Free Kessel Free

Tue 15 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kessel, Baum PlanIt’s Tax Day here in the USA and in between the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and renting of garments and DVDs, we are celebrating the Publication Day of John Kessel‘s new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.

How are we celebrating?

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.

Creative Commons: Some Rights Reserved


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 15, 2008

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.

John Kessel is the co-director of the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1992. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. He lives with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Small Beer Press is an independent press based in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Since its founding in 2000 in Brooklyn, Small Beer Press has published Kelly Link’s collections Stranger Things Happen (Salon Best Books of the Year) and Magic for Beginners (Time Magazine Best Books of the Year); Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Angélica Gorodischer’s novel Kalpa Imperial; Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount (Philip K. Dick Award winner); Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle; Story Prize Finalist Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh, and John Crowley’s Endless Things, among others. Small Beer also publishes a small lit-zine, LCRW.

In July 2005 Small Beer Press released Kelly Link’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen, online under a Creative Commons license. It has since been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
413-203-1636
http://www.lcrw.net