Guest post: A Raffle of Laughter on Solemn Occasions by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Tue 11 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., guest post | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

We’re pleased to have this guest post from Daniel A. Rabuzzi to celebrate the publication of the second and concluding novel in his Yount series!

“For the appearance and names of these gods, there is a humorous as well as a serious explanation…for the gods are fond of a joke.
—Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus.

Humorists are not absent from modern fantasy fiction written in English:­ Terry Pratchett and Fletcher Pratt spring immediately to mind, followed quickly by Robert Asprin, Piers Anthony, Martin Millar.  There are others.  The main forms of humor, at least as practiced by those named above, are broad, even when elegantly executed: the farce, the parody, the screwball drama larded with puns and episodic slapstick.  I have a weakness for such modes, but I wonder why the genre in general seems wary of humor and (for the most part) ring-fences the comic from the mainstream of fantasy’s serious purpose.

Of course, the comic sidekick is prevalent in modern fantasy, with Sancho Panza as one of several models.  (“Samwise,” Tolkien tells us, means “half-wise, simple.”)  And we have knaves, wisecrackers and tricksters a-plenty, drawing on traditions from around the globe.  I am particularly partial to Cugel the Clever myself.

A few authors – Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor . . .  Maurice Sendak, Ray Bradbury­ suffuse their work with mirth and whimsy, no matter that events described may be grim.  Sparrowhawk and Vetch, Zahrah the Windseeker, Coraline (and Richard and Door), Max (and Mickey), Uncle Einar and the other Elliotts in the October Country…they are, as George Meredith in “An Essay on Comedy” wrote about Moliere’s Jourdain and Alceste, “characters steeped in the comic spirit. They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clear interpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all.”

Otherwise, fantasy hews strenuously to an epic mode that seldom admits humor, except for a dash of rustic or burlesque to highlight the seriousness of the main endeavor.  The diction is high, the tone earnest­there is, after all, a world to save, evil (“Evil”) to be destroyed or, failing that, banished for eons to come, sacrifice to be endured and salvation attained.  When confronting the Sublime, the sacred, the mysterium fascinans, the genre brooks little laughter, certainly not of the mocking kind, no matter how gentle (except when clearly marked and marketed as such, with a sort of invisible disclaimer shrink-wrapped around the cover: “this is a parody, thus acceptable; file it separately, so as not to pollute the noble volumes it lampoons.”).  The agon must be preserved in its purest, most noble essence.

For the genre tends to the conservative: order must be restored, history set right, the king must return.  (Michael Moorcock critiques these tropes effectively in the chapter entitled “Epic Pooh,” in his Wizardry and Wild Romance; A Study of Epic Fantasy ­which also contains sharp insights on wit and humor in fantasy).  Core elements of conservatism, alloyed or half-buried though they may be, run through newer variants of fantasy as well, e.g., urban fantasy or steampunk.

I miss the fantastical equivalents of the comedy of manners, the satire and the absurd, and  the humor implicit in the morose and the somber.

The comedy of manners would seem an ideal theme for fiction of the fantastical.  I was reminded of this by another passage in Meredith’s essay:

“Politically, it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze.  It was a boon to the comic poet.  He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers, extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonnetteering marquises, highflying mistresses, plain-minded maids, interthreading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair.”

Sylvia Townsend Warner mined this milieu for her Broceliande stories.  I catch a similar droll sensibility, an archness, in the work of Theodora Goss, and that of Diana Wynne Jones, and more distantly of Angela Carter and, in yet another vein, J.K. Rowling.  Oh, and Joan Aiken, about whom Farah Mendlesohn wrote in Rhetorics of Fantasy:  “The acknowledged master of the fantasy of irony must be Joan Aiken, whose short story collections use irony to construct cryptic riddles and English comedies of manners.”  But we need more such, decanters of Erasmus and Moliere, of Dickens and Austen and the Shakespeare of Much Ado and Winter’s Tale.  The tradition is rich outside of our genre (to name just a few: Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, Alison Lurie, Gary Shteyngart…Shteyngart probably qualifies as a genre writer with his Super Sad True Love Story), if that might act as a spur to writers from Within The Tradition.

The absurd and the satirical sit even less comfortably within fantasy, perhaps because the genre does not want to acknowledge the propinquity, for to do so would mar the image of high seriousness that the genre strains for.  I think that is why works such as White’s Once and Future King, Crowley’s Little, Big and Brunner’s Traveller in Black stories are oddities­ like Gargantua and Pantagruel or Tristam Shandy, like The Man Who Was Thursday or Jurgen — honored in the breach but directly followed by few.  China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer each have a leg in this field, likewise Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Vandana Singh, Nathaniel Mackey, Steven Millhauser, David Nickle, Jedediah Berry.

Finally, a plea for a more Peakean approach within the genre, and praise for the absurdist,  grave and melancholy humor epitomized by the Gormenghast trilogy.  The ruler does not return in the Peakean world-view, in fact he abdicates, he flees.  Chaos does not so much win as it is revealed to be the mainspring of the very Order upon which everything appeared to rest­the sacrament reduced to dust, a bright carving in a neglected upper hallway of a castle that may or may not exist.  That is cosmically funny, a folly, the lifted eyebrow of the gods, even if it is also possibly tragic.

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Daniel A. Rabuzzi [blog] studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm.

ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012 brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount, described by reviewers as “Gulliver’s Travels crossed with The Golden Compass and a dollop of Pride and Prejudice,”  and “a muscular, Napoleonic-era fantasy that, like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.”

Daniel’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade’s Bequest.  He has presented at Arisia, Readercon, Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects ranging from fairy tale to finance.

A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel’s novels), along with the requisite two cats.

Novel preview links:

The Choir Boats [pdf]

The Indigo Pheasant [pdf]

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An Under the Poppy story at a price

Thu 6 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on An Under the Poppy story at a price | Posted by: Gavin

. . . of one photograph of you with your copy of Under the Poppy! Here’s Kathe’s full post:

As a celebration of the publication of the paperback edition of Under the Poppy,  due out on 9/10 (and available now for preorder from Small Beer Press, B&N and Amazon, among others), I’m offering a PDF of never-before-published Poppy fiction, called “An Interlude of the Road”: the tale of a young Rupert and Istvan, and their encounter with Herr Nagler, the smiling herring-monger in the satrap’s robe.

To receive the story, all you need to do is send a picture of yourself and your copy of Under the Poppy: whether it’s in your hands or on your nightstand, you holding your e-reader, you waving a preorder paperback receipt (or the actual paperback). . . And if you’re somewhere sexy or singular, so much the better.  Are you on the winding road? Or sipping some highbrow tea? Sporting at the gentlemen’s club (wink wink)? Hanging out with a puppet? Or, like acclaimed writer Sarah Miller here, reclining at your ease?

If you give permission, the picture will be happily posted here, and on the Under the Poppy Facebook page; otherwise your privacy will of course be respected.

This fiction will be available only through the Under the Poppy site, until 11/11/12, as a special thank you to those who have journeyed along with these two inseparable gentlemen of the road and their friends, and me.

Send your JPEG to underthepoppy AT gmail.com.

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Blackwood, Indigo Pheasant, Electric Velocipede

Tue 4 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Blackwood, Indigo Pheasant, Electric Velocipede | Posted by: Gavin

Hey,we have some books coming soon. Wooee! We are excited. And busy! So. In the next couple of weeks we will have a couple of guest posts. Our own Dear Aunt Gwenda, under her other name, Gwenda Bond, has her first novel, Blackwood, coming out this week. It’s all about the Roanoke disappearances and is getting great reviews. Gwenda has a Big Idea piece at Scalzi’s Whatever today. At some point in the next week or two we’ll have a post from Gwenda and meanwhile we are celebrating that we’ll be able to get our own copy signed in a couple of weeks when we’re down in Lexington for the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.

A second post is set for next week from our friend Daniel A. Rabuzzi whose second novel—and sequel to The Choir Boats— The Indigo Pheasant comes out this month from ChiZine. Here’s an interview with Daniel from when The Choir Boats came out. I’m looking forward to seeing the book itself, too, as Daniel’s wife, woodworker Deborah Mills does beautiful work and with luck more of her art will be included in this edition.

Need another good thing to do with your hard earned cash? Back Electric Velocipede! John Klima and the EV team are doing a Kickstarter (with lovely Thom Davidsohn calendars available) and this is your chance to ensure their zine has a long and fruitful life!

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Tonight, Kelly & Victor LaValle, Brooklyn

Wed 22 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookstores, Kelly Link | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

Tonight at 7:30 PM you can catch Victor LaValle and Kelly Link in conversation about LaValle’s latest book The Devil in Silver at Greenlight Books, 686 Fulton Street 
(at South Portland)
, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Click here for a map.

In other Kelly news, I might be reading this wrong but it looks like you could pick up the Sub Press limited edition of Stranger Things Happen 1/2-price in this sale(!). I’ve got a photo of a galley to post soon. So near actuality!

And two more quickly nearing events:

Kelly will join Karen Joy Fowler &c at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, Lexington, KY, on September 21 – 22. And, we get to see Gwenda and Christopher wherein we will get to toast the talk of the town, Gwenda’s debut novel Blackwood!

And on  the 5th – 7th of October Kelly is one of the guests (along with Peter Watts,  Joe Abercrombie, Sara Bergmark Elfgren & Mats Strandberg, and Niels Dalgaard) at Kontrast in Uppsala, Sweden. Can’t wait to go! Afterward we are visiting family—and going to see museeeuuummmss in the Hague.

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Stories of Your Life, 3

Thu 9 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ted Chiang | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

Just a quick note to note that we would like to note that, wait. Start again:

We just got copies of the third printing of Ted Chiang’s excellent debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. Thanks to Ori Avtalio and other sharp-eyed readers for helping us with typos. This is a book that I can honestly give to just about anyone and say, “Read the title story,” and know they will love it.

 

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Up on Poppy Hill

Wed 8 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Up on Poppy Hill | Posted by: Gavin

Thank you someone (sorry I didn’t take note who it was!) on Twitter who linked to the lovely trailer for Studio Ghibli‘s new film, Up on Poppy Hill:

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Small Beer Podcast 12: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility”

Tue 7 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Benjamin Rosenbaum, Not a Journal., Benjamin Rosenbaum, David Thompson, Julie Day, Podcastery, Sense and Sensibility, small beer podcast, The Ant King and Other Stories | Comments Off on Small Beer Podcast 12: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility” | Posted by: Julie

There are just so many lovely people in the world. That was my conclusion after talking with David Thompson, the co-editor and host of Podcastle. He just showed up one day and offered to read a story for our little podcast. Well, of course, we said yes.

I couldn’t be more thrilled  with the pairing we’ve come up with: David Thompson reads Benjamin Rosenbaum. “Sense and Sensibility” is a wild mash-up of Jane Austin, the German comic-grotesteque and Gormenghast, a perfect story for the dog days of summer.

But wait, there’s more! Because we know one Rosenbaum story is just never enough, Small Beer is offering Benjamin’s collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, as a free Creative Commons licensed ebook download.

David’s first audiobook, Tim Pratt’s Briarpatch, will be coming out this fall while Benjamin’s latest story, “Elsewhere,” can be found at Strange Horizons. First though, I hope you’ll spend a little time with both David and Benjamin, a truly excellent pairing.

Episode 12: In which David Thompson read’s Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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The Freedom Maze wins the Mythopoeic Award

Mon 6 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Delia Sherman | Comments Off on The Freedom Maze wins the Mythopoeic Award | Posted by: Gavin

Great news this weekend (2): Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze received the Mythopoeic Award!

Here’s more about the award (lifted from their website): the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature honors books for younger readers (from “Young Adults” to picture books for beginning readers), in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia or that best exemplifies “the spirit of the Inklings.” The winners of this year’s awards were announced during Mythcon 43 in Berkeley, California.

In other news for The Freedom Maze, the Listening Library unabridged audio edition is coming out soon. Listening Library are very excited about the book and we can’t wait to get our hands on a copy.

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Redemption in Indigo wins the Parallax Award

Mon 6 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Karen Lord | Comments Off on Redemption in Indigo wins the Parallax Award | Posted by: Gavin

Great news this weekend (1): Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo has received the Carl Brandon Parallax Award!

Here’s more about the award (lifted from their website):

the Carl Brandon Parallax Award is given to works of speculative fiction created by a self-identified person of color. The award includes a $1000 cash prize. Nnedi Okorafor received the Carl Brandon Kindred Award for her novel Who Fears Death and the honors list comprised:  N.K. Jemisin,  The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Anil Menon,  The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, Charles Yu “Standard Loneliness Package.” The 2010 Carl Brandon Awards will be presented at Worldcon in Chicago, August 30 – September 12, 2012. The jury statements and full nominations list will be published at that time.

In other news about Karen, Redemption in Indigo is on the Not the Booker looonglist. She also has a lovely cover for the UK edition of her forthcoming book The Best of All Possible Worlds—it comes out next February and is great—AND, as if that is not enough, she (lifting from her blog) . . .

and Karen Burnham (NASA engineer by day, SF reviewer and podcaster by night) approached me to ask if I would be interested in doing a podcast with her, the ‘yes’ couldn’t fly out of my mouth fast enough. We have a lot in common, including a first name, a degree (BSc Physics) and a hobby (martial arts/fencing). I was eager to tackle my to-read list and take some recommendations and, more importantly, do so in a meaningful way that would expand my appreciation of the craft of writing and the literary and scientific merits of speculative fiction. And so the podcast SF Crossing the Gulf came to be.

You can find it here, kindly hosted by SF Signal, and it will also be available via RSS feed and iTunes.

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The Sale of Midsummer

Wed 1 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on The Sale of Midsummer | Posted by: Gavin

Coming on Friday: Joan Aiken’s lovely story “The Sale of Midsummer” will be released on Consortium’s free Bookslinger short story app.

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Back

Tue 31 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Clarion West, creepers, Elizabeth Hand, Readercon, Shirley Jackson Awards, travel | Comments Off on Back | Posted by: Gavin

We’re back in the office after 2+ weeks away. Yay! Yesterday we flew back from Seattle: today I feel like the sludge left at the bottom of a cup of cowboy coffee. Did we miss anything? (Yes.)

There is a stack of mail, a box of packages, tons of orders (thank you!), many emails, a few phone messages, a sad lack of telegraphs, one beeping box (a toy!), and a number of deadlines looooming.

Before leaving, we were at Readercon for a couple of days and we owe many thanks to Jedediah Berry and the et al awesome people who ran our table when we left. We were offline the last few days so missed Readercon’s craptacular response to the craptacular behaviour spotlighed by Genevieve Valentine so we just signed Veronica’s petition. (I am not sure if the BoD should stand down, but only because I want to make sure the convention survives. If the Board stands down and new directors are elected [is that how it works?], then that’s great.) But over all, blech. And kudos to Genevieve for posting about her experience. Thank you for helping everyone by doing that.

Also, Elizabeth Hand (“Near Zennor”), Kelly (“The Summer People”), and Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse) won Shirley Jackson Awards. (And, I have the nominee rock to send to Joan Aiken’s estate’s agent!). Wish we had been there.

After Readercon, we went to Seattle to teach week 5 at Clarion West. This is a heads-up to editors and publishers everywhere*:  the 2012 Clarion West class are coming for you! They are in a white hot heat of creation, revision, and submission, and you will be hearing from them soon. Wow, that was a week. The worst part about it was leaving on Saturday. We wanted to stay!

We owe huge thanks to the Clarion West organization for all their work and accommodations. We traveled as a party of four, Kelly, me, our daughter Ursula and Kelly’s mom, Annie (without whom it would not have been possible, so thanks to Annie, too) and the CW people didn’t blink. They put us up, they put up with us, they ferried us around (even acquiring car seats when needed!) to parties and more. Every time I’ve seen Clarion West in operation I’m impressed. (The 2013 instructors have been announced.) Also thanks to Nicole Kimberling (publisher of Blind Eye Books and LCRW food columnist) who visited the Clarion class and Eileen Gunn & John Berry and Greg Bear for wonderful parties. (I grew up reading Greg Bear but was able to speak 2-3 coherent sentences to him without my head exploding. Phew.)

Then we went to Portland (hello Powell’s and Reading Frenzy) and Vancouver (hello Naam!), both of which were lovely (and occasionally terrifying—eek!). While post-Clarion braindead in Vancouver we almost watched a movie in the hotel . . . but it was $15.99. Um. Internet was expensive and so avoided. Do people really pay prices like that?

Travel back was ok except that we would like to unthank the bridge that got stuck in the upright position meaning we had to drive from Vancouver to Seattle instead of take the lovely train. Bad bridge, bad! (Loved the train otherwise.) And: United Airlines has the smallest seats in the world. Boo! Also: on the way out they lost our stroller and we did not get it back for a whole week. Ever really missed something? We missed that stroller! I even tried tweeting United but I got no response. Oh well!

And now we are back in body if not in spirit. Emails will be returned soon-ish.

* I think every Clarion instructor always wants to send out this heads up but since this is the first time I have officially been one of the instructors I am adding my voice to the masses of other instructors.

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April: A Stranger in Olondria

Thu 26 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sofia Samatar | Comments Off on April: A Stranger in Olondria | Posted by: Gavin

I know we announced A Stranger in Olondria for 2012 but we decided to add a simultaneous hardcover edition to the trade paperback and ebook editions as the behind-the-scenes excitement is building tremendously as more readers discover A Stranger in Olondria is a book to be treasured.

So now it is an April 2013 book. Ta da! We’ll be making a new round of galleys to reflect the changes which should be going out by the end of the month. Electronic review copies are going out, too. Leave a comment or ping us (ok, so we’re traveling this week, but still) if you’d like a copy.

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Things Mean a Lot

Thu 12 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Things Mean a Lot | Posted by: Gavin

Gosh, this is nice.

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Here we go to Readercon & Clarion West

Tue 10 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., conventions, Jedediah Berry, Kelly Link, Readercon, Vincent McCaffrey | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

This coming weekend we (me, Kelly, and our daughter, Ursula) will be at Readercon. I am on a panel on Oblique Strategies. Help! Kelly is on some panels, too, see below. Since we are leaving on Saturday morning for Clarion West (Writer Boot Camp ahoy! We do a reading on Tuesday night in Seattle!) even though the program sched says Kelly will be at the Shirley Jackson Awards, she won’t. And, Jedediah Berry has stepped up to man the Small Beer table. Phew! And Vincent McCaffrey (author of the Hound series) is on a panel about political fiction, Delia Sherman can be found on “When Non-Fantastic Genres Interrogate Themselves,” Greer Gilman is on “Mapping the Parallels,” and so on and on!

The bad news is that the con dropped us from two tables down to one, which means we can’t take as many titles from other publishers to sell: boo! That’s how we got our start with LCRW—people such as Mike Walsh (Old Earth Books) and Greg Ketter (DreamHaven, a real bookstore, how exciting that was!) sold the zine and then our chapbooks off their table, encouraging us to keep going back to the conventions and eventually it all snowballed into BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS! (It is a slippery slide!)

See you in Boston or Seattle!

Thursday

8:00 PM   G   Genrecare. Elizabeth Bear (leader), Kathleen Ann Goonan, Kelly Link, Shira Lipkin. In a 2011 review of Harmony by Project Itoh, Adam Roberts suggests that “the concept of ‘healthcare’ in its broadest sense is one of the keys to the modern psyche.” Yet Roberts notes “how poorly genre has tuned in to that particular aspect of contemporary life.” Similarly, in the essay “No Cure for the Future,” Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay write that “SF is a world almost never concerned with the issues of physical frailty and malfunction.” As writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Tricia Sullivan, and Kim Stanley Robinson explore the future of the body, how is SF dealing with the concepts of health, medicine, and what it means to be well?

Friday

4:00 PM   ME   Oblique Strategies for Authors. Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, Gavin J. Grant, Glenn Grant (leader), Katherine MacLean, Eric M. Van, Jo Walton. In 1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies.” Each card provides a cryptic directive—such as “Use an old idea” or “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”—intended to help an artist deal with a creative block or dilemma. While many of the original strategies are useful for writers of fiction, others (such as “The tape is now the music”) are perhaps only appropriate for musicians and visual artists. Let’s brainstorm a deck of Oblique Strategies specifically designed to provide unexpected creative kicks for authors who are in a jam.
Proposed by Glenn Grant.

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Reselling the spider

Fri 6 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

I must be too old. Hmm, deafening silence in response. Anyway, there’s yet another Spiderman movie coming and I swear there was a new one just last week, or was it last year? What? It was more than 3 or 4 years ago? Oh well then, it must be time to remake it . . .

You know what they should remake? The Avengers. That was fun and it came out ages ago now, so why not remake it and then we can enjoy it all over again.

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Couple of nice reviews

Tue 3 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Couple of nice reviews | Posted by: Gavin

Just love to see our books finding readers. There was a very thoughtful (and fully linked) review of After the Apocalypse by L.S. Bassen on SF Signal. This intro paragraph signals (sorry) that it won’t read like the average review:

“Maureen F. McHugh’s collection of stories is an outstanding solo in the zeitgeist fiction chorus including Gods Without Men (Hari Kunzru) and The Truth and All Its Ugly (Kyle Minor) that at long last begins building the bridge between The Two Cultures invoked by C.P. Snow decades ago. In these stories, despite the title, destruction and despair are not the key motif: survival, even transcendence, is.”
—SF Signal

And then on Strange Horizons, T.S. Miller looks at Geoff Ryman’s collection Paradise Tales through the lens of the title:

“The stories gathered here from across Ryman’s career narrate paradise and its stories in ways that are far from conventionally utopian. Rather, Ryman’s paradises are not only largely intangible but often built on and out of loss. Reading his quasi-fairytales and other flights of passionate fantasy, we will always be reminded that these paradises, like all paradises, are places that can never be—except in fiction. For Ryman, however, this is an essential exception, as the power of story to heal and repair across time and across cultures becomes a recurrent theme in the collection…. By the end of Paradise Tales, however, the reader will understand that Ryman has already invented such a device: whether it is fantasy, science fiction, or some fiction in-between, the utopian, revelatory tool for Ryman is simply fiction itself.”
—Strange Horizons

 

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Complicate my accounting, please

Fri 29 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., accounting joy, shipper's delight, spreadsheets of wonder, Yog's Law | Comments Off on Complicate my accounting, please | Posted by: Gavin

If you have long wished to make a publisher’s life more complicated here’s your chance. June 30th—manana!—is the last day of this royalty period (here in spreadsheet land that’s a.k.a.Jan-Jun2011).

So go on, complicate our accounting and royalties by making all kinds of weird orders. Why, yes, now that you ask, subscription options were updated and new ones—Big Mouth, YBF&H, Col(Link)ection, Signed— added today.

It’s also the last day of the 3-month royalty period for Weightless, but royalties are so much easier there that we can usually pay within 10 days. Hmm!

We will thank you from the icy chambers of our hearts!

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Apocalyptic summer

Tue 26 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Apocalyptic summer | Posted by: Gavin

Very nice to see Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse on this NPR list:

Summer’s Best Sci-Fi: Planets, Politics, Apocalypse

along with Kim Stanley Robinson, Saladin Ahmed, Tobias Buckell, and Mira Grant. There’s some good reading!

As you may know, Bob, After the Apocalypse is “. . . definitely one of the best works of science fiction you’ll read this year, or any thereafter.”

Yup!

A long time ago when the world was young and Maureen had only written a handful of novels (ha!) and stories we published her first collection, Mothers & Other Monsters. The most excellent Nancy Pearl*featured Mothers on Morning Edition (“Gorgeously crafted stories,” she said, I remember as if it were yesterday**). That was a little while ago now so it was refreshing to read a 5-star review of the collection this week:

“Fans of McHugh will adore Mothers & Other Monsters – and, if you’re not already one, Mothers & Other Monsters will make a fan out of you!”

It is lovely to find that the books we’ve published over the years keep finding readers. Thanks, y’all, for spreading the word, it’s appreciated.

In other news, I should start posting some of the other news about Things That Are Happening including being tempted to do a Kickstarter called the Kick-in-the-Behind LCRW Kickstarter to get the new ish out. Hmm. But paying work calls, gots to go do that first.

* Yeah, yeah, we know, she has an Amazon imprint. Who doesn’t these days? She’s doing what we’d love to do: get someone else to bring lots of books back into print. Wish she were doing it elsewhere, but no one else bit, c’est la vie.

** Except yesterday I didn’t almost fall off my chair at breakfast when someone on the radio started talking about one of our books.

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A book, a book!

Mon 18 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

Where? There!

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Win free copies of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters books

Mon 11 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Free books, Lydia Millet | Comments Off on Win free copies of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters books | Posted by: Gavin

We just posted giveaways for both of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters novels on Goodreads. The first book, The Fires Beneath the Sea just came out in paperback and the second The Shimmers in the Night is now at the proofreader and will be out later this summer. Get ahead of the game and win an advance copy today!

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Clarion West reading series

Fri 8 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Clarion West, events | Comments Off on Clarion West reading series | Posted by: Gavin

Hey, we’re going to teach week 5 at Clarion West in Seattle this year. We haven’t been to CW—or out west—for ages. Can’t wait!

While there we’ll do a reading at the fabby University Book Store—although you might also want to pick up tix for some of these other readings, too.

The readers for the 2012 Clarion West Summer Reading Series are:

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Mary Rosenblum

June 19, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Mary Rosenblum explores climate change, biotechnology, and class inequity in stories based on her profound knowledge of science and technology and her passion for sustainable living. Her first novel, The Drylands, won the 1994 Compton Crook Award, and in 2009 she received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for her story “Sacrifice.”

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Stephen Graham Jones

June 26, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Stephen Graham Jones has published eleven novels and over 140 finely-honed stories about innocents, unfairness, and scary truths. A Blackfoot Indian from Texas, a Professor of English at the University of Colorado, an NEA Fellow, and a Bram Stoker Award finalist, Jones can warm an audience to laughter or chill it with icily observed inevitabilities.

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George R.R. Martin

July 3, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle

George R. R. Martin is the author of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, basis for HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ He has received four Hugos, two Nebulas, and many other major awards over his four-decade career. Martin was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2011. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.

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Connie Willis

July 10, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Connie Willis peppers her live appearances with humorous insights on everything from the Oscars to current elections. Willis has won more major awards than any other author, including most recently her eleventh Hugo for Blackout/All Clear, a time-travel novel about World War II London. She explores comic and tragic aspects of the human condition through characters that run the gamut from desperately likable to sweetly infuriating.

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Kelly Link & Gavin Grant

July 17, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant founded Small Beer Press, arguably today’s most important independent publisher of avant-garde fantasy. Link’s award-winning fiction was described as “an alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’” by Salon.com. Grant’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons and The Christian Science Monitor. The pair’s editorial projects include the literary zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, several volumes of The Years’ Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow), and 2011’s Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories.

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Chuck Palahniuk

July 24, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle

Chuck Palahniuk is known for his reclusive nature and his skillful hand with disturbing modern fables. His most recent book, Damned, references the young adult novels of Judy Blume as it follows a thirteen-year-old girl through Hell. Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club won critical acclaim and cult status before being turned into a major motion picture. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.

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More University Book Store Readings

In addition to the Clarion West Summer Reading Series, every year the University Book Store hosts dozens of other readings of interest to fans of SF. Check out their events calendar for further information.

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A Day in the Life of a Publisher (not) at BEA 2012

Wed 6 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., BEA 2012, nap time | Comments Off on A Day in the Life of a Publisher (not) at BEA 2012 | Posted by: Gavin

Woke at 7 for 7:30 breakfast meeting. Worried I might be late but I hear that the person I’m meeting doesn’t want to get out of bed. Phew.

Next meeting is one I am not looking forward to. It’s all about returns/remainders/what happens to stuff when it’s been through the, you know, consumer channel. The meeting is longer than hoped for but it all goes well in the end.

Breakfast meeting goes surprisingly smoothly and there may be some forward motion on some recent disagreements (whether consumers must consume what is put in front of them or whether they can walk away at any point).

I have to escort client to a 9:00 meet and greet followed by two hours of panels and focus groups on contemporary education publishing. I get to slip out instead—win! Get some design done in by avoiding twitter. For the most part. Local music shop calls to tell me that my copy of the new Kelly Hogan album is in. I didn’t order it. Marriage = total win!

11:30 AM Client exhausted and weepy from educational seminar. We have another post-consumption meeting. Goes much as expected. Lunch is quick, client needs tears wiped away and to sit on my knee. I pull out the exclusive tchotkes (binky, blanket) and client is much happier. Post lunch meeting is a total nap.

I grab a sandwich (but it’s not a Javits Center sandwich, so it’s pretty good and only costs $6) and do some mailing. Hey, the post office only charges $17 to mail a book internationally! Hope they are investing in some other business as they’re killing their own. No wonder we sell so many ebooks abroad.

3:00 meeting with publishing consultant about new formats and consumption patterns. Client now well rested and very cheery, takes over any room she walks into. I go in thinking she is going to totally rule and she does. Expect that she will be all over twitter and in the PW Show Daily tomorrow. Awesome.

4:00 Client has an outdoor meeting on social media, meeting places, and discoverability vis-a-vis diversity vis-a-vis diverticulosis or something. She is off my hands for 2 hours because she is busy buying some YouTube subscribers for her various accounts. Time for tea and biscuits—excuse me, cookies—and reading twitter rather than pretending to do something else and checking it.

6 PM pre-dinner drinks with client. Drinks unimpressive, seem very watered down. (May have actually been water.)

7 PM Dinner with client. Both of us a little punch drunk—not actually drunk, see 6 PM above—but for the most part food follows the trajectory of plate to cutlery to mouth. Occasionally cutlery is put aside and occasionally food is put aside, too.

8 PM A very successful last meeting. Client falls asleep after reading only three books.

9 PM Write-up day and listen to Fitz and the Tantrums.

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Small Beer Podcast 11: Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic

Mon 4 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jennifer Stevenson, Julie Day, Podcastery, small beer podcast, trash sex magic | Comments Off on Small Beer Podcast 11: Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic | Posted by: Julie

I think the world should be filled with double features: double-dip ice cream cones, double copies of the books you’re likely to drop in the tub, bonus skirts given at the time of purchase. Sometimes more is better.

Now that we’ve successfully pulled off our first double feature (the John Kesselmania that was Episode Nine and Episode Ten), we’re raring to do it again. This week we bring you an excerpt of Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic. The novel is now available as an audio book through Iambic Books. It’s wild, weird and sexy: a perfect spring read. But that’s not the end of our Stevenson tear. In the next Small Beer podcast, we return to the scene of the crime and roll out a full-on interview with the amazing Jennifer Stevenson: author, speed skater and former roller derby queen.

Episode 11: An excerpt from Jennifer Stevenson’s novel Trash Sex Magic. [audio]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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Stranger Things Happen limited edition news

Fri 25 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions, Stranger Things Happen | Comments Off on Stranger Things Happen limited edition news | Posted by: Gavin

Stranger Things Happen is Kelly Link’s debut collection of stories. It contains eleven stories It was one of the first two books—the other was Ray Vukcevich’s Meet Me in the Moon Room—we launched with back in July 2001 and is our bestselling title. We just recently got in copies of the seventh printing of the paperback. It has also been downloaded more than 110,000 times from our site and others as well as selling very well as an ebook. It is taught at many schools and has been published in Japan, Italy, Hungary, Russia, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, and Korea. Yay!

This October, eleven years after first publication, Stranger Things Happen will be published in a hardcover edition by the good people at Subterranean Press. We could have published this edition ourselves but Kelly has long wanted to work with Bill Schafer and everyone at Sub Press and they are pros at this kind of project. As with many readers in this genre, we’ve long been admirers of the press and Bill has often given us great advice over the years. We own many of their books—and we have all these great books we’re working on so it made sense to go to them with it.

It is also gave Kelly a chance to work with one of her favorite artists, Kathleen Jennings, who has provided the cover illustration as well as story headers for each of the eleven stories.

This special signed limited edition of Stranger Things Happen is accompanied by a exclusive hardcover chapbook, Origin Stories, which contains two stories, “Origin Stories” and “Secret Identity.”

There are only going to be 500 copies, all of which will be signed, and we have arranged with Kelly to personalize copies ordered here.

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Norton, Nebulas!

Mon 21 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Delia Sherman, Geoff Ryman, Kij Johnson | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

What a weekend not to be in Washington, DC! Huge congratulations to Delia Sherman whose novel The Freedom Maze received the Norton Award. You can see a picture of a very happy Delia in this picture on Making Light with the rest of the nights awardees.

We’re very proud to have published this book and elated to see it recognized in this way. The Freedom Maze is also a Prometheus Award finalist and was on the Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 and Tiptree Award Honor lists. The audio book will come out this autumn from Listening Library; you can listen to an interview with Delia and a reading from The Freedom Maze on our podcast, and read Delia’s guest post on Diversity in YA about the book: “When I began writing The Freedom Maze, back in 1987, I didn’t intend to write a book about race.”

Geoff Ryman was very happy that he came over from the UK for the weekend: his story “What We Found,” from the Sept./Oct. 2011 issue of F&SF received the novelette Nebula. That story is not in his collection Paradise Tales but if you want a taste of his writing you can read the first story, “The Film-makers of Mars,” on Tor.com.

It’s been said that Kij Johnson‘s forthcoming At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories is one of the most anticipated debut (print—there was an ebook collection a few years ago) science fiction and fantasy collections in recent years. Her story “The Man Who Bridged the Mist“ (Asimov’s, Oct./Nov. 2011) is her third in three years to have received the Nebula, which is pretty amazing. You can read a few of her stories on her website and the collection—with a fantastic cover by Jackie Morris—will be out in August.

Also: Delia will be at Wiscon in Madiscon, WI, next weekend. We’re not going (ach!) but David J. Schwartz will be tabling for us, thanks again Dave. He will have a few signed copies of Delia’s book—all we have left are the copies Delia signed when she was up here recently. When the few we have and those sent to Wiscon sell, that’s it until the paperback comes out. Get your copy here. Of course, you can also get the ebook.

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Translation games

Thu 17 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alberto Chimal, Chris N. Brown, Skynet, Three Messages and a Warning, translation | 3 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

When Three Messages and a Warning came out one of the things we meant to do was play with Google Translate. Hold that thought, let a few months pass, find a quiet Thursday afternoon and here we are.

So:

1. here’s the story in the English translation
2. then the same story run through Google from English to Spanish (enjoy, Hispanophones!),
3. and, lastly the machine Spanish translation retranslated by Google from Spanish to English—using a different browser so that it did not just return the original text.

I used one of the shorter stories in the book, “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge” by Alberto Chimal [video of author reading], translated by co-editor Chris N.Brown so that you can buzz through it and easily compare: Read more

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New Catalog, New Titles: Le Guin, Dickinson, Gorodischer, More

Tue 15 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., catalog | 5 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

We’ll be mailing copies of this soonish but you can read it right now due to the magic of . . . yes, your early childhood educators who taught you to read. A big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for all those educators. Yay! And now you can exercise your lovely reading ability on our new catalog covering rightnowthisinstant through to March 2013.

Bookstores and reviewers: if you would like a print copy, email us at info @ smallbeerpres dot com and we will add you to our opt-in very occasional actual physical mailing list.

In conjunction with posting our catalog, we’ve added our new titles to the site. More about these books TK in coming weeks, but for the moment we are delighted to add books we are very happily working on:

Peter Dickinson, Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures (Sept. tc/tp/ebook)

Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy (Sept. tp)

The Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume One: Where on Earth (Nov. tc/ebook)
The Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume Two: Outer Space Inner Lands (Nov. tc/ebook)

Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar: a novel (Feb. 2013, tp/ebook, translated by Amalia Gladhart)

All of which can be ordered right here right now.

Small Beer Press 2012+

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The Book Group

Mon 14 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

At some point we realized one of our fave painfully funny TV shows, The Book Group is available on Hulu. Painful painful painful Funny funny funny.

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