What we are doing: a new catalog, galleys of 2 books for BookExpo, a game for BookExpo, a zine, a chapbook for BookExpo, Sales Conference this weekend, sending forth review copies of The Ant King, enjoying the reviews of John Kessel’s book and sending that out further, the Phil. Book Festival next weekend. Maybe other stuff? Who knows.
Coming soonish on a website, a bike, a firecracker near you: the zine known as LCRW. And what will be in it? Pomegranates! Of course. Also, mostly fiction. This will go to the printers devils in a week or two. Here’s what’s it is:
William Alexander, “Away”
Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”
Becca De La Rosa, “Vinegar and Brown Paper”
Kristine Dikeman, “Dearest Cecily:
Carol Emshwiller, “Self Story”
Eileen Gunn, “To the Moon Alice” (poem)
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Snowdrops”
Maureen F. McHugh, “Going to France”
Jeremie McKnight, “The Camera & the Octopus”
Mark Rigney, “Portfolio”
David J. Schwartz, “Mike’s Place”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “The Honeymoon Suite”
Caleb Wilson, “American Dreamers”
Cara Spindler, “Escape”
Miriam Allred, “To a Child Who Is Still a FAQ”
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Abby Denson, Comic
Tickle your ears today with the sound of “The Ant King”—the title story of Ben Rosenbuam’s upcoming collection—the fifth in the new fantasy-flavored PodCastle (a castle in a pod: how science fictional!):
Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
Rated PG. Contains surrealism, involuntary cohabitation, strong language and characters with unconventional genders. Also, an extremely large number of geek culture easter eggs.
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
No free books this week! Making more books, LCRW (hey, we still put out a zine!), a catalog, und, yes, so weiter, is getting in the way. Also: we are planning a fun thing for BookExpo, hee hee. Cough. (Sounds look weird in WordPress. May need to add sound.)
ARCs of Ben Rosenbaum’s collection are on their way to the secret masters of the universe who will declare it a bestseller. Yes, they are in touch with the public’s unending appetite for short story collections.
Kelly is reading next week at the South Street Seaport in NYC as part of the NYRSF reading series with Jennifer Stevenson whose sexy new novel The Brass Bed is about to about to about to arrive.
Hey, in February we sold a couple of books on the Kindle. Who knew! Asked Amazon if they would send us a Kindle to see what the reading experience was like. They demurred. People should always feel free to send us expensive gifts. We are not public servants. (Neither are we savants.) We do not fear the gifting. We are just very bad at the return part.
Just a note that our distributor is running out of the hardcover of John Kessel’s collection. We have some in stock for conventions and so on but if you want one from a store, sooner is better than later.
If you’d like a signed copy, John’s got some more signings coming up.
And: here’s a pic of Jed in LA just before the book festival madness began!
Jedediah Berry will be manning the Small Beer booth at the LA Times Book Fest this weekend so if you’re in the area go say hello (and congratulate the man!) at Booth # 1023 in Zone: J – Moore Hall Grass, UCLA campus.
Small Beer are splitting a table with the wonderful Coffee House Press. Drop by and say hi to some of their authors, and meet other local stars such as Cecil Castellucci and more authors than a forest could shake sticks at. Admission to the Festival of Books is free. Parking is $8.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, that forest will not be shaking sticks at Kelly Link who will not be there after all. Maybe next year.
This has nothing to do with Trickster gods (excepting The Coyote Road, which has lots to so with it). Instead it is just a tricky headline to make you wonder what we’re on about now. It’s Locusfinalist celebration day—thanks to John K. for the heads-up!
The finalist list is a reminder that 2007 was a strong year, especially for men writing in this genre. That’s not snarky, look back at the list. Congratulations to Elizabeth Bear (“Tideline,” Asimov’s Apr/May 2007) and Connie Willis (“All Seated on the Ground,” Asimov’s Dec 2007;The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Subterranean), the only women in short fiction. SF novels are all men, then Fantasy, YA, and Debuts are all pretty mixed—and all are very strong categories (below the cut). Too much work to look at more except perhaps there should be a PR campaign by any women artists in the genre?
It will be fun to see who wins but the real winners, said without cheesiness—especially after serving on award juries—are readers who use this as a reading list to see what’s good out there at the moment.
Here comes the lunch truck? Nope. The boat? Nope. Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection? Ping! We have a winner!
Ben doesn’t know this yet (because we are evil, or, maybe because we’ve been busy giving away free books?) but we just received the advance reading copies of his debut collection, The Ant King and Other Stories. So today (besides cursing the errors—they’ll be gone by August) we’ll be sending it out to reviewers and maybe sending a few to Ben over there in Switzerland.
How does it look? Who cares? Does it go well with beer? You decide.
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.
When we asked Maureen if she was interested in releasing her collection this way she took a moment out from working on Top Secret Gaming Things to say go for it. It is awesome to work with authors like Maureen and John who are so enthusiastic about this.
The thirteen stories in McHugh’s “gorgeously crafted” (Nancy Pearl, NPR, Morning Edition) collection include her her Hugo Award winner “The Lincoln Train” as well as a reading group guide. Mothers & Other Monsters was a Story Prize finalist and a Book Sense Notable Book.
Although we think our paper editions are of course prettier than these downloads, please pass the word along. The further out these CC-licensed books go (especially from our site where we can count them) the higher chance there is of persuading other authors of doing the same with their books.
Mothers & Other Monsters is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them. The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats.
The paper edition is much nicer, although not free:
Tue 22 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Books | Comments Off on Hey hey | Posted by: Gavin
How excited are we? Very! Congratulations Jed!
As far as we know he’ll be back in the office later this week. Or, could it be true that he is right this moment partaking of a well-earned vacation on a sunny island in Indonesia? Who can say, without consulting The Manual of Detection!
Fri 18 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Books | Comments Off on reading | Posted by: Gavin
Update: approaching 5,000 downloads of John Kessel’s collection. More good news on the Creative Commons front here next Tuesday. Ladies, Fish, and Gentlemen, could this be a regular thing?! Publishers Weekly notes John’s book here. There are a couple of new download options to add (you people are Awesome!).
John did his first reading for The Baum Plan at Quail Ridge in Raleigh and about 100 people turned out: Yay!
We are just sending off LCRW-with-green-eyeshadow, the most inventive subscription request we’ve received yet.
Will has a great post on findings at a recent library sale (and also a call to action for New Yorkers). Will’s blog is a must-read.
Alan DeNiro’s review of The New Space Opera at Rain Taxi is the basis for a conversation on SF Signal. Then it got picked up by io9. Then a huge spaceship appeared over the Twin Cities and uploaded Alan, Kristin, and Rain Taxi. Good luck out there!
Somehow completely missed that there was an online discussion of Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle which included Sean. Sean’s new book, Cathy’s Key: If Found, Call (650) 266-8202, is hitting stores right about Now.
Congratulations to Sarah Hall for the Tiptree Award for The Carhullan Army. (published in the US as Daughters of the North.) It’s an excellent book and Gavin hopes there will be something that good this year as he is one of the judges!
We mentioned the other day that Interfictions was on the Honor List and we are incredibly proud and happy to note that Laurie J. Marks‘s novel Water Logic was also on the Honor List: pick up the book from us, by mail order, or Powells, BookSense.com, or on Fictionwise.
It’s been fun to see the reaction to the question “are awards worthwhile?” over the last week. How about: it depends? (The answer to everything!) It depends on: whether you trust the jury for some awards; if you follow the will of the populace (online or otherwise); whether you think a self-limited interest group of some sort will produce an interesting list of books. The Tiptree Award seems worthwhile in that the jury redefines the definition every year and produces some great reading lists—as well as the occasional head scratcher.
Laurie’s book—and the rest of the Honor List—is a book which, besides being a dark, thoughtful , entertaining pageturner, makes people think. It’s a noisy world and anything that encourages people to stop and think is excellent.
It’s been almost a year since the Publication Day of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s first anthologyInterfictions: how about an update?
Yesterday it was announced that the book was one of 9 on the Tiptree AwardHonor List, which is great news and retrospectively seems very fitting that an anthology intent on ignoring all kinds of borders would be recognized by an award that seeks to expand our understanding of gender. (Read “expand our understanding” as “blow your mind.”)
And then on Friday Christopher Barzak announced that he and Delia Sherman will be editing the second Interfictions. The editors will be reading this October and November and the book will be published some time in 2009. Get ye to your thinking chair or get out your pencils and papers (or whatever your tools of interstitial fiction production are) and get to it.
It’s been almost a year since the Publication Day of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s first anthologyInterfictions: how about an update?
Yesterday it was announced that the book was one of 9 on the Tiptree AwardHonor List, which is great news and retrospectively seems very fitting that an anthology intent on ignoring all kinds of borders would be recognized by an award that seeks to expand our understanding of gender. (Read “expand our understanding” as “blow your mind.”)
And then on Friday Christopher Barzak announced that he and Delia Sherman will be editing the second Interfictions. The editors will be reading this October and November and the book will be published some time in 2009. Get ye to your thinking chair or get out your pencils and papers (or whatever your tools of interstitial fiction production are) and get to it.
With John’s blessing we’re setting his book free into the world:
Today, April 15, 2008, is tax day in the USA and we all need cheering up. We’re celebrating at Small Beer Press by publishing John Kessel‘s first collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, as well as releasing it as a free download in a number of completely open formats—with, of course, no Digital Rights Management (DRM).
The Baum Plan includes Kessel’s Tiptree Award winning “Stories for Men” (gender inequality meet Fight Club . . . on the moon), “Pride and Prometheus,” a mashup of Frankenstein and Jane Austen, and “Powerless,” an amazing mix of pulp fictions, paranoia, and academia.
The Baum Plan is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any remixing/interpretation/Web 2.0 huddly-cuddly noncommercial manner.
The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. Read more, download, and or order the collection here.
Confirming what everyone knew all along but the government were too lily-livered to admit:
Cheney, Others OK’d Harsh Interrogations
By LARA JAKES JORDAN and PAMELA HESS
Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON (AP) — Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
Cheney et al knew it was right for the USA to use torture but they also knew it was right that no one should know it was them who ok’d it. Double standard? Sure. But who cares about that. What we care about is that torture-porn like 24 aside, if they wanted porn they should´ve watched some Gay Furry Porn. These methods are inefficient, morally questionable, and has probably helped throw the USA into recession because the whole world looks at the USA differently now. And not different-is-good.
Hope Cheney (et al) gets prison time before his robo-heart gives out.
Two things! A thoughtful and wide-ranging review/interview in Metro Magazine in Raleigh, NC (Kessel’s hometown—unless you count his football homeland, Buffalo):
Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please — or to defy prediction.
Second Thing:
In preparation for the actual publication day (April 15) next week, we’ve got more free audio fiction from John Kessel: this week it’s his fantastic 19th century mash-up, “Pride and Prometheus,” first published in the January 2008 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction:
Miss Mary Bennet, the bookish younger sister of Elizabeth Darcy, meets a mysterous and handsome scientist from the continent come to Regency England on a matter of life-and-death.
Fri 4 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Books | Comments Off on New Fowler | Posted by: Gavin
Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel Wit’s End is out this week—you can read the first chapter here and an interview here. There’s also a video of that interview if you have a WSJ log-in.
You can also pre-order a signed copy from Powell’s (and pick up a signed copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, Lavinia, at the same time!).
More? Ok. Great fun, hilarious in parts, heartbreaking, and filled with Fowlerian grace notes. It’s one of the first novels to really look at the author’s place in this overheated Web 2.doh atmosphere. There’s more politics in it than The Jane Austen Book Club, which is a good fit as Fowler is one of the most acute and informed political observers we know. And now we can play the Casting the Movie game.
Also, here’s her new web site and upcoming events (via Gwenda).
Greg Frost is a multi-talented (and sharp-dressed) man. Here’s his IMDB page and his latest novel, Shadowbridge (the second part of the duology is due this summer), is a celebration of storytelling in all its forms.
This week John Kessel posted Greg’s reading of his story “Every Angel is Terrifying”:
Railroad is a murderer and a man haunted by God. What happens in the aftermath of his latest crime, when the pet cat of his last victims offers him a chance ot change his life? (With apologies to Flannery O’Connor).
We’ll have more about it as the publication date (April 15) approaches including a nice surprise for peeps everywhere.
It’s already in some stores (especially those John is reading in) and should be arriving at your local book store soon.
Indie book shops may have it in their Book Sense section, chains will have it in New Books, Excellent Books, Short Story Collections by Extremely Smart People, or in the Tall section.
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats loves Black Sabbath (but who doesn’t) and has a book out on them soon. Interviewed on io9, he showed amazing good taste:
When I was a kid I pretty much worshiped Harlan Ellison and I still think he’s a good writer. Through his interviews & his introductions in the Dangerous Visions books I got into James Sallis & Carol Emshwiller, and I’m still a big Emshwiller fan to this day — she writes such hard good sentences.
Update: Missed this until the kind people at The Stranger mailed us a real, paper copy. (We love paper, so there internets!) This was from Paul Constant’s Constant Reader column where he wrote a lovely piece about why people should go to Norwescon:
The best reason to pay attention to Norwescon is the Philip K. Dick Awards, an annual ceremony dedicated to celebrating a “distinguished original science-fiction paperback published for the first time during the award year in the USA.” Unlike most book awards, the PKD Awards almost always single out an excellent book. Of the last five years’ worth of PKD winners, three of them—Life by Gwyneth Jones, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and The Mount by Carol Emshwiller—are books that, in a world unprejudiced to genre, would wind up on almost any critics’ annual best-of lists.
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. If the PKD awards didn’t recognize The Mount, it’s doubtful that anyone else would have, either, which means that they’re possibly the only book awards in the world that actually do exactly what they’re supposed to do.
A bloodless revolution, a changing of the guard. Yay for Matt Kressel! The series is funded out of Matt and Ellen’s pockets (unless you’d like to throw some $$$ their way?) so why not buy them a drink next time you see them?
New co-host of Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series
Ellen Datlow is proud to announce that she has a new co-host, writer/editor Matthew Kressel, for the KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading Series.
Kressel, publisher of Senses Five Press and Sybil’s Garage, is taking over for Gavin J. Grant as co-host of the monthly reading series at the famed KGB Bar in New York City.
Terry Bisson and Alice K. Turner started the reading series in the late 1990s, attempting to bring together mainstream writers with writers of speculative fiction in order to show, in Alice Turner’s words, “that at a certain level they were plowing exactly the same field.” In the spring of 2000 Ellen Datlow took over for Alice K. Turner and in August 2002 Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press, stepped in for Bisson when he moved to California.
For six years Gavin has co-hosted the series with Ellen. We wish to thank him for the bang up job he’s done, for the dedication he has shown to the authors and their work.
The KGB Fantastic Fiction readings—in addition to showcasing many of the major voices of the field—regularly bring together the members of New York City science fiction, fantasy, and horror communities where writers, editors, and readers can mingle and promote excellent fiction.
The readings (which are always free) are held on the third Wednesday of each month at 7 PM at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).
Upcoming readers include P. D. Cacek, Jack Ketchum, James Patrick Kelly, Cassandra Claire, Christopher Barzak, Jeff Somers, Stefan Merrill Block, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and John Kessel.
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.
