Gravity Again

Tue 18 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on Gravity Again | Posted by: Gavin

On January 1st of this year I hung up my space boots and Weightless Books became the sole property of my friend and cofounder, Michael J. DeLuca.

Michael and I began Weightless in late 2009. Weightless was nominally owned by me as I had the Small Beer business infrastructure in place so that I could pay sales tax and send out annual 1099s but it was an equal collaboration: we were each paid equally every quarter and we made decisions together. I admire Michael both for his work ethic (how American of me!) but also his wandering off to the woods, the way he and his wife are raising their kid, his way of moving through the world, his home brewing and baking, and although Weightless is a small niche website that could always be better, I have always enjoyed it as an excuse to work with him.

Where and Why Weightless

In 2009 Michael and I had been redoing the Small Beer Press website from a clunky hand-coded html site to an up-to-date (for its time) WordPress site and among the problems  we ran into was that of selling both print and ebook formats simultaneously from the site. (Let’s not talk about the difficulty of trying to bring in years of my hand-coded zine pages over!)

We’d been selling ebooks on the old site since 2005 but the PayPal cart architecture made selling both formats complicated. As is still true, Am*zon was dominating ebook sales and part of their method was to remove or threaten to remove the buy button on a on a book’s page. I did not want to have all the Small Beer ebooks in one basket so I self-distributed them to Fictionwise, Google, and B&N as well as Am*zon — as then, they dominate the ebook market. However, if we had our own site we’d never need to worry that one company could make all of our books disappear.

When it comes to publishing, I always like seeing if I can do something myself so we decided to try building a website that could automate some of the ebook delivery work. Michael is the technological heart of the website and he coded it. At the start, we had some Small Beer interns who helped – shout out to Diana Cao and Felice Ling! — but over the years it has been Michael on the tech side and then both of us doing everything else: importing ebooks, sending them out, fixing our own and publisher errors, paying royalties, hunting down missing ebook formats, importing yet more ebooks, dealing with hosting failures or PayPal and WordPress blips where sales did not come through, &c., &c. In the weeks since the new year I’ve already found it odd not to be regularly checking the Weightless email to see if there are questions. We designed the site as one that we’d be happy to buy from — although no matter what we did, it would always have been better if we’d had more money to make it load faster — so:

  • there are no pop-ups
  • we never sold ads
  • we never sold anyone’s information
  • we only stocked DRM-free ebooks.

In early 2011, friends of ours who run Blind Eye Books published a huge ten-part serialized novel by Ginn Hale called The Rifter which was incredibly popular and it helped us realize how much people like subscriptions. We approached mostly sf&f publishers and some of them tried the site and left and some are still there. We found that genre (primarily science fiction, fantasy, & horror and to a small extent, mystery) ebooks generally outsold nongenre ebooks. We worked with big and small publishers although given the time constraints of two people working in the interstices of their lives we had to set limits to what we could bring on — some of the parts we’d hoped to automate had never quite worked — so after bringing on many small magazines (closer to my heart on paper than ebook, but still) we eventually closed to new publishers although since we are both interested in forefronting diverse voices in recent months we did manage to bring on khōréō and Constelación.

But Also

In the past 11 years Michael and I have done a lot of other things. Most of my time has been taken up with our kid or Small Beer Press and a few years ago Michael founded Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice.

Then in 2018 a used and new bookshop came up for sale in the next town over, Easthampton, where our Small Beer office is. I met my wife, Kelly, while working at a bookshop in Boston and I love the diversity of viewpoints independent bookshops put out into the world. At Small Beer we can only publish 6-10 books a year. At a bookshop we could put hundreds of books in front of people.

Kelly and I had long played with the idea of running a bookshop — but it was play. I knew we couldn’t afford to buy or open one in Northampton and since I hope never to move house again it was safe to think it would never be more than play. Our bookstore could be four stories with an elevator; 10,000 sq ft on one floor; it could only sell books by 19th century left-handed Scots writers. Besides, although we’d both worked at a couple of bookshops, we didn’t know how to run one. But on inquiring, it turned out the bookshop was much quieter than we’d known, and therefore affordable, and in 2019 Kelly used part of her MacArthur grant to buy it.

Kelly’s a full-time writer as well as the art director and editor of many Small Beer books, so as we imagined how our lives would be if bought the shop (and while we bounced hundreds of possible names for it off one another), it became clear we could only do so if I spent a fair amount of time there — which I wanted to — and if we found people we could work with.

The bookshop, Book Moon, has been fun and I’m happy to say we found great people to work with — although the first few months of the pandemic were a grind and as I type two booksellers are out with Covid (fingers crossed) and we are back to being only open for Curbside Pickup again. But over the past two pandemic years I kept running into the problem of there being too little time or not enough me to do all I wanted and I realized that something had to go: Small Beer, Weightless, or Book Moon.

3, 2, 1, You’re Out!

During one of our regular discussions on the future of Weightless, Michael said he would be happy to run it himself. Even though I knew I had to leave, I didn’t jump at this quite as fast as I expected I would. Not surprisingly, I found it quite hard to give up something I’d helped start, worked on, and still enjoy. But it seemed better for the site if I stood down since Michael was re-energized and excited about future possibilities. Michael has built a strong community with Reckoning which made me think that perhaps he could grow Weightless, too. Besides, if needed, I can still pitch in.

I’ve found the hard part is not to think I have lots of free time so I should go start something else. So far that’s been somewhat easy as (sorry, writers) there’s a lot of Small Beer reading to catch up on, 1099s are due, and our next book, Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, is coming out soon.

So now I’m part of the great resignation. Michael has registered the business in Michigan, the PayPal and bank accounts are now his, the hosting and url registration has been transferred. Historically Weightless didn’t made tons of money. It wasn’t volunteering but it was more that the site was a service that we liked providing, a place for readers to find something interesting and not just be part of the datacloud Am*zon etc. are eating every day. The site pays does not pay anything resembling Michael’s actual coding rates so  so I did not “cash out” my half of the business. I transferred it to Michael and walked away.

Thanks to everyone who has ever bought a book or subscribed to a magazine on Weightless. It was, believe or not, fun. It’s much better to have tried it, it did ok, than not try it. I strongly believe in the principles we founded the site on so Small Beer ebooks will still be distributed DRM-free on the site and I look forward to working with Michael for years to come.


Shipping, some free books, Janelle Monae, a big blue cat

Wed 15 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Shipping, some free books, Janelle Monae, a big blue cat | Posted by: Gavin

Reconstruction: Stories Cover ImageDespite the pull of the couch and the shiny shiny kettle suggesting that it is time for tea and biscuits, we’re still shipping here books from Book Moon and from our distributor, Consortium. Ordering on this site means includes free media mail shipping — great if you are not bothered about books in time for the holidays. If you do want them to arrive in time, choose priority mail or ground shipping at Book Moon. The Post Office says they might get there in time but maybe take that with a pinch of salt and a deep relaxing breath letting the shipping gods know that you know they’re in charge and we mortals are not in the know and ok with it.

To make up for that possibly slow shipping, we’re throwing in a free backlist title with each new book order. Get some for yourself, your Little Free Library, your good friends, your friends who are not so good and maybe worry you a little but they’re fun and as long as they can keep it together (cf Eddie Murphy, Bowfinger) one day they’ll get a Nobel prize or a first look deal with Netflix.

All copies of LCRW are being delivered by a big blue cat, so please forgive that cat if it gets distracted by a shiny thing on the way and it is delayed.

Not sure which book to order? How about some short story collections?

Janelle Monae just picked Alaya Dawn Johnson to co-write the title story of her forthcoming first short story collection, The Memory Librarian. (That sentence is just amazing to write. Wow.) See why she picked Alaya by picking up Alaya’s wide-ranging and lauded collection Reconstruction: Stories.

I just heard the excellent news that Elwin Cotman sold his debut novel The Age of Ignorance to Scribner at auction so while looking forward to that I’m going to throw his collection Dance on Saturday onto this list.

Recently Samantha Cheh interviewed Zen Cho for Electric Lit about her novel Black Water Sister and her joy-filled expanded debut collection, Spirits Abroad. I just listened to Zen’s novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and loved it so that gets a recommendation here, too.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 44 cover - click to view full sizeIsabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever has a couple of new long stories which are not to be missed, the meet cute “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls” — the latter, about older males in positions of power over young women at a camp is a sharp distillation of what has gone wrong in so many fields over the years. The reaction is harsh, effective, disturbing, and deserved.

And lastly one day I’ll sit on an uncomfortable chair in a convention hall or hotel and have the happy experience of listening to Jeffrey Ford read a story. While I can’t do that, at least I have his latest collection, Big Dark Hole.

Anyway, order a book — or a box of books — and we’ll throw in a freebie and all our thanks for helping keep the wolves from the door for another year for this small press.

 

 


Caught up in the Supply Chain

Thu 2 Dec 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Caught up in the Supply Chain | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeDespite all the warnings I had thought I was in the sweet spot with our next book, Richard Butner’s debut collection, The Adventurists. Little did I know I was walking through the letters p, r, i, d, and e, and what do you know, down I go.

The new date for the book is March 22, 2022, a lovely palindromic date in anywhere the date is sensibly written day/month/year, 22/3/22. Maybe that’ll give us more time for the pandemic to burn itself out as we all get our next boosters and mask up and we can actually get Richard out to some bookstores.

In the meantime, here’s one of Richard’s stories, Circa, on Interfictions.


Kate Challis RAKA 2021 Commendation

Fri 19 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Kate Challis RAKA 2021 Commendation | Posted by: Gavin

Taboo cover - click to view full size“The Kate Challis Ruth Adeney Koori Award, or RAKA, which means ‘five’ in the Pintupi language is awarded to an Indigenous artist in one of five categories annually, including: creative prose, poetry, script writing, drama and visual arts” and this year’s winner is Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield, a novel I read and highly recommend. Although I think all the awards it has piled up — including the Miles Franklin Award, sort of like the Australian Booker Prize — might be strong enough rec. Of the award, Ms. Winch says:

I’m a Wiradjuri woman, who grew up on Dtharawal country. I want to acknowledge the Country on which you read these words, and acknowledge my fellow writers whose beloved work was published in the last five years. I also want to recognise those writers commended, my mentors, colleagues and friends — Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott. I feel as if I’m only still at the beginning of my career as an interrogator and questioner of the past, present and future of ourselves and our nation, so it is a distinction that I will endeavour to work to, and pay respect to, in my ensuing works and years.

Kim Scott’s novel Taboo is one of three commended novels. We published Taboo in North America and I was lucky enough to attend the Library of Congress National Book Festival and spend some time with Kim, one of the highlights of pre-pandemic time. Here’s a short video of him reading from Taboo during the panel.

The full commendation for the three novels can be found here and here’s an excerpt from the note on Taboo:

‘Takes the reader along a spiritual path deep into the land and its stories, with characters as earthy, as real, as stumbling, as flawed and enlightened, and as courageous as any characters you would want to find in an epic tale.’


Second Interview in New Series

Thu 18 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Second Interview in New Series | Posted by: Gavin

Alaya Dawn Johnson, photo by Armando VegaWe recently posted a new interview with recent World Fantasy Award winner Alaya Dawn Johnson in our occasional Book Moon Small Beer author interview series. As with the first, the interview was carried out by the inimitable Franchesca Viaud.

Reconstruction: Stories is Alaya’s first collection of stories collecting stories from as far back as 2005 and as new as the eponymous title story that first appeared in the collection. “The Mirages” was going to be published for the first time in the book but the pandemic got the better of us, the book was moved to January of this year, and the story first appeared in Asimov’s last issue of 2020. In between those times Alaya has published many stories and novels, started a band, and moved to Mexico.

Alaya’s first novel, Racing the Dark, was published in 2007 by Agate and her latest, Trouble the Saints, that World Fantasy Award winner mentioned above, was published in 2020 by Tor with the paperback edition coming out just this past August. We have some signed bookplates at Book Moon will be included free with any of her books ordered from there.

Read the interview here.

Author photo by Armando Vega.


An Essential Travelers’ Guide

Wed 17 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on An Essential Travelers’ Guide | Posted by: Gavin

Received by packet mail over the internet from a writer who knows a good travel book from the inside out — besides his award-winning fiction he is also the author of Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff — this note about Richard Butner’s The Adventurists:

The Adventurists cover - click to view full size“Richard Butner has taught me so much about the art of short fiction, and The Adventurists is an essential travelers’ guide to packing a small space with all the wit, craft, invention and heart needed for the journey. Thank you, Richard Butner — once again!”
— Andy Duncan, World Fantasy Award-winning author of An Agent of Utopia


Full of love and pain

Tue 16 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Full of love and pain | Posted by: Gavin

Never Have I Ever cover - click to view full sizeIsabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever gets a shout out in this Book Riot very solid list of Out of This World SFF Short Story Collections:

Last but not least, this is another collection that mixes the magical and the horrific. It is full of urban legends, Filipino folklore, and immigrant tales that explore the lives of women and girls. Yap’s unique voice is oft-praised for a reason — her stories are unique and lyrical. Full of love and pain. They also include things like ghosts, vampires, androids, and elementals to name a few. Watch out especially for “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Good Girls,” and the heartbreaking “Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” which talks about the Philippine drug war.

Every reader pulls different favorites from a collection — for instance this reader highlighting Asphalt, River, Mother, Child. I’d like to highlight the three stories that appear in Never Have I Ever for the first time, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” “Syringe,” and “A Canticle for Lost Girls.”

“Syringe” — as the title promises — is a short sharp shock while the two other stories are much longer, albeit very different. They’re both stories about friendship, love, and magic but while the first is a sweetly seductive story the second is a much darker story that will stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.


Hot Chocolate

Fri 12 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Hot Chocolate | Posted by: Gavin

Me & our kid have just signed up again for the annual Hot Chocolate Run Walk fundraiser for Safe Passage. Is it true we only walk a couple of miles on a cold December morning so that we will get a mug of hot chocolate. No? No! We raises the money for the programs and we get hot chocolate. Win? Win!

We’ve been doing this fundraiser for the last few years — except 2020, which must have been virtual. I can barely remember although I just checked and Ursula raised $585 which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who donated for that. Ursula has turned into a powerhouse fundraiser over the years — I am so glad she is older and I do not have to carry her part of the way anymore. Little does she know that soon she’ll have to carry me.

Anyway, back to posts about books and supple chains (pretty sure that’s what’s all over the news), and thanks again for support in the past and any and all donations for Safe Passage are welcome, thank you!


Holiday Deadlines 2021

Wed 3 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Comments Off on Holiday Deadlines 2021 | Posted by: Gavin

Time for our annual posting of the USPS Holiday Shipping Deadlines.

I usually post these later but you may have seen in the news that all the manufacturers are expecting holiday shipping to be slow, more expensive, and unreliable this year. So far our experience at Book Moon has proven that to be correct. If you can order early for the holidays, go for it!

As usual, the Small Beer office will be closed from December 23, 2021 – January 3, 2022. However, we can still get books to you because what we most want to do, book-wise, is get books to readers:

  1. Weightless Books is always there, 100% solid, 100% independent with DRM-free ebooks in the format of your choice. They can also be sent as gifts on the date you specify.
  2. How about just any about old ebook in any genre? Got them here.
  3. Audiobooks: we have them. (I love Libro.fm — it’s very simple to use and they have pretty much everything.)
  4. Bookshop can ship books and toys to you or direct to your family and friends. We’re always adding book recs there.
  5. Book Moon will be open.

So here are the last (domestic) order dates for Small Beer Press. (International.) Along with a reminder that orders include free first class (LCRW) or media mail (books) shipping in the USA.

And this year this annual reminder should probably just be bolded:

Media Mail parcels are the last ones to go on trucks. If the truck is full, Media Mail does not go out until the next truck. And if that one’s full, too . . . it could be very late in December before there’s space. So, if you’d like to guarantee pre-holiday arrival, please add Priority Mail:

Domestic Mail Class/Product Deadline
Media Mail (estimate, not guaranteed) Dec. 5
First Class Mail (LCRW/chapbooks) Dec. 17
Priority Mail Dec. 18
Priority Mail Express Dec. 23

Here are the books we published this year:

 


Trifecta

Tue 2 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Trifecta | Posted by: Gavin

Dropping today like a bear into a bookshop near you today is Elizabeth Hand’s third Cass Neary novel, Hard Light — Cass is in England, there’s murder, photography, bad behaviour (UK spelling this time, of course) and now all three have matching covers. If winter is coming down on you like a henge stone tipping over in a thousand-year storm these are the books to step into and escape.

TL;DR?

riveting tour-de-force . . .  mysterious death . . . Helsinki . . . stunning images . . . Reykjavik . . . corpse . . . vortex . . . ancient myth . . . betrayal, vengeance . . . Icelandic wilderness.

Here’s a picture of all three of them on the bench in Book Moon where all 3 of them are sitting on the shelf looking beautiful and appropriately scary. Come by or order them online today!


Soaked in Myth

Wed 27 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Soaked in Myth | Posted by: Gavin

The Silverberg Business cover - click to view full sizeWe are happy to announce a new novel — Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Silverberg Business, coming in trade paperback and ebook in 2022 — and reveal the cover today. The cover art is by a long time favorite of ours, musician and artist Jon Langford, whose art is a perfect fit for this novel of 19th-century Texas where everything is weirder than it first seems.

We have long admired Robert’s stories since we first published his story “Suspension” in the eighth issue of LCRW. One of the early readers of the novel, Daryl Gregory, author of Revelator, had this to say:

“The Silverberg Business hits like a hurricane—there’s strangeness and beauty on every page. The novel is that rare thing, a weird western that’s truly weird, set in a Texas that’s simultaneously gritty, violent, and real, yet soaked in myth. Don’t miss this.”

There’ll be lots more posted about it before, on, and after the publication date, August 22, 2022, and in the meantime, hey, Jon Langford!


Meet the new boss

Mon 25 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Meet the new boss | Posted by: Gavin

Quite different from the old boss. Cass Neary, allergic to bosses, sensitive as a brick through a window, deeply intimate with the relationship between light and dark and the photography of same, is coming back. Hard Light comes out on November 2.


Early Adventurer Says

Thu 21 Oct 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Early Adventurer Says | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeHere’s an excuse to post the near-final cover of Richard Butner’s forthcoming collection — John Kessel sent us this report from perusing The Adventurists:

“Richard Butner’s stories are funny, scary, personal, dispassionate, satirical, and heartfelt, if those incompatible adjectives can be assembled to describe the same work. He writes about the subtle losses we suffer (often without noticing) as we get older, about love and loyalty, about how the past is never completely past and can come sweeping back over you at the slightest opportunity like a tidal wave, so you’d better be ready lest you drown.”

Ready to adventure but don’t want to wait until February? There are 10 copies to be had on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers here.


Beginning the adventure

Thu 23 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Beginning the adventure | Posted by: Gavin

The Adventurists cover - click to view full sizeNext year we’re looking forward to publishing The Adventurists, a collection of stories by a long time favorite writer, Richard Butner. Butner’s stories have been published in Interfictions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Crimewave, Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic, SciFiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, When the Music’s Over, and Strange Horizons among others.

We’ve sent advance copies to booksellers and more are going out to a few readers and reviewers every week. For those who like electronic hunting and gathering you can now download or request it on Edelweiss.

I love to hear what other readers think of the books and am happy to share a couple of early reactions:

“A Richard Butner story is an invitation to discovery alongside his characters. It’s a left turn off of reality’s highway and into its old business district: defiantly shabby, casually weird, and occasionally surreal, perfect in every grounding detail. Every story zigs when you expect it to zag. You only think you know where they are going, but it turns out you are on the same adventure as the protagonist, discovering as you go that the world is stranger than it was the minute before, and the minute before that. Well worth the journey.”
— Sarah Pinsker, author of We Are Satellites

“At last, one of the contemporary masters of the uncanny and darkly humorous, Richard Butner, has his stories in one place where we can get at them. With a toe (just a toe) in the literary pool, and the rest of him splashing happily in the spec fic/sci-fi/surreal swimming hole, Butner’s tales deal in the deadly habits of nostalgia, and the surprises waiting for the wistful and the obsessive whose march forward obliges a look backward. Linkean, Barthelmean, Saundersean . . . hm, okay, these guys do NOT lend themselves to sonorous adjectivization but, nonetheless, they’ll have to welcome a new storyteller beside them on the shelf.”
— Wilton Barnhardt, author of Emma Who Saved My Life and Lookaway, Lookaway


Cass Neary Dark Mode Now Available

Mon 13 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Cass Neary Dark Mode Now Available | Posted by: Gavin

Available Dark cover - click to view full sizeThis month we are putting out our first paperback edition of Elizabeth Hand’s second Cass Neary novel, Available Dark — available in paperback and ebook now at your favorite bookstores. The ebook wasn’t connected to the print book because I missed the new switch added to the massive flowchart of How To Publish A Book. Oops. It’s up there and should be connected by Thursday or later. Will it matter to anyone but me? Don’t know.

I sometimes find it hard to find the right words to recommend these books because Cass Neary is such a walking car crash — although that’s not right as it doesn’t capture her relentless forward-moving energy. (So maybe it’s more like she’s always crashing in the same car.) If she looks back she might turn into a pillar of salt (or something slightly more illegal) and blow away so she is always moving, almost on the run, looking forward for a place where she won’t be surrounded by and immersed in the damage she can see on some people. Well, no such luck this time, Cass.

Available Dark immediately follows Generation Loss as Cass takes on a photo authentication assignment and leaves the US for Helsinki (what, no Covid fit-to-fly test?) and then goes onto Reykjavik. It’s beautiful up there in the Iceland, but for Cass and others, it’s getting deadly.

Hand will be down in DC this Saturday as part of the 20201 National Book Festival for this event celebrating the new paperback edition of the 4th book in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners (which I think comes out this month):

Live Event (virtual link to come)
September 18, 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT

Elizabeth Hand, author of The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland), and Alex Michaelides, author of The Maidens  (Celadon), discuss their new books with NPR Books editor Petra Mayer.

A direct link to the virtual event will be available here closer to the date of the Festival. Attendees may register during the event to submit questions for the live Q&A at the end.

 


Too Too Solid Paper

Fri 10 Sep 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Too Too Solid Paper | Posted by: Gavin

Here’s a fun one: do you work at a lit nonprofit and like getting boxes of free Small Beer books? Email us!


50 of the Best

Fri 20 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on 50 of the Best | Posted by: Gavin

We’re delighted to see Sofia Samatar’s two Olondria novels included in NPR’s big fun list — how many have you read?

We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

In Olondria, you can smell the ocean wind coming off the page, soldiers ride birds, angels haunt humans, and written dreams are terribly dangerous. “Have you ever seen something so beautiful that you’d be content to just sit and watch the light around it change for a whole day because every passing moment reveals even more unbearable loveliness and transforms you in ways you can’t articulate?” asks judge Amal El-Mohtar. “You will if you read these books.”

Which reminds me it was also on a big list last year:  Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

“This slowly-unraveling, exquisitely-detailed novel made the poet Sofia Samatar a World Fantasy Award winner and a Nebula Award finalist. It follows Jevick, a young writer who is obsessed with the fantastical, distant world of Olondria, where his father is a merchant. But when Jevick is called there after he inherits the family business, he becomes haunted by a ghost—and is unwittingly pulled into Olondria’s power struggle. The novel unfolds in waves of A Game of Thrones-level twists, all while its fantastical world-building pulls from South Asian, Middle Eastern and African cultures to offer a welcome departure from Eurocentric fantasy.”


Vandana Singh, Climate Imagination Fellow

Tue 17 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Vandana Singh, Climate Imagination Fellow | Posted by: Gavin

I was delighted to see via Locus that Vandana Singh (author of Ambiguity Engines among others) is one of 4 new Climate Imagination Fellows, hosted by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The fellowship “seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world.”

I have Xia Jia’s collection from the Clarkesworld Kickstarter but the other 2 writers are new to me:

  • Libia Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City. She writes speculative fiction as well as nonfiction and criticism about science fiction and fantastic literature. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian and Portuguese. She is one of the co-founders of the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, with a special focus on science fiction; and Mexicona: Imagination and Future, a series of Spanish-language conversations about the future and speculative literature from Mexico and other planets. She was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for the bilingual and bicultural anthology “A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia.” After that, she was so excited that she edited “A Timeline in Which We Don’t Go Extinct,” a bilingual anthology that is also a video game, which is free to download and play. She edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine “Strange Horizons,” published in November 2020.
  • Xia Jia is a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, a city in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. Seven of her short stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. She has published a fantasy novel, “Odyssey of China Fantasy: On the Road” (2009), and four collections of science fiction stories: “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” (2012), “A Time Beyond Your Reach” (2017), “Xi’an City Is Falling Down” (2018), and “A Summer Beyond Your Reach” (2020), her first collection in English. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Nature and Clarkesworld magazine. Her nonfiction academic collection, “Coordinates of the Future: Discussions on Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Globalization,” was published in 2019. She is also involved in science fiction research, translation, screenwriting, editing and teaching creative writing and is currently working on a new science fiction book, titled “Chinese Encyclopedia.”
  • Hannah Onoguwe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies “Imagine Africa 500” (2016), from Pan African Publishers, and “Strange Lands Short Stories” (2020), from Flame Tree Press. Her work has appeared in publications including Adanna, The Drum Literary Magazine, Omenana, Brittle Paper, The Stockholm Review and Timeworn Literary Journal. In 2014, “Cupid’s Catapult,” her collection of short stories, was one of 10 manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She won the ANA Poetry Competition in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ibadan and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Jos. She works at a software company, providing support for the Nigeria Immigration Service.
  • Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” (2014) and “Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories” (2018), the second of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2014, she traveled to the Alaskan North Shore to create a case study on climate change for undergraduate education as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Her work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis is part of a forthcoming volume from UNESCO, “Charting an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Radical, Transformative Change in the Midst of Climate Breakdown.” Her short fiction has been widely published, including the short story “Widdam,” part of the interdisciplinary climate-themed collection “A Year Without a Winter” (2019). She was born and brought up in New Delhi and now lives near Boston.

It is quite an exciting program. The fellows will write short fiction, short flash fictions, and essays and so on to be collected in a Climate Action Almanac next year. They also will be doing workshops around the world including the countdown summit to COP 26 in Scotland later this year.

Congratulations to Vandana and all the Fellows. Looking forward to seeing what they do.


Read Liyana on Lithub

Mon 16 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Read Liyana on Lithub | Posted by: Gavin

Spirits Abroad cover - click to view full sizeLithub just dropped an excerpt from Zen Cho’s story “Liyana” — read it in the book or check it out here.

Recent notes about the book can be found in the infinite pages of Bustle

“A must-read book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan.”

and Buzzfeed:

“These 19 science fiction and fantasy short stories infused with Malaysian folklore are absolutely gorgeous. Originally published in 2014, before Zen Cho’s debut fantasy, Sorcerer to the Crown, it is now being published by Small Beer Press with nine additional stories. In her Hugo Award–winning novelette ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,’ an imugi who wishes to ascend to full dragonhood has its plan thwarted by a human girl taking a selfie. In ‘The House of Aunts,’ a teenage pontianak (sorta like a vampire) lives with her overbearing female relatives and attends school, where she tries to hide her food choices from her crush. Just as with her novels, Cho merges humor and relatable characters with delightful prose and engaging storylines.”


Here, There, and Everywhere

Tue 10 Aug 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Here, There, and Everywhere | Posted by: Gavin

Spirits Abroad cover - click to view full sizeI’ve been looking forward to this day for a while as it’s the publication day for our expanded edition of Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad. The book was originally published a few years ago and was a co-winner of the Crawford Award. I hadn’t read it until more recently when it came across my desk with nine additional stories including the Hugo Award winner — and such a good story! — “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.”

We were a bit late with getting the cover finalized but when it came in from Wesley Allsbrook we were over the moon, what a cracker! The book is about as much fun as can be with the whole gamut of stories, running from here, there, to everywhere.

The book is available everywhere in print, audio, and ebook. Dive in!


And now we ship

Tue 13 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on And now we ship | Posted by: Gavin

Don’t expect to hear too much from us as we try and organize hundreds of orders from that sale. Phew. Thank you! With luck the monthly warehouse charges will have been significantly reduced. If not, check back here.


Warehouse Clearance Sale — last day

Mon 12 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Warehouse Clearance Sale — last day | Posted by: Gavin

It has been — it is — nuts, so: thank you! Today, July 12th, is the last day of our Warehouse Clearance Sale — maybe we’ll do another next year and I’ll be better prepared for the madnesses. We’ve processed on third or so of the orders and some are shipping out. Many are being assembled. Books are moving from one warehouse to the other, being shipped from our office to the warehouse, adding a T-shirt, or another Angélica Gorodischer title.

Anyway, last day of the sale is here.


Celebrating Jeffrey Ford’s new book Big Dark Hole with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

Tue 6 Jul 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Comments Off on Celebrating Jeffrey Ford’s new book Big Dark Hole with a Warehouse Clearance Sale! | Posted by: Gavin

July 6th, 2021: We are celebrating a new book, Jeffrey Ford’s Big Dark Hole, and 20 years (. . .) of Small Beer Press books with a Warehouse Clearance Sale!

It’s been 20 years since we started publishing books as Small Beer Press and we are going to celebrate in a couple of different ways beginning now and continuing later this summer — mostly by making books or sending even more books out into the world, ha!

First Thing

We are delighted to celebrate 20 years of really rather good books by publishing Jeffrey Ford’s new collection Big Dark Hole. It’s a stoater!

This is Jeff’s sixth collection — seventh, really, as there was a Best of from PS last year — and every one of them is a cracker. We’re already planning our next collection with him — who wouldn’t when you look at this list I grabbed from his site:

The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, 2002, Golden Gryphon Press

The Empire of Ice Cream, 2005, Golden Gryphon Press

The Drowned Life, 2008, Harper Collins

Crackpot Palace, 2012, Harper Collins

A Natural History of Hell, 2016, Small Beer Press

Big Dark Hole, 2021, Small Beer Press, natch, comes out today, July the 6th, 2021, and it is a short, sharp shock of fantastic fiction.

There are a three new stories first published here in this book, “Monkey In the Woods,” “Inn of the Dreaming Dog,” and “The Match.” That third one there will have you stopping what you’re doing and making sure you read the rest of the story before someone interrupts.

You can read one of the stories, “Not Without Mercy,” online, but, really the book is shiny in surprising places and feels good in the hand. Sign up now for Readercon — online in August — where Jeffrey Ford and Ursula Vernon will be the guests of honor.

Second Thing

We’re putting on our first warehouse sale in many years. Long time readers will recognize the screenshot below from our pre-WordPress website — and now 10+ years later we’re basically doing the same thing.

The sale is going to run on the Book Moon website and will have a few rules and limitations:

  • alphabetical buying encouraged but quite difficult given the price-ordered list, but it’ll be fun, honest.
  • no buying over 5,000 books unless you really want to build something interesting out of them.
  • On second thoughts if you want to buy over 5,000 copies, you do you.
  • Discounts range from 0-94% off retail prices.
  • Order some full-price titles (such as the first one on this page,Travel Light, or Big Dark Hole) and we’ll throw free titles from the sale list.
  • Orders on this Easthampton, Massachusetts-based bookshop website will be shipped as fast as we can put them through from the Tennessee warehouse of our fabulous Minneapolis-based distributor, Consortium.
  • Gosh we love these books. We loved publishing every single one of them and right now we’re lining up some surprises and new books for the couple of years. It is true that I am an enthusiast, still, about all this and our warehouse people will tell you that, yes, I am very enthusiastic when I put the print orders in. More joy all round, says I.
  • There are a few books in the sale that are rarer and we will ship them from Book Moon.
  • This Decennial Warehouse Clearance Sale will run for one (1) week, July 6th-12th with the possibility of being extended for one (1) more week.
  • We only ship within the US & Canada.

I imagine if we keep publishing for another 10 or 20 years, we’ll have more clearance sales. Imagine that: 2030. 2040. What funny looking numbers. 2030 looks more like a time than a year. 8:30 already?

Who knows. Maybe by 2040 we’ll all be ordering small pills from Bookland that download the latest story virus into our chips. If you trust Bookland and your shipper, of course.

Anyway, please pass the word around and stock up: it’ll be Jolabokaflod before you know it.

Right, here’s that all important Warehouse Clearance Event link.

Thanks for reading, spreading the word, buying books, and keeping this Small Beer contraption on the road!


Ben Rosenbaum event Wednesday night!

Mon 28 Jun 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Comments Off on Ben Rosenbaum event Wednesday night! | Posted by: Gavin

Join us Wednesday night for the last Book Moon zoom of the month with 2 fabulous authors. We published Ben Rosenbaum’s absolutely fabulous collection The Ant King and Other Stories a few years ago and this novel is a leap from there. I used to read Annalee Newitz on io9.com and now I enjoy her monthly column in New Scientist. Her latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age which I’ve started and recommend. They are both lovely, smart people and I’m looking forward to listening to them (and seeing them!) build the future we want to see in conversation:

Wednesday, June 30th @ 7:00 pm ET

Join authors Benjamin Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) and Annalee Newitz (Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, The Future of Another Timeline) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Rosenbaum’s amazing first novel, The Unraveling, published this month by Erewhon.

**Register here**

Hope to see you there!


Sneaky

Tue 22 Jun 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Sneaky | Posted by: Gavin

Out goes a new zine into the world. 43rd of its line.

Most are mailed out, at least. What’s it got? A Night Farmers’ Museum, Half a Papatya, Shiny Green Floors, Mysteries, Wires, Gutter-Princes, Acting Tips, Three Favours, Poems, King Moon’s Tithe to Hell, and a Time Travel Self-Care System.

All of which can be yourn.


New Interview Series

Fri 21 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on New Interview Series | Posted by: Gavin

Today we’re celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month as well as short story month by kicking off our Small Beer Press Author Interview series with Franchesca Viaud’s interview with Isabel Yap which has just been posted on the Book Moon website.

Isabel’s first collection, Never Have I Ever: Stories, was published in February 2021 — we have a limited number of signed bookplates to go with it. A number of Isabel’s stories can be read online: Milagroso, Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?, & How to Swallow the Moon.

If you missed it, you can also catch up with Isabel’s Strange Light Reading Series event with Rebecca Roanhorse here.

As with all things Small Beer this series is imagined as an occasional event that will meander along in its own sweet time for many years to come. Francesca has been working at Book Moon for a while now splitting her time there between working outside on the fine weather days and working behind the scenes on the not-so-fine weather days. Her interview with Isabel is a conversational delight — as is the Strange Light event above; the common factor being Isabel, so perhaps she is just a conversational star as well as being a great writer! Read the interview here.

Author photo by Meg Whittenberger.


More Hands, More Hands

Mon 17 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on More Hands, More Hands | Posted by: Gavin

Being among the more cautious, I have no idea if travel will seem like a good idea or not this summer or autumn. I know millions of people are traveling right now but I’m not there yet so for travel, it’s all just books for me.

Come September, those who are armchair traveling will have 2 dark, propulsive options to carry them to Scandinavia and the south of England and the the darkest secrets at the heart of humanity. In other words, Cass Neary is coming back.

I’ve added 2 new September 2021 books to this site: Elizabeth Hand’s novels Available Dark and Hard Light, the second and third books in her can’t-look-away series of Cass Neary novels that began with Generation Loss. In the coming weeks I’ll post them on Edelweiss for reviewers and booksellers and post excerpts here to give readers a taste — here’s the the first chapter of Generation Loss.


Elle, Zen, Saving Animals on the Moon

Wed 12 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on Elle, Zen, Saving Animals on the Moon | Posted by: Gavin

Alison Bechdel spotlighted the first line of Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody in an interview with Elle:

This “speculative western” first came out in 1995 but was just reissued. The first sentence is magnificent in the way it’s a microcosm of the whole book, as well as a glimpse at the way Stinson writes so beautifully about fat bodies: “I was crouched next to the creek baiting my hook with a hunk of fat when I heard a rustling on the bank upstream.”

This Saturday June 15th Book Moon will be part of a Cottage Street Sidewalk Sale, We’ll have books on the sidewalk. Should be interesting.

And at 3 p.m. ET/8p.m. UK on Sat. the 15th Zen Cho (England) and Kelly Link (Massachusetts) will do an online event celebrating Zen’s new novel Black Water Sister which came out this Tuesday. Register here.

Book Moon has some excellent events coming hitting up a couple of different parts of the old cerebellum:

June 1st,  6 p.m. ET: Strange Light Reading Series features Rivers Solomon (Sorrowland) and Leigh Bardugo (Shadow and Bone). UMass zoom link goes live 2 weeks before the event so will post it again then.

June 2nd , 7 p.m. ET: Join local author Elan Abrell (Saving Animals) and Alex Blanchette (Porkopolis) online for celebration of the publication of Saving Animals and an interesting conversation on same.

June 15th, 7 p.m. ET: Join NYT bestselling authors Gayle Forman (Just One Day, If I stay) and Holly Black (The Cruel Prince, Tithe) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Gayle Forman’s new book, We Are Inevitable, which will be published in June by Viking Books for Young Readers. Register here.


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