientific and dreamlike.”
—Time Out New York
“These stories — like this empire — are deceptively simple, as they are built from complex components of a deep and richly imagined history.”
—Strange Horizons
“This is definitely a book to savour slowly.”
— Strange Charm
“[A] remarkable collaboration . . . an engossing escape . . . a useful tonic and reminder that the irascible perspectives of Borges and Cortazar are alive and well.”
— Bridge Magazine
Kalpa Imperial has been awarded the Prize “Más Allá” (1984), the Prize “Sigfrido Radaelli” (1985) and also the Prize Poblet (1986). It has had four editions in Spanish: Minotauro (Buenos Aires), Alcor (Barcelona), Gigamesh (Barcelona), and Planeta Emecé Editions (Buenos Aires).
An excerpt from Kalpa Imperial, The End of a Dynasty, was originally published in the original anthology Starlight 2, (Tor).
About the Author
Angélica Gorodischer, daughter of the writer Angélica de Arcal, was born in 1928 in Buenos Aires and has lived most of her life in Rosario, Argentina. From her first book of stories, she has displayed a mastery of science-fiction themes, handled with her own personal slant, and exemplary of the South American fantasy tradition. Oral narrative techniques are a strong influence in her work, most notably in Kalpa Imperial, which since its publication has been considered a major work of modern fantasy narrative.
Here’s a fuller bio:
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on July 28th 1928, lives in Rosario, Argentina, since 1936. Fifteen books published, novels and short stories. Never a play; never a poem, not even at sixteen when everybody writes poems, out of love or of politics. Elementary and high school at the Escuela Normal no.2 de Profesoras in Rosario. And then School of Arts and Literature, Rosario National University but only for five years. No grade, no academic award, no nothing: wanted to write, not to teach.
Books: Short Stories with Soldiers, 1965; Opus Two, novel, 1967, 1990; The Wigs,short stories, 1968; Under the Yubayas in Bloom, short stories, 1973, 1987; Chaste Electronic Moon, short stories, 1977; Trafalgar, short stories, 1979, 1984 and 1986; Imperial Kalpa, novel, 1983, 1990, 2000, 2001; A Bad Night, short stories, 1983, 1997; Vases of Alabaster, Boukhara Carpets, novel, 1985, 1992; Mango Juice, novel, 1988; The Republics, short stories, 1991; Fable of the Virgin and the Fireman, novel, 1993; Survivorship Techniques, short stories, 1994; The Night of the Innocent, novel, 1996; How to Succeed in Life, short stories, 1998; Mint, short stories, 2000;Everywhere, novel, 2002.
Awards: 1964 “Vea & Lea” award, III contest of detective stories; 1965 “Club del Orden” award; 1984 “Más Allá” award; 1984 “Poblet” award; 1984-85 Emecé award; 1985 “Sigfried Radaelli Club de los Trece”; 1986, 1991 Gigamesh (Spain); 1994 “Platinum Konex” for her work on sci-fi; 1996 “Dignity” award granted by the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights for works and activity in women’s rights; 1998 Silvina Bullrich award, granted by the Argentina Writers’ Society to the best novel written by a woman during the three precedent years; 2000: “Margarita de Ponce” award, granted by the Union of Argentine Women.
Short stories in anthologies in Argentina and other countries. Seminars, conferences, meetings, conventions, etc. in Argentina and other countries. More than 300 lectures (not counting papers at meetings or conferences) especially on fantastic narrative and gender and literature. Judge at literary contests from 1967 to the present. Book presentations, public reading of short stories. Workshops for women who want to write. Articles and short stories in newspapers and magazines in Argentina and other countries.
A husband (for 50 years the same one), two sons, one daughter-in-law, a daughter, a son-in-law, six grandchildren, a house, a garden, many many friends . . . in Argentina and other countries.
Read more of Angélica Gorodischer’s stories in English:
Four short stories including “The Perfect Married Woman” in the anthology Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women of Argentina and Chile.
“Camera Obscura” translated by Diana L. Velez, The Latin American Literary Review, XIX, 37:96-105. Special Issue: Scents of Wood and Silence: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers.
About the Translator
Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College, and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they lived in Portland, Oregon, from 1958 on and had three children and three grandchildren.
Ursula K. Le Guin has written poetry and fiction all her life. Her first publications were poems, and in the 1960’s she began to publish short stories and novels. She writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. As of 2003 she has published over a hundred short stories (collected in nine volumes), two collections of essays, twelve books for children, five volumes of poetry, two of translation, and nineteen novels. Among the honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, five Hugo Awards, and five Nebula Awards.
In August 2003 the University of New Mexico Press published Ursula’s translation of Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral — “This is the first presentation in English and Spanish of a really substantial selection of the poetry of Mistral — the first Latin American, and the only Latin American woman, to receive the Nobel Prize.”
Praise for the Spanish-language editions of Kalpa Imperial:
“Angélica Gorodischer, both from without and within the novel, accomplishes the indispensable function Salman Rushdie says the storyteller must have: not to let the old tales die out; to constantly renew them. And she well knows, as does that one who met the Great Empress, that storytellers are nothing more and nothing less than free men and women. And even though their freedom might be dangerous, they have to get the total attention of their listeners and, therefore, put the proper value on the art of storytelling, an art that usually gets in the way of those who foster a forceful oblivion and prevent the winds of change.”
—Carmen Perilli, La Gaceta, Tucuman
“At a time when books are conceived and published to be read quickly, with divided attention in the din of the subway or the car, this novel is to be tasted with relish, in peace, in moderation, chewing slowly each and every one of the stories that make it up, and digesting it equally slowly so as to properly assimilate it all.”
—Rodolfo Martinez
“A vast, cyclical filigree . . . Gorodischer reaches much farther than the common run of stories about huge empires, maybe because she wasn’t interested in them to begin with, and enters the realm of fable, legend, and allegory.”
—Luis G. Prado, Gigamesh, Barcelona
The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.
Eight Legged Story
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
I. Naturalistic Narrative
Cheap pens. My marriage is not going to survive this. Not the pens — I bought the pens because no pen is safe when Mark is around; his backpack is a black hole for pens — so I bought this package of cheap pens, one of which doesn’t work (although rather than throw it away, I stuck it back in the pen jar, which is stupid), and two of them don’t click right when you try to make the point come out and then go back. It’s good to have them, though, because I’m manning the phone. Tim, my husband, is out combing the Buckeye Trail in the National Park with volunteers, looking for my nine-year-old stepson, Mark. Mark has been missing for twenty-two hours. One minute he was with them, the next minute he wasn’t. I am worried about Mark. I am sure that if he is dead, I will feel terrible. I wish I liked him better. I wish I’d let him take some of these pens. Not that Tim will ever find out that I told Mark he couldn’t have any of these pens.
Trampoline: Stories
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
Trampoline: Stories
20 stories: 140,000 words. But are they any good?
Decide for yourself:
Stories:
O
Sally Harpe
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
They tell this one in those tobacco towns along the Green River.
One day Roy Barlowe and his dad walked up the hill to Townie Harpe’s old place. Townie’s widow, Miss Erskine, was sitting on a cane bottom chair on the porch, fooling with some clothes.
Roy didn’t know whether she was sewing or quilting or doing some kind of mending. He never paid much attention to that kind of work. Still, if the mother knew those ways then it followed that the daughter would.
Ash City Stomp
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
Listen to Richard Butner reading “Ash City Stomp.”
She had dated Secrest for six weeks before she asked for the Big Favor. The Big Favor sounded like, “I need to get to Asheville to check out the art therapy program in their psychology grad school,” but in reality she had hard drugs that needed to be transported to an old boyfriend of hers in the mountains, and the engine in her 1982 Ford Escort had caught fire on the expressway earlier that spring.
Trampoline: An Anthology
Fri 15 Aug 2003 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
Greer Gilman’s novella “A Crowd of Bone” won the World Fantasy Award.
- Trampoline and Alex Irvine’s “Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman” were nominated for World Fantasy Awards.
- Susan Mosser’s “Bumpship” was reprinted in The Year’s Best SF.
- Christopher Barzak’s Dead Boy Found” was reprinted in The Best New Horror.
- Karen Joy Fowler’s “King Rat” and Richard Butner’s “Ash City Stomp” were reprinted inThe Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.
Read stories:
- Greer Gilman’s A Crowd of Bone
- Maureen McHugh’s Eight-Legged Story
- Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s Insect Dreams
- Christopher Rowe’s The Force Acting on a Displaced Object
- Richard Butner’s Ash City Stomp
Multi-author interview. (An interview with Greer Gilman. And an older interview.)
Trampoline pictures
- “No unblinkered, gloveless reader can resist the stream of associations unleashed by Ford’s story and the rest of Trampoline: influences as disparate as science fiction, magic realism, pulp, and Twilight Zone morality plays.”
— Village Voice - “In short, Trampoline is yet another unique source of powerful, exciting, new approaches to fantasy and interstitial fiction. It is flexible enough and fresh enough that I hope it proves to be the beginning of a series. It occupies its own rather beautifully fragile place in the fantastical fiction milieu.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online - “The editor should be commended, not only for an intriguing compilation…but that she manages to stay out of the way of it. The only thing that intrudes here is her taste in the story selection and ordering. There’s no tiresome manifesto here, no chest-beating about movements or genres or rants against publishing mediocrity and how some merry band of rogues is going to revolutionize anything. She understands that the role of editor is to let the work speak for itself.”
— SF Site - Washington Post
Trampolines everywhere. Trampoline news alerts.
Trampoline, an anthology of mostly original fiction. Perhaps the first of an occasional series, perhaps the one and only of its kind. We’ll see.
20 stories ~ 140,000 words ~ 10 men ~ 10 women
Does not contain a manifesto.
Cover painting by Shelley Jackson.
Trampoline: an elastic mattress-like contrivance on which acrobats, gymnasts, &c. leap.
Trampoline: an original anthology edited by Kelly Link, the award-winning author of Stranger Things Happen, and co-editor of the zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Trampoline: twenty astounding stories by Christopher Barzak, Richard Butner, Alan DeNiro, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Greer Gilman, John Gonzalez, Glen Hirshberg, Samantha Hunt, Alex Irvine, Shelley Jackson, Beth Adele Long, Maureen McHugh, Susan Mosser, Ed Park, Christopher Rowe, Dave Shaw, Vandana Singh, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson.
O
For a mere $17 you and your friends around the world can read the finest fiction we’ve been able to find collected in one solid, easy to throw across the room, bouncy package.
Story selections have appeared (and maybe disappear) online. A roundtable interview is now bouncing across hypertext. All over the country home insurance companies will inquire, “Do you have a Trampoline?”
O
Ok, but who are these people? — photos, biographies, links to websites and blogs, news on
trampolining activities (parties and readings?), and maybe some other bouncy fun.
O
Table of Contents
Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Shelley Jackson, Angel
John Gonzalez, Impala
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
Dave Shaw, King of Spain
Susan Mosser, Bump Ship
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
Carol Emshwiller, Gods and Three Wishes
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
Karen Joy Fowler, King Rat
O
From the first line theory of reading:
T he little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch.
R amnath Mishra’s life changed forever one morning,
A ll this started when my father told my mother she was a waste.
M argaret, do you see the leaves?
P ristine silence was the law in the gleaming white halls of The Center for the Reification of Actual Probability.
O ne day when I was in the first grade Scott Arnold told me he was going to wash my face with snow on my way home from school.
L ately, Walter has been hard to live with.
I t’s the start of a brand new life, Johnny.”
N b. No story begins with the letter N. Is that odd? Should we be worried?
E xclusion Rights for minors?
O
A partial index of this anthology.
A poem, not connected to this anthology.
O
Available in all good book stores, libraries, coffee shops, Chuck e Cheese, and State Fairs. O
Vanilla Sky Redux
Mon 21 Jul 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Reviews| Posted by: Gavin
Vanilla Sky is told from the point of view of David Aames, a good looking (hey, he’s Tom Cruise!), millionaire (his father published TV Guide!), playboy (Cameron Diaz swallowed his cum — that means something!) who is not without his dark moments (his parents killed by a drunk driver!). Instead of a bat flying through his window to give direction to his life, this Bruce Wayne meets the batty Sofia Serrano, played by Penelope Cruz, and everything changes.
This is not a film review. The point of this essay is to trash the movie to explain how it could have (should have!) been better. So consider that your spoiler warning, combined with my opinion that this movie isn’t really worth watching in its current form anyway.
Foreigners
Sun 1 Jun 2003 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
Release came not as I expected — burdened with fines, restrictions, armed guard, and list of warnings longer than my conscience. Instead I walked away entirely free. The doctors, inquisitors, and officials did not visit my cell in the morning as they usually did. Only the middle-aged woman named Ardis entered the cell, without a guard. She arrived with the breakfast tray consisting of nothing out of the ordinary with its simple roll, butter, dab of marmalade, and small red pot of black tea. I stared at the tray trying to assess what was different. Had the commissary taken a second longer in arranging the items across the yellow plastic? Had the usual disarray of items proved unsatisfactory this day? The normally skewed angles of napkin, butter knife, and spoon — had they demanded straightening today? In my brief look at the tray I could see the kitchen help had thought to cut into a fresh lemon for the tea saucer, instead of reaching for a slice remaining from the day before. Or perhaps Ardis personally had overseen the assembly of this breakfast, even stopping to straighten its contents as she stood in the hall outside my cell. As she placed it on the immovable round table near the bed, she did so with greater care than usual. Read more
Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces
Sun 1 Jun 2003 - Filed under: Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
No.5in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces — written and illustrated by Wisconsin writer Mark Rich. Each of the nine stories (three of which are published here for the first time) is illustrated by Mark.
Reviews
“This chapbook of nine stories by Mark Rich offers a fine selection of some truly imaginative fiction. The stories fall open without warning, speaking their own languages with unfamiliar cadence, insisting that you give them your full attention if you plan to attend to them at all. Mark Rich has a little bit of Richard Brautigan in him, something magical in his sentences that charms, even when you don’t understand where they are taking you. My love affair with fiction has become complicated since I finished grad school, and I am heartened when I discover stories that remind me of the inherent beauty of language, and the way it can sparkle when used in the right hands (his are the right hands).”
— Xerography Debt, no.12
“There is some interesting stuff here. He seems to do best with stories that involve gardening.” — A Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press, no.20
“Rich’s confident and compact prose is spiked with sci-fi quirks that veer in unexpected but ever-rewarding directions.”
— Broken Pencil no.23
Contents
Wrong Door
Mrs. Hewitt’s Tulips
Take Me
Ashes of Penis Thrown to Sea
Kiss of The Wood Woman
Idiosynchronicity
On the Collection of Humans
Foreigners
Exfoliation
“Speculative fiction as it should be, without fear of boundaries or consideration of catagories. Each story is absolutely true to itself and utterly unique.”
— Richard Bowes
“Mark Rich is the only writer in existence who can make my mouth fall open.”
— Michael Kandel
“Humor, surrealism, a unique world view — Mark Rich’s short fiction is refreshing, original, and wonderfully written. Any new Mark Rich collection is highly recommended.”
— Jeff VanderMeer
Who is Mark Rich?
Is he A) The jaunty, offbeat stories of Mark Rich have appeared since the 1980s in venues ranging from small humor and literary zines to the slick pages of science fiction monthlies. Since the appearance of his first collection of stores, Lifting (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1991), he has published three books about toys, including the dictionary-style compendium Toys A to Z (Krause Publications, 2001). He writes a multitude of columns about toy history for collecting magazines, pens the occasional drawing, such as the ones found in this chapbook, and leads the rock band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind, which performs in the central Wisconsin area where he makes his home with partner and fellow musician Martha Borchardt. They have no pets.
Is he B) Mark Rich first wrote stories as a child in Colorado in the 1960s. He began publishing occasional poems and reviews in newspapers and zines in his teens, and started two speculative poetry zines before entering college. In some ways, entering college meant the end to his early writing efforts, although he did win a poetry prize and edited the campus newspaper during this time. He earned a degree in music from Beloit College in 1980. In the early 1980s he made his income from a combination of music, artwork, and writing, more the first two than the last; and as a secretary and occasional house painter and cleaning person. His income never rose above the poverty level for fifteen years. In the ’80s he co-founded The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, with Roger Dutcher; managed the Turtle Creek Food Co-op in Beloit, Wis.; worked parttime as editorial assistant and arts reviewer for the Beloit Daily News; participated in local art exhibits, with awards including a Juror’s Award in a regional show; and formed the short-lived bands Auto Da Fe and the Glass Doves. His first collection of short stories, Lifting,appeared in 1991 from David Memmott’s press, Wordcraft of Oregon. Though a small book, it won the Leslie Cross award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers. Afterwards his fiction began appearing in the professional press, beginning with Amazing Stories and Bantam anthology Full Spectrum 4. In the mid-1990s he became a regular contributor to Analog; and he published the letters-oriented zine Kornblume: Kornbluthiana, focusing on the life and works of Cyril Kornbluth. In the late 1990s, he began contributing columns about toy collecting and toy history to collecting magazines, and since then has published three books on toy history. In 2001 he established the band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind with his partner in life and music, Martha Borchardt. The band’s first CD, Drive, appeared in 2002. Now a five-piece ensemble, the band performs in the central Wisconsin area.
Or C) Mark Rich’s life has been largely unsatisfactory, from the point of view of those who measure accomplishment by the bottom results of a balance sheet. He has, however, provided some help to a few prairie plants and miscellaneous amphibians; has published a few verses; has published a few drawings; has bought people a few beers; has put together and taken apart a few bands; has published a great number of photographs, mostly of toys; has published hundreds of thousands of words about toys; has helped out a few souls in meager literary ways; has published a few stories; has published a few books; has published a little literary criticism; has rescued a few earthworms; has cooked some good meals; has mixed some fine classic martinis; has drunk some excellent beers; has gone on some excellent walks; has provided a source of worry to his family; has read some good books; has grown a few longs hairs; and has grown a few gray hairs. This is his second collection of short stories.
Or some combination. Or all three. Or something else entirely??
Here’s his website, where you can find out more about the man, the music, the toys, oh yes, the toys.
Mark’s art was featured in LCRW 11 and on the cover of LCRW 5. His short story, “Delivery”, appeared in LCRW 9.
Mark’s been writing for years, and has been published in Tales of the Unanticipated, Analog, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Age, The Silver Web, Keen Science Fiction, Plot, Palace Corbie, Nova 5, and the anthologies The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection, Universe 3, Full Spectrum 4… etc., etc.
Some of the stories in Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces were previously published in the following places:
Ashes of Penis Thrown to Sea, Stygian Articles (No. 11, October 1997)
Exfoliation, Talebones (No. 1, Winter 1996)
Foreigners, Full Spectrum 4 (Bantam Doubleday Dell: 1993).
Idiosynchronicity (as Idiosynchrasies), SF Age (3:3, March 1995)
Mrs. Hewitt’s Tulips, in Tales of the Unanticipated (No. 20, August 1999)
On the Collection of Humans, appeared originally in Nova (U.K; 1993) and Year’s Best Science Fiction 11 (St. Martin’s: 1994)
Take Me, Wrong Door, and Kiss of the Wood Woman appear here for the first time.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 12
Sun 1 Jun 2003 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Gavin J. Grant. Right lane must turn right. Left lane must turn left.
Kelly Link. Good things, yes. Bad things, no.
Fiction
Jan Lars Jensen — Happier Days
The theme for our ten year grad reunion was “Happy Days.” I’m not sure why this particular show was selected, as we had graduated long after the ’50s, and the series had been cancelled before most of us met in high school. I’m not even sure why we needed a theme — a reunion wasn’t a prom. But I guess “Happy Days” generated a feeling of nostalgia that the organizers hoped would rub off on our event, and few people could claim they had never seen an episode.
David Erik Nelson — Bay
Ursula Pflug — In Dreams We Remember
Richard Parks — The Plum Blossom Lantern
Michiko’s servant girl Mai carried the deep pink lantern to light their way through the dark city streets. Mai was dead. Since Michiko was, too, that didn’t seem so strange. In fact, very little about the situation struck Michiko as odd or even very different from when she was alive. She did have one regret, however — her feet. Michiko missed having feet.
Nick Mamatas — Found Wedged in the Side Drawer in Paris, France, 23 December, 1989
Lena DeTar — Definitions
Jennifer Rachel Baumer — Spirits of Sage, Wind, and Sun
Philip Raines and Harvey Welles — The Fishie
Catchie hears first. “‘mam! Noisy in the ground!”
Spitmam scoops away sleep and releasing Catchie from her bed grasp, listens for the disturbance beyond the cottage.
“Hear? Under rock, ‘mam! Under and deep, calling to the folk!”
“You say, you say.” In a grumbly witter, Spitmam swings on her longcoat and unlodges the door. The night’s cold as groundstone, but Spitmam bends stiff knees to lay an ear to one of the pathway flags.
“You’re hearing it,” she tells the girl quietly. “That thumping’s surely under. And a grand thing’s there!”
Nonfiction
Jack Cheng — Mesopotamians, All
Richard Butner — How to Make a Martini
“I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.” — James Douglas Morrison
Drink what you like, so you can talk to assholes including yourself. But. But you might want to have a martini. And here’s how to make one.
First off, martinis are made of gin and vermouth. If you make one with vodka, it’s not a martini; it’s a vodka martini. If you make one without vermouth, it’s not a martini, it’s cold gin, which is a perfectly fine KISS song but perhaps not a perfectly fine beverage.
The state of being in a martini glass does not instantly confer martini-hood on any given concoction. Some perfectly fine drinks are served in martini glasses (aka cocktail glasses, as opposed to old-fashioned glasses or Collins glasses or cordial glasses). Gimlets, say. Hell, even Lemon Drops. There is no such thing as a Choco-Banana Martini, though.
L. Timmel Duchamp — What’s the Story? Reading Deena Metzger’s The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them
Zines reviews & credits
William Smith — The Film Column: Don’t Look Now
Poetics
Christoph Meyer — Death Ditty
Cara Spindler — Five Poems
Nancy Jane Moore — Resilience
Anne Sheldon — Two Poems
Contributors
Jennifer Rachel Baumer lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband/best friend/sometime editor Rick and a rapidly expanding number of cats. She wrote “Spirits” at Clarion after news from home of a shooting at the local market. When not writing fiction Jennifer can be found procrastinating on writing nonfiction, from which she makes a tentative living.
Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you. Read his story “Other Agents” from LCRW no.5. His story “Ash City Stomp” provided the inspiration for Shelley Jackson’s painting for the cover of Trampoline.
Jack Cheng works on archaeological excavations in Turkey and Syria. He is writing a book on Assyrian music when not playing with his new son Austin. Earlier contributions to LCRW include a review of Vanilla Sky, an email exchange in no.7, and illustrations in no.4.
Lena DeTar is currently teaching English in Nara, Japan. She will be attending a Science Writing (journalism) MA program at Johns Hopkins next year. As for philosophy, she may be Buddhist. Or not. It deserves more meditation.
L. Timmel Duchamp is a regular columnist for LCRW. She has published a prodigious quantity of fiction in addition to a modest number of essays. She is an editor at Fantastic Metropolis.Intrepid voyagers may discover and explore her work here.
Jan Lars Jensen grew up in Yarrow, B.C. and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. His first novel, Shiva 3000, was published by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the U.K. Raincoast Books will publish a nonfiction work, tentatively titled Nervous System, in 2004.
Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-losing short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull Press) and of short stories appearing in Razor, Strange Horizons, Wide Angle NY, and The Whirligig. This bio is already longer than his story, so just look at his website.
Christoph Meyer lives in Danville, OH. He is an enthusiast. His zine, 28 Pages Lovingly Bound with Twine, is indeed that, and should be read.
Nancy Jane Moore‘s fiction has appeared in various anthologies, some magazines, and the occasional webzine, but this is the first time her poetry has appeared anywhere besides her high school literary magazine. Her story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” appeared in LCRW no.8.
David Erik Nelson currently lives somewhere in America with his anonymous fiancee and X number of dogs. He has never been associated with the publication Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), and asks that you disregard that vile, scurrilous rag entirely.
Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and three cats. His work has appeared inAsimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies. His first short story collection, The Ogre’s Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups, was published in 2002 by Obscura Press.
A contemporary fantasy/magic realist novel by Ursula Pflug, Green Music has recently been released by Tesseract Books. Pflug has had over forty short stories professionally published, at home in Canada and internationally in both speculative and mainstream venues, in print and on the web (Holy Mackerels, Late for Dinner, Sky Rise, Python). She has frequently written about art and books for Toronto’s Now Magazine and other venues, worked in editorial for three years at the cultural journal The Peterborough Review, and co-written several short films including,Memory Lapse At The Waterfront — based on a published Pflug short story, it has shown at festivals and has been sold to television. Pflug has taught writing workshops to both adults and children. She has read her short fiction at countless public readings. She has received several Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grants in support of her fiction; her theatre work has also been supported by the OAC and by the Laidlaw Foundation. She has had three plays professionally staged and has been writing and performing with Seaskum, a Peterborough based all girl comedy troupe. She is a member of SF Canada and Broad Universe. Formerly a full time graphic artist, she has concentrated on her writing since moving to the rural Kawarthas from Toronto with her family, fifteen years ago. In their spare time, they are building a teleporter together.
Philip Raines and Harvey Welles have published stories in The Fractal, New Genre, and Albedo One, and have won the UK Bridport Prize short story competition. Phil is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle. Harvey lives in Milwaukee.
Anne Sheldon was born in Washington, DC, in 1945. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Spitball, Weird Tales, and Edge City Review, among other small magazines, and in a chapbook,Lancastrian Letters, and a book, Hero-Surfing. She is a poet-in-the-schools, working through the Maryland State Arts Council, and teaches storytelling at the library school of the University of Maryland.
William Smith is a regular columnist for LCRW. He is on the cusp of publishing a zine, Trunk Stories. We are note with awe that his review of Don’t Look Now did not include a reference tothat scene.
Cara Spindler lives in Michigan and teaches creative writing, in high schools for money and prisons for free. Her poetry has most recently appeared in The Driftwood Review, Poor Mojo’s Almanac, and Spinning Jenny.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.12 June 2003. LCRW appears twice a year from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Contents the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Thanks for those, Richard. No extras this time, no footnotes, no recipes spelled out in the first letter of each story (see no. 8). Apples, etc. read from back to front. Remove the figure from the head, what’s left? Is there a ship? Is there a state? There is a state, disunited. Mostly, when we read the news, we are sad. It is annoying to feel so sad and useless. We want to revolt, but non-violently, because we do not believe in violence. The ends don’t justify those means and all that. But what does it mean when every day, every day, another freedom is taken away, another imbalance is made law, another good law (yes, good) is wiped off the books. Revolution now.
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Lord Stink & Other Stories
Fri 1 Nov 2002 - Filed under: Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
Now with T-shirts (and mini bears)
No.4 in the Small Beer Chapbook Series. “Election Day” is new to this collection. “Lord Stink” and “The Window” were published in Asimov’s and “Dream of Rain” was originally published in Interzone. “The Window” was a runner-up for the 1999 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and one of Locus‘s Top Ten Stories of 1999.
Cover art by Shelley Jackson.
Interviews:
Reviews
“On the basis of Lord Stink and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, chapbook, $5.00, 76 pages, ISBN unavailable), Judith Berman is a skillful, passionate writer who proceeds at her own measured pace to produce quality craftsmanship from her workshop. Two stories here, the title piece and “Dream of Rain” are mythic, fairytale-like fantasies that evoke the best of Ursula Le Guin. The heretofore unpublished “Election Day,” by contrast, is a madcap Tim-Powersish romp involving talking mirrors, reanimated corpses and a touchingly awkward, nascent love affair. Finally, “The Window” moves into Carol Emshwiller territory with its tale of an Earth overrun by the Grubs, and how humanity fares as pets. Berman exhibits a sure hand and a sharp imagination. Seeing more of her work will be a pleasure, especially at possibly longer lengths.”
–Paul Di Filippo, Asimov’s
“…should whet readers’ appetites for the author’s upcoming novel from Ace, The Bear’s Daughter”
— Tangent Online
“Judith Berman hasn’t been very prolific. These stories represent most of her output to date, to my knowledge, but they are intriguing works, displaying considerable range and a fine new voice.”
— Locus Online (far down the page)
Contents
Lord Stink
Election Day
Dream of Rain
The Window
Who is Judith Berman?
Here’s her website, which may tell you some more about her. Raised in the wilds of Idaho, Berman is an anthropologist and now lives with her family in Philadelphia, PA. Her first novel, Bear Daughter, follows on from her story, “Lord Stink” (see above).
Her essay, “Science Fiction Without the Future,” published in May 2001 in the New York Review of Science Fiction, won the 2002 Pioneer Award for Best Critical Essay. Bruce Sterling said it was “[P]robably the most important piece of science fiction criticism in the last ten years.” Berman published another essay “Models of Time: Imagining the Future,” in the New York Review of Science Fiction (September 2002).
Berman read at KGB Bar in August of 2002 (pictures).
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 11
Fri 1 Nov 2002 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Notes (& Letters)
In our last issue, no.10, we once again attempted to bring the magnificent fictions of Barbara Gilly to the public. Instead, our run of bad luck continued, and the expensive glossy insert (pages 23-26) painstakingly put together last winter apparently appeared in only a few copies. Disappointed as we are, however, we have been energized by the reaction of those readers who received the full magazine. However, we are not afraid to admit to our mistakes, and a selection of letters from those who did not receive the full issue follow.
We extend our apologies to all our readers.
On consideration, we have developed a plan that is sure to be a winner: our next issue, no.12, hitting the stands and subscribers hands in June 2003, will be an all-Barbara Gilly issue!
To ensure quality and timeliness, we have had our interns working on it since September — thanks guys! (We’ll miss them when we move to Northampton — more on that later — but we’ll make sure none of these young men and women lack for glowing recommendations when they leave.)
The interns have had a great response from some very well-known writers who have promised us appreciations, reviews, critical looks, and, unexpectedly and a little puzzling, more.
Issue 12 — our first special issue devoted to a single writer — will be produced concurrently with issue 13 to satisfy the regular readers of this periodical.
Please note the change of address. Our thumb was stuck out and we were given a lift. They took us as far as Northampton, MA, so that’s where we will be for the foreseeable future. It is current as of November 2002, our new address, thank you. Also, please keep us up to date with your moves.
A note on the cover: a ticket from a film, a day together, what happened later.
A note on the type: Bodoni Book, with creamy highlights that, in a certain light, are reminiscent of the morning sun over the mountains of the moon.
A note on the printing:
By Design Ink
2208 Frankfort Ave.
Louisville, KY 40206
(502) 899-3551
A note on these notes: where is the copyeditor?
Contents
Fiction
Theodora Goss — The Rapid Advance of Sorrow
Neil Williamson — Messianic Con Brio
Sarah Monette — Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland*
John Rubins — Ewe and Eye
Christine Klingbiel — Enemies and Neighbors
Minsoo Kang — Three Stories: Lady Faraway, The Well of Dreams, The Dilemma of the King and the Beggar
Benjamin Rosenbaum — Fig
Molly Gloss — Eating Ashes
*A picture of Sarah wearing the Elise Matthesen necklace that inspired the story.
Nonfiction
L. Timmel Duchamp — What’s the Story? Viewing Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own
Leslie Burmeister — Newly Important Information
Zines
Oil and Greece
William Smith — The Film Column: Donnie Darko
Notes & Letters
Jimmy Carter — The Nobel Peace Prize — Long Deserved
Poetics
Nan Fry
— The Wolf’s Story
— Names for Bear
David Moles — Tacoma-Fuji
Kathryn Cramer
— The Mourners
— What Stopped Jack
Interior and back cover art — Mark Rich
Contributors
Leslie Burmeister was raised in California and now lives on the east coast. Although an accomplished surfer and possessed of a flair for mixing martinis, she presently works in publishing.
Kathryn Cramer grew up in Seattle. She is married and by the time this is published, should be the proud mother of a new daughter. She has won a World Fantasy Award for best anthology.
Despite an early disappointment when her soccer career was scotched by a low-flying egg, L. Timmel Duchamp has had some success raising stories and essays in the wilds of Washington State.
Nan Fry is the author of two collections of poetry:Say What I Am Called, a chapbook of riddles translated from Anglo-Saxon (Sibyl-Child Press) andRelearning the Dark (from Washington Writers Publishing House). The Poetry Society of America has installed one of her poems on posters in the transit systems of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore as part of its Poetry in Motion Program. Another poem is being carved into a bench that will be placed at a trolley stop in Bethesda, MD. She is chair of the Academic Studies Department of the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., where she teaches courses on children’s literature, the environment, and wolves.
Molly Gloss, a fourth-generation Oregonian, lives in Portland, OR. She is the author of four novels:Outside The Gates, The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, and Wild Life, and more than two dozen short stories, essays, and book reviews. Awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Center West Fiction Prize, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Wild Life was the Seattle Public Library/Washington Center for the Book 2002 selection for “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book.” This story is also available on her website.
— an interview with Molly Gloss
— an excerpt from Wild Life
Theodora Goss dreams about the University. She wonders why corridors keep leading to staircases, staircases to corridors. She thinks she may be late for class, and what is she supposed to be teaching anyway? Find her, if you can, at theodoragoss.com.
Minsoo Kang has lived in Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Iran, Brunei, Germany, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in European History at UCLA, writing his dissertation on the symbolic significance of the automaton in the Western imagination. His historical works and reviews have appeared in American Historical Review, Times Literary Supplement, Manoa, AZ, Rethinking History, Comitatus, and two essay collections.
Christine Klingbiel teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, assists in magic shows, and models for a fantasy artist. She is currently working on a collection of magic related stories. Secrets may be revealed! Someone call FOX! This piece was first created for a flash fiction reading where the second to last line was assigned.
David Moles has lived in six time zones on three continents and hopes some day to collect the whole set. In addition to LCRW, his work will also appear in Polyphony. His favorite color is blue and his favorite ape is the siamang (Hylobates syndactylus). He currently lives in Seattle.
Sarah Monette is working on her doctoral thesis, watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and bracing herself for winter. Another of her short stories is in press with All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society.
Mark Rich is responsible for many pieces of art within this issue. Small Beer Press will publish his new chapbook, Foreigners and Other Faces, in 2003.
Usually Benjamin Rosenbaum goes with his daughter to buy figs at the Migros Supermarkt down Gorenmattstrasse on Friday mornings. Aviva can ride on the back of the bicycle now and she is soooooexcited about that. But today, when he came to work in Zurich, there were figs for free in the cafeteria. He took two. Ben’s stories can be found in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Vestal Review, and Harper’s.
John Rubins was once given an invisible dog on a leash as a birthday present by his fellow office workers. He thanked them. Other heroic acts of his have appeared in Surgery of Modern Warfare, The Southeast Review, American Journal of Print, andelimae . He lives in Vermont with two women and edits the online fiction monthly tatlinstower.com.
William Smith is chasing a certain green fairy even as you read this. When you stop reading, he will stop chasing it. He likes that you are still reading. Smith lives in a 42-room mansion in northern Pennsylvania, where films are watched, made, and dissected. He has no website.
Neil Williamson lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such asInterzone and The Third Alternative, and a short, factual treatise on the subject of dental health will appear in the 2003 edition of that perennial medical favourite, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.11 November 2002. LCRW appears twice a year from Small Beer Press. Wow! Another new address! info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Contents the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. We lie awake at night wondering where they are. Sometimes we get up and watching the night sky for a bit. There isn’t much to see, from the city. We never hear from Joe and his pal, that astronaut fellow, anymore. We wonder what happened.
###
The Mount: Chapter One
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Novel Excerpts| Posted by: Gavin
We’re not against you, we’re for. In fact we’re built for you and you for us — we, so our weak little legs will dangle on your chest and our tail down the back. Exactly as you so often transport your own young when they are weak and small. It’s a joy. Just like a mother-walk.
You’ll be free. You’ll have a pillow. You’ll have a water faucet and a bookcase. We’ll pat you if you do things fast enough and don’t play hard to catch. We’ll rub your legs and soak your feet. Sams and Sues, and you Sams had better behave yourselves.
You still call us aliens in spite of the fact that we’ve been on your world for generations. And why call aliens exactly those who’ve brought health and happiness to you? And look how well we fit, you and us. As if born for each other even though we come from different worlds.
James Tiptree Letter to Carol Emshwiller
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Authors| Posted by: Gavin
A letter to Carol Emshwiller from James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), with spelling and puctuation left intact. See a jpg of the original.
| 24 May 75
Dear Carol Emshwiller: May a stranger make known how much your book, JOY IN OUR CAUSE has been enjoyed? Weak word, meant to include admired, goggled at, occasionally genuflected to, been rivetted in entrancement by, and, not least, suffered suicidal inferiority-convictions from. But before I go on, please—do not, I beg of you, feel that this letter must be acknowledged, etc. etc.—I should hate to think that I had robbed your time. I’m also a writer of minor sorts and I know what a curse unsolicited communications can be. So just pop this in the round file and know that the pleasure of expressing pleasure completes the act. (It does, you know; strange thing this impulse to say, how good, how good.) I’ve come across your stories before, of course, but in the awful manner of avid readers half the time I hadn’t connected the memory with the author’s name. Having them all together is precious. You would have been amused to watch me rationing them like treats at one a day. I suppose that in a letter like this one should make some gesture towards evaluation, at least to the extent of demonstrating that your reader and fan is minimally conscious. Has anyway their buttons buttoned. But it’s hard. They are so much of a piece. If I were forced at gunpoint, I guess I could mutter something about a slight preference for those that build —the ANIMAL, of course, and perhaps most MR. MORRISON—Oh god. But then, Oh, I couldn’t do without THE ASSOCIATION. And the deliciously hideous Dr. Alexander Ostrander. And Mr. Perlou on the stairs…No, no, we will not choose. Lord what a thankless thing it must be to produce such exquisiteness. How many aficionados of the unexpected are there? Multitudes, I hope. But I doubt. By the way, I think that is the culminating aspect of your work. The sheer damned total implacable unexpectedness. Causing reader who also writes to tear out the remaining hair. Again by the way, I found your address in our old SFWA directory. It’s nice you see fit to belong to us. That really is nice. With every good wish, James (Tip) Tiptree Jr. PS. That was meant, about not replying. |
||
| Published with the permission of the Estate of Alice B. Sheldon. |
Mrs. Jones
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories| Posted by: Gavin
Carol Emshwiller | from Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories
Cora is a morning person. Her sister, Janice, hardly feels conscious till late afternoon. Janice nibbles fruit and berries and complains of her stomach. Cora eats potatoes with butter and sour cream. She likes being fat. It makes her feel powerful and hides her wrinkles. Janice thinks being thin and willowy makes her look young, though she would admit that — and even though Cora spends more time outside doing the yard and farm work — Cora’s skin does look smoother. Janice has a slight stutter. Normally she speaks rapidly and in a kind of shorthand so as not to take up anyone’s precious time, but with her stutter, she can hold peoples’ attention for a moment longer than she would otherwise dare. Cora, on the other hand, speaks slowly, and if she had ever stuttered, would have seen to it she learned not to.
Carol Emshwiller Reviews
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Authors, Carol Emshwiller| Posted by: Gavin
Reviews: The Mount : Report to the Men’s Club : Joint Reviews
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The Village Voice: Our 25 Favorite Books of 2002
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San Francisco Chronicle: 10 Best SF&F of the Year
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Book Magazine
* Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute in its delineation of the complex relationships between masters and slaves, pets and owners, the served and the serving, this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times.”
School Library Journal
“Adult/High School – This veteran science-fiction writer is known for original plots and characters, and her latest novel does not disappoint, offering an extraordinary, utterly alien, and thoroughly convincing culture set in the not-too-distant future. Emshwiller brings readers immediately into the action, gradually revealing the takeover of Earth by the Hoots, otherworldly beings with superior intelligence and technology. Humans have become the Hoots’ “mounts,” and, in the case of the superior Seattle bloodline, valuable racing stock. Most mounts are well off, as the Hoots constantly remind them, and treated kindly by affectionate owners who use punishment poles as rarely as possible. No one agrees more than principal narrator Charley, a privileged young Seattle whose rider-in-training will someday rule the world. The adolescent mount’s dream is of bringing honor to his beloved Little Master by becoming a great champion like Beauty, his sire, whose portrait decorates many Hoot walls. When Charley learns that his father now leads the renegade bands called Wilds, he and Little Master flee. This complex and compelling blend of tantalizing themes offers numerous possibilities for speculation and discussion, whether among friends or in the classroom.”
Laura Miller, Salon
“Emshwiller’s prose is beautiful”
The Women’s Review of Books
“The Mount is a brilliant book. But be warned: It takes root in the mind and unleashes aftershocks at inopportune moments.”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Carol Emshwiller has been writing fantasy, speculative and science fiction for many years; she has a dedicated cult following and has been an influence on a number of today’s top writers…. it is very easy to fall into the rhythm of Emshwiller’s poetic and smooth sentences”
F&SF Magazine
[A]s Carmen Dog and “Mrs. Jones” – Emshwiller balances delicately on the beam, carrying the tale straight-faced with a combination of precise language, gentle humor, a near-perfectly pitched voice, and a tenderness toward her characters that draws us in and beguiles us…. As Kim Stanley Robinson observes in his blurb forThe Mount, we are all mounts — we’re all caught up in one way or another in systems like Hoot servitude, kept in our places by fear, or a love of ease, or inertia, or sheer laziness. Emshwiller reminds us of this, shows us how it happens, and how very difficult it can be to escape.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Emshwiller’s themes — the allure of submission, the temptations of complicity, the perverse nature of compassion — are not usual fare in novels of resistance and revolt, and her strikingly imaginative novel continues to surpass our expectations to the very last page.”
The Village Voice
“Carol Emshwiller’s elegant new novel, The Mount, is both fantastical and unnerving in its familiarity. And like her work in romance and westerns, its genre-twisting plot resists easy classification.”
Locus
“[Carol Emshwiller] may be the most brilliantly perverse dreamer of them all…. What is it like to spend a few days alone with Carol Emshwiller? Startling, a process of immersion very different from encountering the occasionally piece in an anthology, and a revelation for anyone unfamiliar with her history….”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Emshwiller uses a deceptively simple narrative voice that gives The Mount the style of a young-adult novel. But there’s much going on beneath the surface of this narrative, including oblique flashes of humor and artfully articulated moments of psychological insight. The Mount emerges as one of the season’s unexpected small pleasures.”
Booklist
“A memorable alien-invasion scenario, a wild adventure, and a reflection on the dynamics of freedom and slavery.”
Asimovs
“…a profound novel of amazing depth and intimacy.”
Bookslut
It’s a brilliant piece of work…
Rambles
“In a recent interview with Science Fiction Weekly, Ursula Le Guin called Emshwiller “the most unappreciated great writer we’ve got.” The Mount proves Le Guin right…. If Emshwiller is not already on your top bookshelf,The Mount will put her there.”
BookPage
“…a beautifully written allegorical tale full of hope that even the most unenlightened souls can shrug off the bonds of internalized oppression and finally see the light.”
Fearless Reviews
“While whimsical and entertaining at times, The Mount raises some potent questions. It will make you laugh, but it will also make you think. This would be a wonderful book for classroom or book club discussions. Buy it, read it, recommend it to your friends.”
Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories
The Women’s Review of Books
“Emshwiller sentences are are transparent and elegant at the same time. Her vocabulary, though rich and flexible, is never arcane.”
Jane magazine, October, 2002:
Locus
“The Mount combines elements of E.T., Black Beauty, Huckleberry Finn, and some very twisted fairy tales in a way that’s uniquely Emshwiller. It’s crazy, horrific, absurd, moving — and it works, as account of both individual maturation and a conquered planet’s coming of age.”
Publishers Weekly
“Carol Emshwiller (Carmen Dog, etc.) lends her elegant wit to Report to the Men’s Club, a collection of 19 fantastic short fictions treating the war between the sexes. Such tales as “Grandma,” “Foster Mother” and “Prejudice and Pride” are brim-full of wry insights into male-female relationships. Testimonials from Samuel R. Delaney, Maureen McHugh, Terry Bisson and Connie Willis, among other big names, should send this one into extra printings. Emshwiller is also the author of a new novel, The Mount.“
Kirkus Reviews
“A daring, eccentric, and welcome observer of darkly human ways emerges from these 19 motley tales. Often writing in an ironical first-person voice, storywriter and novelist Emshwiller (Leaping Man Hill, 1999, etc.) assumes the persona of the outsider or renegade who flees the community as if to test boundaries and possibilities. In “After All,” the narrator is a grandmother who decides to set out on a “makeshift journey” in her bathrobe and slippers simply because it is time. The setting is vague: she flaps through the town and then into the hills, pursued, she is sure, by her children, and, in the end, she is merely happy not “to miss all the funny things that might have happened later had the world lasted beyond me.” Both in “Foster Mother” and “Creature,” the mature, quirky narrators take on the care of an abandoned, otherworldly foundling and attempt to test their survival together in the wilds. In other stories, a character’s affection for a scarred pariah forces her out of her home and through a stormy transformation-as in the sensationally creepy “Mrs. Jones.” Of the two middle-aged spinster sisters, Cora and Janice, Janice is the fattish conspicuous one who decides to tame and civilize at her own peril the large batlike creature she finds wounded in the sisters’ apple orchard. Janice does get her husband, and through skillful details and use of irony, the story becomes a chilling, tender portrait of the sisters’ dependence and fragility. At her best, Emshwiller writes with a kind of sneaky precision by drawing in the reader with her sympathetic first person, then pulling out all recognizable indicators; elsewhere, as the long-winded “Venus Rising” (based on work by Elaine Morgan),the pieces read like way-far-out allegories. A startling, strong fourth collection by this author-look for her upcoming The Mount.“
Booklist
“This strange collection of stories is populated by creatures of all sorts, human and alien. The collection-closing title piece takes the form of a speech given to a men’s club by someone who has just been initiated into membership, despite the accident of birth that made her biologically female. The other stories range topically from the faith of a scribe in “Modillion” to love at first sight in “Nose.” What makes them satisfying is the personalities of their characters. Even the shortest pieces present characters who possess all the force of real persons who might be standing beside us. For the most part, Emshwiller keeps the stories simple, engaging us with their characterization rather than fast, copious action. We stay engaged because they render enough emotion to sustain our creaturely interest.”
Asimovs
“…the news that she has a new collection out, and that the collection includes seven hitherto-unpublished pieces, is joyous…”
NYRSF
“her long-awaited fourth collection of short fiction is…a real joy to read. This is a collection to delight and intrigue readers and writers of all persuasions. Go out and buy it now.”
Time Out New York
Carol Emshwiller is often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” an ostensibly laudatory term that usually refers to artists who aren’t getting the attention they deserve. An eminence at 81, Emshwiller is also almost exclusively categorized as a science-fiction writer or fantasy writer when the truth is that she uses genre elements in ways that usually subvert the genres she’s supposedly writing in. A sad formula: writer’s writer + genre = obscurity. Thank God, then, for Small Beer, a Brooklyn-based press dedicated to publishing short-story writers, has released Emshwiller’s two new books: Report to the Men’s Club, a short-story collection, and The Mount, a novel.
Let’s start with the stories. Elliptical, funny and stylish, they are for the most part profoundly unsettling. In “Mrs. Jones,” a spinster tries to one-up her sister in an ongoing codependent battle by trapping and seducing the angel (demon? alien?) that is living in their orchard. In “Creature,” a man cohabitates with a massive female monster — one of a race that has been engineered to kill him. In “One Part of the Self Is Always Tall and Dark,” a woman, happily convinced that she is going crazy, dreams of long sentences composed of nothing but three-letter words: “She was far out and tip top too.”
As wonderful as the stories are, the real treat here is The Mount, a fable/fantasy/cautionary tale along the lines of, say, Animal Farm. It’s the story of Charlie, a preadolescent human who’s being used as a horse by shoulder-riding alien invaders known as Hoots. Charlie wants nothing more than to become a great Mount, a loyal slave and servant, until his father, a renegade Mount who has fled from the Hoots and now lives in the mountains, comes to take him away. Like so much of Emshwiller’s work, The Mount asks difficult questions — in this case, What is freedom? The issue is particularly appropriate at a time when “freedom” in America is increasingly defined as “security”– freedom from uncertainty, freedom from fear, freedom from want. All of which is, in the end, not really freedom at all.
SF Site
This is a wonderful collection of short fiction, marked by tremendous variety, a wonderful, funny, knowing, and sympathetic voice, and a truly off-center imagination…. Carol Emshwiller is a real treasure. She seems underappreciated to me, but this late burst of productivity may help remedy that situation. Both The Mountand Report to the Men’s Club are first rate books.
On to:
The Mount
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 200 pages · 9781931520034 | ebook
Philip K. Dick Award Winner
Nebula Award finalist
Best of the Year: Locus, Village Voice, Book Magazine
Impac Award nominee
The Carol Emshwiller project.
Charley is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives in a stable. He isn’t a runner, he’s a mount. He belongs to a Hoot: The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn’t seen his mother for years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he’s going to have to learn how to be a human being.
Start reading now:
“We’re not against you, we’re for. In fact we’re built for you and you for us — we, so our weak little legs will dangle on your chest and our tail down the back. Exactly as you so often transport your own young when they are weak and small. It’s a joy. Just like a mother-walk.” Read Chapter One
Reviews and reaction to The Mount:
“What’s compelling about this beautifully-written novel, though, is that it’s no simple ‘aliens oppress humans’ tale. It explores what happens when humans get used to, and even enjoy, their servitude.”
— Charlie Jane Anders, io9.com, 10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading
“Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute in its delineation of the complex relationships between masters and slaves, pets and owners, the served and the serving, this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This veteran science-fiction writer is known for original plots and characters, and her latest novel does not disappoint, offering an extraordinary, utterly alien, and thoroughly convincing culture set in the not-too-distant future. Emshwiller brings readers immediately into the action, gradually revealing the takeover of Earth by the Hoots, otherworldly beings with superior intelligence and technology. Humans have become the Hoots’ “mounts,” and, in the case of the superior Seattle bloodline, valuable racing stock. Most mounts are well off, as the Hoots constantly remind them, and treated kindly by affectionate owners who use punishment poles as rarely as possible. No one agrees more than principal narrator Charley, a privileged young Seattle whose rider-in-training will someday rule the world. The adolescent mount’s dream is of bringing honor to his beloved Little Master by becoming a great champion like Beauty, his sire, whose portrait decorates many Hoot walls. When Charley learns that his father now leads the renegade bands called Wilds, he and Little Master flee. This complex and compelling blend of tantalizing themes offers numerous possibilities for speculation and discussion, whether among friends or in the classroom.”
—School Library Journal
“Most definitely a strange novel. . . . Emshwiller’s prose is beautiful.”
—Laura Miller, Salon
“Emshwiller’s themes—the allure of submission, the temptations of complicity, the perverse nature of compassion—are not usual fare in novels of resistance and revolt, and her strikingly imaginative novel continues to surpass our expectations to the very last page.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Mount, particularly, is a marvel; originally published by a tiny Massachusetts art-house publisher, this novel—about a distant future wherein humans are content to be the transport animals (complete with bits and saddles) for tiny aliens who have enslaved us—is so refreshingly weird and allegorical that it evokes some of the earliest masters of the genre, like Orwell and Verne.”
—The Stranger
“The Mount is a brilliant book. But be warned: It takes root in the mind and unleashes aftershocks at inopportune moments.”
—The Women’s Review of Books
“Carol Emshwiller’s elegant new novel, The Mount, is both fantastical and unnerving in its familiarity. And like her work in romance and westerns, its genre-twisting plot resists easy classification.”
— The Village Voice
“Emshwiller uses a deceptively simple narrative voice that gives The Mount the style of a young-adult novel. But there’s much going on beneath the surface of this narrative, including oblique flashes of humor and artfully articulated moments of psychological insight. The Mount emerges as one of the season’s unexpected small pleasures.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A memorable alien-invasion scenario, a wild adventure, and a reflection on the dynamics of freedom and slavery.”
—Booklist
“A profound novel of amazing depth and intimacy.”
—Asimovs
“A brilliant piece of work.”
—Bookslut
“A beautifully written allegorical tale full of hope that even the most unenlightened souls can shrug off the bonds of internalized oppression and finally see the light.”
—BookPage
“She writes such hard good sentences.”
—John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats
“The Mount is so extraordinary as to be unpraiseable by a mortal such as I. I had to keep putting it down because it was so disturbing then picking it up because it was so amazing. A postmodernist would call it The Eros of Hegemony, but I’m no postmodernist. Nearly every sentence is simultaneously hilarious, prophetic, and disturbing. This person needs to be really, really famous.”
— Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights Bookstore
“We are all Mounts and so should read this book like an instruction manual that could help save our lives. That it is also a beautiful funny novel is the usual bonus you get by reading Carol Emshwiller. She always writes them that way.”
— Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Years of Rice and Salt
“I’ve been a fan of Carol Emshwiller’s since the wonderful Carmen Dog. The Mount is a terrific novel, at once an adventure story and a meditation on the psychology of freedom and slavery. It’s literally haunting (days after finishing it, I still think about all the terrible poetry of the Hoot/Sam relationship) and hypnotic. I’m honored to have gotten an early look at it.”
— Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil
“This novel is like a tesseract, I started it and thought, ah, I see what she’s doing. But then the dimensions unfolded and somehow it ended up being about so much more.”
— Maureen McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse
“Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount is a wicked book. Like Harlan Ellison’s darkest visions, Emshwiller writes in a voice that reminds us of the golden season when speculative fiction was daring and unsettling. Dystopian, weird, comedic as if the Marquis de Sade had joined Monty Python, and ultimately scary, The Mount takes us deep into another reality. Our world suddenly seems wrought with terrible ironies and a severe kind of beauty. When we are the mounts, who — or what — is riding us?”
— Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Six Kinds of Sky
About the Author
Carol Emshwiller is the author of six novels including Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, Mister Boots, The Secret City, and Leaping Man Hill, as well as collections of short fiction: Joy in Our Cause, Verging on the Pertinent, The Start of the End of It All, Report to the Men’s Club, I Live with You, Master of the Road to Nowhere, and two volumes of Collected Stories. She grew up in Michigan and France. She lives in New York City.
Praise for Carol Emshwiller’s previous books:
“[Ledoyt is] a fierce and tender portrait of a girl growing up fierce and tender; a sorrowful, loving portrait of a man whose talent is for love and sorrow; a western, an unsentimental love story, an unidealized picture of the American past, a tough, sweet, painful, truthful novel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Tales of Earthsea
Ms. Emshwiller is so gifted. . . . She describes the ragged, sunswept Western countryside with a vividness and clarity that let us see it as her characters do—and understand why they love it as they do. There are moments of [Ledoyt] that are remarkably moving; there are scenes of great power.
—New York Times Book Review
[Ledoyt is] as haunting as the song of a canyon wren at twilight.—Atlanta Journal
Leaping Man Hill is a satisfying novel, with complexities not susceptible to easy summary, as well as those quirky characters and some playful language. Finally, though, it is dominated by Emshwiller’s sure development of Mary Catherine. Readers who grow with that young woman may remember this book a long time.
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
[Leaping Man Hill is] another strong, satisfying western . . . a headstrong young heroine succeeds in finding her niche in the ranch country of post-WWI California. . . . An exuberant yet exquisite portrait of a woman coming into her own.
—Kirkus Reviews
Emshwiller has produced a first novel that combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical panache of Animal Farm. In the hyper-Kafkaesque world of Carmen Dog, women have begun devolving into animals and animals ascending the evolutionary ladder to become women. . . . there has not been such a singy combination of imaginative energy, feminist outrage, and sheer literary muscle since Joanna Russ’ classic The Female Man.
—Entertainment Weekly
Emshwiller knows well the marvelous inexplicability of love, jealousy, and heroism.
—Library Journal
First and foremost, Emshwiller is a poet—with a poet’s sensibility, precision, and magic. She revels in the sheer taste and sound of words, she infuses them with an extraordinary vitality and sense of life.
—Newsday
Emshwiller’s characters embrace the unexpected and extraordinary; their lives leap from the mundane to the wondrous in a surreal instant, and the reader feels transported too.
—Publisher’s Weekly
Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories
Thu 1 Aug 2002 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
9781931520027
“Creature” won the 2002 Nebula.
Nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award
Locus 2002 Recommended Reading List
What if the world ended on your birthday — and no one came? What if your grandmother was a superhero? What if the orphan you were raising was a top-secret weapon, looked like Godzilla, and loved singing nursery rhymes? What if poet laureates fought to the death, in stadiums?
Emshwiller’s previous books (Joy in Our Cause, Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, and others) have won her a devoted cult following. Her short fiction is about women and men, monsters, obsessions, art, and falling in love. She writes witty, humane, endearingly odd stories that play with all the genres and conventions you can put a name to — science fiction, Western, romance, postmodern, tabloid, literary — and some that haven’t even been invented yet.
Suspect that life is much stranger than anyone ever admits? Buy this book. Unhappy in love? Buy this book. About to visit the dentist or embark on a long voyage? Buy this book. Troubled by dreams you can never quite remember in the morning? Buy this book. Love good short fiction? Buy this book.
Grandma
The Paganini of Jacob’s Gully
Modillion
Mrs. Jones
Acceptance Speech
One Part of the Self is Always Tall and Dark
Foster Mother
Creature
The Project
It Comes from Deep Inside
Prejudice and Pride
Report to the Men’s Club
Overlooking
Water Master
Abominable
Desert Child
Venus Rising
Nose
After All
Praise for Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories:
“These short stories have a mysterious glow.” — JANE
“Emshwiller proves over and over again why she should be venerated as the treasure she is: relationships, superheroes, sentient reptiles — it’s all in there, and she makes it all work.”
— Peggy Hailey, Book People
“Carol Emshwiller’s stories are wonder-filled, necessary, and beautifully crafted. It’s a high pleasure indeed to see this new collection.”
— Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren
I am disappointed by these stories. Disappointed that they have not (yet) won Emshwiller the Pulitzer she deserves as our premier magic realist. Disappointed that their sly and scary intimacy has not (yet) altered the tone of all science fiction for the better. Disappointed that she wrote them, not I.
— Terry Bisson, author of The Pickup Artist
Carol Emshwiller makes fiction out of the stuff of our everyday lives; about moms and memory and monsters that end up as familiar as Border Collies. She’s deceptively deft, full of strange things that end up feeling as familiar as your own kitchen.
— Maureen F. McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse
“I read one of the stories in Carol Emshwiller’s new collection, Report to the Men’s Club, in progress several years ago and have thought about it ever since. I could even quote you lines! And now, having read the rest of the elegant, complex, insightful stories, I know she’s done the same thing to me again eighteen times over! Emshwiller knows more about men and mortality and love and loss and writing and life than anybody on the planet! Dazzling, dangerous, devastating writer! Unforgettable (and I mean that literally!) collection! Wow! Wow! Wow!”
— Connie Willis, author of Passage
Cover art by Erica Harris.
Rosetti Song
Mon 1 Jul 2002 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read| Posted by: Gavin
Some people have always wanted to be president, or a baseball player, or a movie star or business tycoon. Me, I’ve always wanted to own a bar. Not some flaky franchised chicken-finger paradise for post-fraternity muscleboys and their bimbos; a real shot-and-a-beer kind of neighborhood joint. Pool table or two in the back, an old Wurlitzer by the bathroom doors, a long mirror behind the bar suitable for the sort of what’s-he-got-that-I-ain’t-got scrutiny that melancholy drunks love to subject themselves to. Tables with a topography of cigarette burns, water rings, dents of uncertain origin, all preserved under a quarter-inch layer of varnish. Beer signs on the walls, no bikinis or volleyballs allowed, just painted mirrors and classic flickering neon like the sign out front that says FRANK’S PLACE. Cab company numbers taped to the side of the phone. A blackboard leaning against the mirror advertising the day’s special and a permanent addendum: HANGOVERS FREE OF CHARGE.
Rossetti Song: Four Stories
Mon 1 Jul 2002 - Filed under: Books, Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
Out of Stock.
No.3 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series, Rossetti Song, is by up-and-coming writer Alex Irvine. Alex has recently had stories in Scifiction, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, LCRW, and many other wonderful places. Rossetti Song contains four stories: two were previously published in F&SF, “The Sea Wind Offers Little Relief” was original to Starlight 3, and “The Sands of Iwo Jima” is new for this collection. Designed by Thom Davidsohn.
Contents
Rossetti Song – read it now
The Sands of Iwo Jima
Akhenaten
The Sea Wind Offers Little Relief
- “The Sands of Iwo Jima” received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror
- F&SF review
- Locus Online review
- Tangent Online review
Who is Alex Irvine?
He’s the winner of the Crawford and Locus Awards. Here’s hiswebsite. He had a story in LCRW No.8*, and was a John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award finalist (website), which, handily, lists many of his publications.
Here’s another picture.
Alex is also responsible (with designer Thom Davidsohn) for The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, an amazing pulp-style colllection (which is for sale here).
Read a review on Locus Online
And look what’s being said about his first novel, A Scattering of Jades:
“The characterization is nearly as accomplished as the historiography, and the two together make the book an exceedingly solid achievement, with a great deal of promise for the author’s future.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Smartly written, uncliched…. [A]n intelligent and strongly written debut historical-fantasy by a descendant of P. T. Barnum’s. Excellently researched, this fantasia about New York City, Kentucky, and the Midwest in the 1840s mixes US history and Aztec mythology.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Irvine’s prose is rich and evocative, his plot tightly structured and beautifully paced. The denouement, when it arrives, offers no easy answers; each of the principals leaves the scene damaged. Most impressive is Irvine’s interweaving of two seemingly unrelated histories and myth structures without straining the credibility of either.”
— Washington Post Book World
* This is what we said about him then:
Alex Irvine is far too sporty to stay indoors and write, and yet he does. Look at that author photo. He has a story in the anthology Starlight 3, and probably has one in the next F&SF. His novel, A Scattering of Jades, will be published by Tor in 2002. In 2001 he was one of the writers on the A.I. webgame and has co-written a novelization (A.I.:The Death of Evan Chan) with Sean Stewart.
Author pic (with friend) by Beth Gwinn.
Carol Emshwiller Bio
Wed 19 Jun 2002 - Filed under: Authors, Carol Emshwiller| Posted by: Gavin
Carol Emshwiller was awarded a Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Award in 2005.
Read the Letter of Intrigue: James Tiptree to Carol Emshwiller.
Notes Toward an Article on Carol Emshwiller. (WisCon 27 program book)
Read her story in Trampoline. (And her hilarious bio and the 2-question interview.)
Carol’s own webpage.
Besides her novel, The Mount, and collection of short fiction, Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, who is this writer? It’s not just the vast staff at Small Beer Press who think she’s an incredible writer, check out what happy readers and writers are saying about her new books on those pages above, and have a look below too see that this is one writer who has been making readers very happy for a good amount of time!
Carol Emshwiller’s stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ninth Letter, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, Crank!, Confrontation, and many other anthologies and magazines.
Carol is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has been awarded an NEA grant, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant, the ACCENT/ASCENT fiction prize, and the World Fantasy, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Gallun, and Icon awards.
Carol was Guest of Honor at Wiscon 27, May 23-6, 2003 (bio).
Recently, her stories have appeared inTrampoline, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Leviathan 3, andPolyphony.
Carol Emshwiller is the author of three previous collections of short fiction: The Start of the End of it All (Winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award), Verging on the Pertinent, and Joy in Our Cause, and three novels Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, and Leaping Man Hill. So, how have her previous books been received? Or her books released by us?
(Click on the images to order the books from your local bookshop)
Strange Horizons devoted a special issue to Carol Emshwiller in which they posted an interview, a story (“The Circular Library of Stones“), and a review of Ledoyt by Ursula K. Le Guin.
She lives in New York City in the winter where she teaches at New York University School of Continuing Education. She spends the summers in a shack in the Sierras in California.
Interviews
Bookslut, interview by Joseph J. Finn
Fantastic Metropolis — reposted here by Robert Freeman Wexler
Strange Horizons, interview by Patrick Weekes
Fantasy Magazine, interview by Jennifer Konieczny.
Stories
“Boys”
“The Circular Library of Stones”
Films
Pilobolus and Joan (based on Carol Emshwiller’s story “Metamorphosed”)
Family Focus (voiceover)
Skin Matrix S (short version)
Links
Carol Emshwiller’s website
Fantastic Metropolis: Three essays by Carol Emshwiller:
How My Husband’s Death Changed My Writing
Resonance
Writing Rules I Like to Break
Download photo for print.
Author photo by Susan Emshwiller.
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