Howard Waldrop, R.I.P.

Mon 15 Jan 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Howard Waldrop holding a copy of his collection Night of the Cooters in 2018Brought low by the news that Howard Waldrop died yesterday, January 14, at the age of 77.

We delighted in bringing his first collection, the still well and hilariously named Howard Who?, back into print in 2006 and then publishing a later collection, Horse of a Different Color in 2013. Each of those books has at least one of my favorite stories in them: the award-winning “The Ugly Chickens” in the former and the holy grail/vaudeville mashup title story in the latter.

In 2014 we published ebooks of two selections of his works, Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction and Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction, which were published in trade cloth and trade paper by Michael Walsh of Old Earth Books. Then in 2022 we re-released his Wheatland Press/Electric Story collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures, his “movie (‘dream factories’) and television (‘radio pictures’) stories from his first four collections, as well as a new article and a new story.”

That’s the publishing part. More on the man himself, one of my most faithful correspondents, later. For now, he is much missed. Here’s his best known story, The Ugly Chickens.