Kindling

Tue 23 Jan 2024 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

Published simultaneously in trade cloth (9781618732170), trade paper (9781618732132), & ebook (9781618732149) · 288 pages

World Fantasy, Locus, Ditmar, and Aurealis Award shortlists

A fabulous debut of folk tales and fantasies by an award winning author and illustrator.

Small fires start in the hearts of Kathleen Jennings’s characters and irresistibly spread to those around them. Journeys are taken, debts repaid, disguises put on, and lessons offered — although not often learned — in these fantastic tales. Jennings’s confident voice lulls readers into stepping off the known paths to find “Undine Love,” “The Heart of Owl Abbas,” and further unexpected places and people.

Read a story: Undine Love

Table of Contents

The Heart of Owl Abbas
Skull and Hyssop
Ella and the Flame
Not to Be Taken
A Hedge of Yellow Roses
The Tangled Streets
The Present Only Toucheth Thee (story; podcast)
On Pepper Creek
Annie Coal
Undine Love
Kindling
The Splendour Falls

Read Kathleen’s story notes.

Reviews

“A real treat. There is a kindling in each character’s heart throughout this collection of fantastical stories, as well as throughout Jennings’s whole oeuvre.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

“But sinking into each story, to delight in the rhythms of the words and the delightful worlds created: That’s giving this collection what it deserves.”
— Alexandra Pierce, Locus

“A range of strange tales, from the myth-like to settings in suburban and outback Australia.”
— Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette

“If you are looking for lovely fantastical short stories, such as a perfect for savoring on a cold winter night (or hot summer day if you are antipodal), I enthusiastically recommend Kindling, by Kathleen Jennings.” — Charlotte’s Library

“Fantasy writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings (Flyaway) offers 12 glittering, fantasy-inspired short stories in Kindling. In ‘Ella and the Flame,’ three women and one child tell each other stories to comfort themselves while their neighbors burn them alive as retribution for a mysterious crime. Flipping the fantasy script by placing a boggart rather than suspected witches at its center, ‘On Pepper Creek’ tells the story of a boggart who is brought to a new land against his will in a family trunk and who exacts his revenge in return. And while the titular ‘Kindling’ centers the unexpected intuition behind a barmaid’s observations of her clientele, ‘Splendour Falls’ shows the much more nefarious manipulations of a mysterious young woman who enchants a young man gifted with special sight.
Jennings’s plots are refreshingly never straightforward, and her tone and subject matter never the same. For example, ‘Ella and the Flame’ casts a wistful spell with its oral-storytelling conceit and angle of feminist tragedy. Meanwhile, ‘Undine Love’ is a complex balancing act between a cautionary tale and dark humor, using its narrator’s outside perspective to infuse humor in the plight of its doomed “hero.” Though recognizable folk tales and fairy tales appear in fragments — ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in ‘A Hedge of Yellow Roses’; ‘The Frog Prince’ in ‘Undine Love’; ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ in ‘Splendour Falls’ — they never play out the way readers expect. Throughout, like the scraps of old tales, characters’ motivations flicker in and out of view, making the true magic of these stories the simultaneous predictability and unknowability of the people and creatures at their centers.” — Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Women with guts and men of good fortune in search of their personal treasures.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Following her debut, Flyaway (2020), Jennings here compiles a collection of 12 of her previously published short stories. Samplings of her elegant fantasies include “The Heart of Owl Abbas,” a beautifully detailed tale of a lonely songwriter who sends anonymous compositions to a recently arrived virtuoso, which unfortunately brings her presence to the attention of their dissipated ruler. In ‘Ella and the Flame,’ three sisters and a child spin wondrous tales while awaiting their cruel neighbors’ unjustified vengeance, and in ‘Not to Be Taken,’ the survivor of a murdered family returns home after decades away intent on finding a place for her burgeoning collection of poison bottles. As a riff on ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘A Hedge of Yellow Roses’ has a fully-awake but abandoned lady faire hoping for rescue by the unwitting knight who stumbled into her thorn- encrusted compound. The title story, ‘Kindling,’ links six customer scenarios to a clumsy but intuitive barmaid and her lovelorn admirer. Offer to fans of lyrically descriptive prose.”
— Lucy Lockley, Booklist

Praise for Kathleen Jennings’s books:

“An unforgettable tale, as beautiful as it is thorny.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In spellbinding, lyrical prose Jennings lulls readers into this rich, dreamlike world. Lovers of contemporary fairy tales will find this a masterful work.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“I love the imagery, the atmosphere, the incredible tactile quality of the world as described, the structure. . . . Some of the best prose I’ve ever read.”—Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

“Part ghost story, part murder mystery and part fairy tale, Flyaway feels like a perfect combination of all Jennings’ experiences and imagination.”—Book Page

“An entrancing and unforgettable debut.” — The Southern Bookseller Review

“Jennings’s debut novella is pure, poetic Australian gothic, filled with haunting emotions, fairy-tale action, and sharp prose.” — Library Journal

“A deliciously mysterious Gothic fairy tale wrapped in elegantly descriptive prose.” — Booklist

“Half mystery, half fairy tale, all exquisitely rendered and full of teeth.” — Holly Black, author of Book of Night

“A fairytale wrapped about in riddles and other thorny bits of enchantments and stories, but none of them quite like any you’ve heard before. Kathleen Jennings’ prose dazzles, and her magic feels real enough that you might even prick your finger on it.” — Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

“A superbly told tale of folklore-infused fantasy, full of rising dread, set in a sharply observed Australian outback town.” — Garth Nix

“A darkly enchanting and unexpected tale. A gothic Alice in Wonderland meets Picnic at Hanging Rock. With Flyaway Jennings takes old threads and weaves them into something new and exciting.” — Angela Slatter

“I feel as if a very new voice has whispered a very old secret in my ear, and I’ll never be able to un-hear it. Nor will I ever want to.” — C. S. E. Cooney

Cover art by Kathleen Jennings.

About the Author

Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator and writer based in Brisbane, Australia. As an illustrator, she has received the World Fantasy and Ditmar awards and has been shortlisted for the Hugo and Locus awards. As a writer, she has won a British Fantasy and Ditmar awards and has been shortlisted for World Fantasy, the Courier-Mail People’s Choice Book of the Year Award, the Crawford, and Aurealis awards.

Previously

Fri, 14 June, 6 p.m. AEST, Meet Kathleen Jennings, Brisbane Square Library, 266 George Street Brisbane City, QLD 4000 Australia

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The Privilege of the Happy Ending

Tue 24 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 304 pages · published simultaneously in trade paper (9781618732118), ebook (9781618732125), and a limited hardcover run (9781618732163)

The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small, Medium, and Large Stories is award-winning writer Kij Johnson’s long-awaited second collection, following the celebrated At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Contained here is Johnson’s speculative fiction from the last decade, ranging in form from classically told tales to playfully post-modern work drawing on medieval dream manuals, Icelandic spell books, and the OuLiPo manifesto.

The collection includes the two World Fantasy Award-winning stories “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” and “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,” as well as the illustrated book of signs, “The Apartment Dweller’s Stavebook,” and two never-before published works. Here you will encounter dreamlands, talking chickens, stranger beasts, and also the ghastly spectre of Toad Hall.

Reviewed in the Washington Post by Michael Dirda.

Read the title story on Clarkesworld.

Read an associated article: Dream Interpretation by Jillian Bell.

Table of Contents

Tool-Using Mimics
Mantis Wives
Butterflies of Eastern Texas
Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers
Ratatoskr
Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead
The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall
Certain Lorebooks for Apartment Dwellers
— Bestiary
— Stavebook
— Alphabetical Dreambook
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Noah’s Raven
Crows Attempt Human-Style Riddles, and One Joke
The Privilege of the Happy Ending

Reviews

“Johnson’s work imagines a world of mythic possibility where the tension between name and feeling isn’t a problem but rather, an entry point into our fuller selves. A door.”
— M. L. Clark, Strange Horizons

“Two of her most promi­nent publications have invoked writers as wildly divergent as H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Gra­hame, and some of the short fiction included in The Privilege of the Happy Ending is about as experimental in form as anything I’ve seen in genre venues for some time. . . . Enigmatic, allusive, poetic, fragmentary, and sometimes oddly moving – but with some assembly required.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“This collection of speculative stories feels like being in a vivid dream that you don’t want to wake up from. Kij Johnson’s imaginative narratives are utterly surreal and somewhat dark, yet laced with wit. Their language is highly literary, almost poetic, and draws the reader deeper into Johnson’s world. . . . It’s immersive and supernatural enough to appeal to diehard fantasy fans, but also addresses universal themes like family relationships and loss. The literary prose and character-driven stories (you won’t find hard magic systems here) mean it might make a good introduction to the fantasy genre for those who usually read more grounded contemporary works. It’s simultaneously creepy and cozy, making it perfect to curl up with on a crisp autumn day.”
— Jillian Bell, BookBrowse

“In these strange and speculative stories, Johnson, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Kansas, plays with form and narrative voices in a way that’s designed to raise questions about how much we really know about one another, the past, or the nature of stories themselves.” — Daily Hampshire Gazette

★ “While the entries are uniformly excellent in pacing and prose, the standouts may be the collection’s opener and closer. ‘Tool-Using Mimics’ spins out a half-dozen explanations for a vintage photo of a young girl with tentacles that lead to piercing questions about how much we can know about the past, other species, and each other. The titular novella, which also won a World Fantasy Award, is a compelling fairy tale about a little orphan girl and her talking hen that poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage. A strange and glimmering jewel for any genre fiction collection.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ “Hugo and Nebula award winner Johnson (The River Bank) returns with 14 dazzling speculative shorts. . . . The devastating title tale follows another young girl and her cherished talking hen as they barely escape a swarm of monsters who devour anything with flesh. Johnson’s keen eye for the mysteries of human nature shines as her characters experience love, loss, growth, and betrayal, all made delightfully strange. These boundary-pushing, magic-infused tales are sure to wow.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for Kij Johnson’s stories:

“Wondrously strange and sinister stories of other worlds, future times, and everyday life gone haywire.” — Dan Kois, Slate

Cover art by Sophia Uceda.

Previously

9/8: Campus visit, Kansas State University
10/14, 11 a.m. Twin Cities Book Fest, Fine Arts Stage, Minneapolis, MN
10/24, 7 p.m. Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, KS
10/26-29: World Fantasy Convention, Kansas City, MO
11/12: Other Skies Books, St. Paul, MN
4/19 – 4/21: Guest of Honor at Constellation 13, Lincoln, NE

About the Author

Kij Johnson writes speculative and experimental fiction, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards (among others). She also writes gaming material, puzzles, and nonfiction. She teaches creative writing, novel development, and science fiction and fantasy, for her own Novel Architects group, the Ad Astra Institute, and various universities. For many years, she was the associate director for the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

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OKPsyche

Tue 12 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 160 pages · $15 · 9781618732088 | ebook · 9781618732095

Subjective Chaos Kind of Award Winner

In this playful and aching short novel, an unnamed trans woman is on an epic journey to find the place where she belongs. As she navigates her many realities, she must wrestle with anxieties and fears about the world. Her son and her ex live in another state. Environmental disasters are being outsourced to the Midwest. She can’t decide whether or not to unbox the companion automaton under her bed. And some of her friends may not just be ghosting her, they might not even be real.

OKPsyche is a fever-pitched odyssey through the joys, fears, and weirdness of trans adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.

Interview: Anya joins Mary Anne Mohanraj and Benjamin Rosenbaum on Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans

Lit Hub: 17 Best Covers of September

Read

Read a short excerpt, “Take Pills and Wait for Hips,” on Catapult / Listen on WNYC’s Selected Shorts read by Pooya Mohseni.

Q&A with Zhenya Loughney for The Daily Iowan.

A recommendation on Poets & Writers.

Reviews

“An incredible novel about trans motherhood. told in a world that is very realistically *now,* the narrator is closely, intimately real and viscerally true to life. one of the most beautifully wrought trans motherhood stories or books i’ve read.” — Jordan Kurella

“So perfect-weird and heart full and gorgeously written.” — Chloe N. Clark

“Gorgeous, raw, sharp, and tender, all at once, this book made me cry several times while I read it. Told with piercing emotional power fused with a surreal dream-logic all its own, reading this book felt like reading someone’s heart.” — Maria Haskins

“This novel tore my heart up—in the very best way. Our narrator is a semi-recently-out trans woman in her forties, she is an ex-wife, a mother separated from her son, and largely between stable work (a former writer, whose metafictions pepper the text). Friendships real and imagined provide a mirror of reflection in which our narrator turns the mundane into profound. This is a portrait of a woman who has so much love in her heart, and slowly learns to afford herself some of that love.” — Charlie, Room of One’s Own

“I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to find friendship and love in a hostile world, is aided by magical figures and contraptions, but it’s her voice that stands out. This is absolutely brilliant writing: raw and unflinching in how it portrays transphobia and self-doubt, sweeping and dynamic in its use of language and imagery.”
— Jake Casella Brookins, Locus

“Ultimately, though, it’s still a story that leaves me at a loss. For so small a volume, it looms too large to be captured in 1,000 words and change. It craves hand gestures, tone of voice, all the little things that tell the story when we can’t tell the story. So please, picture me waving my hands, leaning forward, emphasising that this book is something special. Because it is. And if you read it, hopefully you’ll be left speechless too.”
— Roseanna Pendlebury, Nerds of a Feather

“A dreamlike, speculative novel. . . . the heart of this short novel . . . is about the narrator’s journey as a trans woman, someone who’s trying to come to terms with the pain of her closeted past even as she struggles to find her way in a fragile, uncertain present.”
— Daily Hampshire Gazette

“In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, ‘OKPsyche,’ published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“. . . the second-person telling lets the reader in on a conversation this character is having with herself as she creates within herself the understanding that she needs: a sort of literary camera obscura that offers glimpses of how she pieces her historically disparate selves together.”
— E.C. Barrett,  Strange Horizons

“This story contains and covers multitudes. It ties its character to the sticking place, and we are bound as well, by a trans woman’s hopes, desires, losses, and visceral fears of the danger she faces every single day. Those dangers are indeed more real than imagined for a woman who doesn’t pass society’s purity test.”
— The Novel Approach

“DeNiro’s novel is a lyrical, emotionally powerful story about what it means to try and find a place for yourself in the midst of a hurricane of climate disaster, violence, and fear. It’s a story told through weird, ghostly, haunting fantasy. Fans of enigmatic speculative fiction like Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (2022), will enjoy this tale of queer parenthood, of the reality of the sharp fear of trans lives, and of complicated self-discovery.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“An unnamed trans woman is at an uneasy stage in her metamorphosis. She has finally cast off the male persona that never fit her, but she has yet to become the woman she dreams of being. Part of her discomfort is physical—she does not have the body she wants—but much of it is social and emotional. She knows that most strangers do not see her for what she is. Her ex-wife is still adjusting to what is, for her, a surprising new reality. Her mother deadnames her. And, most importantly, her young son is shutting her out. DeNiro’s significant achievement here is making palpable the excruciating, inescapable self-consciousness of her main character. Her decision to narrate in the second person is a bold one; this move will help some readers immerse themselves in the story, but it will just as likely alienate others.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Beguiling. . . . a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly

Early Reader Reactions

“OKPsyche is a spectacular novel, like a shard of stained glass in brilliant reds and greens and purples. DeNiro shows us the impossible and the possible with equal honesty. The book is a chronicle of hope and hurt and freedom, suffused with anxiety and grace, and told in prose that just won’t quit. It’s major. You’ll remember where you were when you read it.”
— Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections

“Tense and funny, heartfelt and uncanny, Anya Johanna DeNiro takes us on an hallucinogenic tour through the mind of a woman on the edge. Guided by strange angels or losing touch with reality — either way, it’s happening to you!”
— Morgan M. Page, screenwriter of Framing Agnes

“DeNiro has done something beautiful here, weaving a luminous lament for a ruined world with the simmering pain of a woman finally coming to life. Delicate, lovely, and ultimately full of the impossible hope that shines forth in trans lives.”
— Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing

“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters. DeNiro writes with a complexity that reflects the internal emotional struggles of her unnamed protagonist as she fights for happiness and a better relationship with her young son. A uniquely told and refreshingly weird story of self-realization and the courage it takes to love.”
— Sam Edge, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, Chapel Hill, NC

“DeNiro (City of a Thousand Feelings) offers a beguiling if somewhat opaque glimpse into a trans woman’s journey to find safety, acceptance, and love in a near-future Minnesota. . . . this is a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly

Reviews of Anya DeNiro’s books:

“That trust in emotional urgency over conventional logic to guide a story is, for me, a critical part of a queer aesthetic. Coming out is about obeying an interior, often inarticulable emotional push over majority logics. . . . DeNiro’s gorgeous and emotionally flawless navigation . . . is masterful, cerebral but full of complex feeling, and nothing short of word-magic.”
— Theodore McCombs, Fiction Unbound

“Surreal and lyrical.”
— Publishers Weekly

“What makes the story even more compelling, is that DeNiro gives you all this, allegory and action, without ever losing sight of the heart of the story: the fundamental bond and evolving relationship between two characters who choose different ways to survive, and yet find a greater power, and maybe even a new kind of salvation, when they come together.”
— Maria Haskins

“Strange, menacing worlds whose contours only gradually become clear (or, perhaps, more complexly mysterious).”
—Dylan Hicks, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Minnesotan DeNiro gives us large hunks of riveting weirdness.”
—Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Wildness, fierceness, and anarchic imagination are traits, then, to be prized in this book, above beauty, order, and sense—or, in classical terms, the Dionysian over the Apollonian—and process.”
— Strange Horizons

“Each story feels new, unique, and important.”
—Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com

“There’s no other writer like DeNiro working today.” — Tim Pratt, Locus

Earlier

May 2: MIBA Spring Tour, Des Moines, IA
Sept. 14, 6 p.m. Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406 (FB)
Oct. 14, 11 a.m., Twin Cities Book Fest, Fine Arts Stage, Minneapolis, MN
Oct. 27, 7 p.m. Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
3/25, A Room of One’s Own, 2717 Atwood Ave., Madison, WI
5/8, KGB Bar, New York, NY, with John Wiswell
5/9, Astoria Bookshop, Queens, NY, with Nino Cipri

Cover Art

“Psyche Asleep in a Landscape,” Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola, 1837, metmuseum.org.

About the Author

Anya Johanna DeNiro is a trans woman and a speculative fiction writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of City of a Thousand Feelings, which was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. [website | twitter]

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Heroes of an Unknown World

Tue 14 Feb 2023 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731975 | ebook · 9781618731982 | Trailer

In the final Liminal novel, a found family of Black superheroes has one last chance to save the world.

The Liminal People · The Entropy of Bones · The Liminal War · Heroes of an Unknown World

New: Ayize interviewed on FanFiAddict.

Read: Locus interview · Watch: City Lights event

After traveling back in time to rescue his fostered daughter, Taggert has returned to the present and found himself in his favorite place: up against the wall. But the world they’ve returned to is not the one they left: everything is slightly grayer, the music is boring, joy is just out of reach. The liminals’ entropic enemies, the Alters, are trying to bring about the end of the world by sucking the life — literally — out of enough people to tip the balance their way.

Traveling from Jamaica to London to Indonesia to the heart of the whirlwind in the desert at the heart of all deserts, Taggert and his found family of liminals and supporters have to find a way to bring back the joy before they’re all ground down into the gray dust.

Reviews

“The decision is shocking, and it highlights one of the key themes of the book: we are all imperfect, broken, compromised. The salvation of the world has fallen to Taggert and his team, and they are choosing to answer the call—but neither they nor the reader should be under any illusion that this makes them good guys. They’re not good now, and maybe they never can be. It’s just that they’re all they’ve got. Taggert and Tamara and Prentis are powerful, sure, but the most important thing they are is passionate.”
— Jenny Hamilton, Strange Horizons

“A prescient examination of issues pressing hard upon our actual reality, Heroes of an Unknown World is a necessary addition to the genre and will be devoured and adored by the most hardcore of readers.”
— Sal A. Joyce, Booklist

“The Liminal Books deserve a place on the bookshelf alongside ambitious fantasy series like Marlon James’s Dark Star Trilogy and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. Big, ambitious, wildly inventive and full of heart. Heroes of an Unknown World displays the voice and verve that are staples of Ayize Jama-Everett’s work. Dive in, you will love what you discover.”
—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

“Ayize Jama-Everett is a towering talent and one of the best genre-writers working today. His final installment of his masterfully told Liminal Series; Heroes of an Unknown World is a taut, textured feast for the minds of any ravenous reader who’s looking for something fresh and exciting to experience.”
— John Jennings

“A rollicking, irreverent action sci-fi filled with anime-esque feats, a deep appreciation for culture, and sparkling humanity. Jama-Everett’s final book in the Liminal series is the kind of grandiose battle against despair I’ll gladly sign up for. Put on your favorite record, crack this one open, and tell the darkness: ‘Fuck off!’”
— Elwin Cotman

“Therapist and theologian Jama-Everett takes his group of Black superheroes from 1970s London to contemporary Morocco in the fascinating and action-packed final Liminal novel (after The Liminal War). Liminals possess supernatural powers, among them central figure Taggert’s ability to manipulate DNA to harm and heal; his adopted daughter Prentis’s empathy with animals; and wind spirit A.C.’s power over the elements. Taggert and his seven major allies must finally defeat the beautiful but monstrous Alters, who work to drive all of humanity to lemming-like suicide by creating a physically and spiritually depressed new world. In breathlessly paced adventures told from ever-shifting perspectives, Jama-Everett celebrates the power of family, community, and music to unite peoples and combat entropy, using dramatic flashbacks to illustrate the salvific power of self-sacrifice for a greater good. His fictionalization of the role psychedelics (here “manna,” the food of the gods) can play in mental health and clear conviction that writing can heal those whom mainstream culture has ignored add depth to the rip-roaring action. Series fans and new readers alike are sure to be drawn in.” — Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Ayize Jama-Everett (ayizejamaeverett.com) was born in Harlem, New York. He has traveled extensively in Northern Africa, Northern California, and Oaxaca, Mexico. He holds three Master’s degrees (Divinity, Psychology, and Creative Writing), and has worked as a bookseller, professor, and therapist. He has a firm desire to create stories that people want to read. He believes the narratives of our times dictate future realities; he’s invested in working subversive notions like family of choice, striving when not chosen to survive, and irrational optimism into his creations. His four-book Liminal series has been published by Small Beer Press. His graphic novel, The Box of Bones, with noted artist John Jennings was published by Rosarium Publishing and his graphic novel with Tristan Roach, The Last Count of Monte Cristo, was published by Abrams Press. Shorter works can be found in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Racebaitr.

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The Silverberg Business

Tue 23 Aug 2022 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 288 pages · $17 · 9781618732019 | ebook · 9781618732026 | Edelweiss

In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in much darker affairs and ends up in the poker game to end all poker games.

Read

» an interview by Tobias Carroll, Skulls, Detectives, and the Texas Surreal, in Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
» an excerpt on Lithub.

Listen

» Robert interviewed by Rick Kleffel on Narrative Species
» Robert & Victor LaValle reading @ KGB Bar, NYC, 4/20/22
» Vick Mickunas interviews Robert on WYSO.

In 1888, Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.

What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.

With The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.

Reviews

“By subverting expectations in both genre and character, Wexler’s writing continually asked me to look closely, beyond initial expectations and surface observations—much like a detective must. This genre-defying novel works at many levels to consider what it means to live as an outsider in a landscape that holds a dark mirror to our contemporary era. And it’s not only deeply-layered: it’s a page-turner, a wild ride, and an immensely enjoyable read. The Silverberg Business is a mystery that kept me thinking about its deeper questions and haunting images long after the case was closed.”
— Melissa Benton Barker, Ancillary Review of Books

“It’s one of the mostly deeply weird novels I’ve read in some time, at times hallucinatory and dreamlike, at other times gritty and naturalistic. We’ve heard a lot in the past several years about genre-blending or ‘‘cross-genre’’ fiction, but Wexler starts out by combining two genres that seldom come up in these discussions: the western and the hard-boiled private eye mystery.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Steeped in the early history of Texas’s statehood and laced with eerie portents of supernatural horror, the outstanding latest from Wexler (The Painting and the City) impresses with its originality and inventiveness. In 1888, a Jewish private detective who goes by the name of Shannon travels from Chicago to Victoria, Tex., to investigate the disappearance of New Yorker Nathan Silverberg, who was sent with donor funds to buy land on the Texas coast for a settlement of Romanian Jewish refugees. Shannon discovers that Silverberg was first swindled, then murdered by a pair of con men, one of whom—a gambler named Stephens—wears an ornate ring with magic powers. When Shannon pursues Stephens, the ring’s magic transports him to an otherworldly “scratch land” populated by skull-headed beings whose rituals—involving card games and strange dancing—shape a cosmic context for catastrophic events that unfold in the human world. Wexler keeps his twisty plot refreshingly unpredictable and endows his characters—even the non-talking skullheads—with vividly realized personalities that enliven his surreal, atmospheric tale. This weird western packs a wallop.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A weird but oddly convincing creature feature.” —Kirkus Reviews

Early reader reactions

“Certainly the strangest book I’ve ever read, and strangeness is a thing that I take to. The grotesque horrors, the impossibilities, the shifting scenes, Silverberg’s skull, the skull-heads, the wooden house that turns into a mansion without the detective finding it particularly odd. It is in fact a book not like anything I’ve ever read.”
— John Crowley, author of Little, Big

“A haunting novel that traverses an American West inhabited by nightmarish characters, human and otherwise, The Silverberg Business evokes the unease of classic weird fiction with a contemporary gloss: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land by way of Jim Jarmusch and Cormac McCarthy. Unnerving and unforgettable.” — Elizabeth Hand, author of Hokuloa Road

“Robert Freeman Wexler never fails to knock me out, and 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.” — Daryl Gregory, author of Revelator

“This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir—at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque—is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail.” — J. Robert Lennon, author of Subdivision

Praise for Robert Wexler’s books

“An unusual, haunting tale from a distinctive new voice.” — Lisa Tuttle, London Sunday Times

“This complex, enthralling novel is concerned with relations between art and commerce, and nature and commerce; the importance of the past; the everyday oppression of capitalism; and how art may shape history.” — Booklist (starred review)

“As buoyant and airy as a center-ring trapeze act.” — Publisher’s Weekly

“Quietly stunning.” — Asimov’s

“Wexler demonstrates a wonderful touch with his writing: to render Lewis’s lengthy inner journey through this dream-state without losing a sense of living, vital immediacy is an extraordinary accomplishment.”—New York Review of Science Fiction

“A fascinating, deeply bizarre adventure.”—Faren Miller, Locus

Also

» an interview on Good People, Cool Things.

Previously

Aug. 23, 8 p.m. Two Dollar Radio HQ, Columbus, OH — with Jeffrey Ford
Aug. 27, 8 p.m. The Emporium, Yellow Springs, OH
Aug. 29, 7 p.m. Joseph-Beth, Cincinnati, OH — in conversation with Rebecca Kuder
Aug. 30, 7 p.m. Book People, Austin, TX
Aug. 31, 6:30 p.m. Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX
Sep. 13, 7 p.m. Book Cellar, Chicago, IL — with Jon Langford
Oct. 13, 6 p.m. Yellow Springs Library, Yellow Springs, OH — with guitar accompaniment by Brady Burkett of Stark Folk Band
Nov. 3-6, World Fantasy Convention, New Orleans, LA
Nov. 19, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Books by the Bank, Cincinnati, OH

About the author

Robert Freeman Wexler’s novel The Painting and the City has recently been released in paperback by the Visible Spectrum and his short story collection Undiscovered Territories: Stories is out now from PS Publishing. He was born in Houston, Texas and currently lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with the writer Rebecca Kuder and their child. His website and blog are at robertfreemanwexler.com

Cover art by Jon Langford.

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The Adventurists

Tue 22 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731944 | ebook · 9781618731951

A collection of stories written over a lifetime of looking forwards and backwards and sometimes even at the now.

Read

. . . Kelly Link interviews Richard Butner for Catapult “about the short story form, running the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, and the value of writing with other people.”
. . .  an interview by Christopher Rowe in the Subterranean Press newsletter
. . . “Adventure” in The Deadlands

Listen

. . . Gil Roth interviews Richard Butner for the Virtual Memories podcast about “his love of the short story as a form . . .writing & performing theater and how he balances that collaborative art with the solo process of writing” and a lot more.

The Adventurists

Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house, where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it led.

Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of the way.

Butner’s allusive and elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life—where there are no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be ignored.

Reviews

“Richard Butner’s work explores the weird, uncanny corners of everyday life — from a theater kid who becomes the queen, to a tree who talks to just one person, to Death’s Fool, who you really shouldn’t ignore.” — Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

“This powerhouse fabulist collection melds ghosts, virtual futures, and the intricacies of friendship into 16 breathtaking, intimate stories that will delight readers of Ray Bradbury, John Crowley, and Sally Rooney alike. In these stories, Butner examines a broad range of interests—the aging process, acts of remembering, overreliance on technology—all in elegant prose, unique imagery, and with keen and generous human insight.”
— Publishers Weekly Holiday Gift Guide

“Butner, who lives in North Carolina, livens his writing with wry humor and moments of absurdity and surrealism, but his stories also explore the fraying of friendships and the sense of loss that the passage of time can bring. What also anchors the 16 stories in the collection is Butner’s crisp, understated prose, a style that lets him quickly segue from straightforward descriptions of everyday life to off-kilter narratives. . . . Yet for all his off-hand tone and biting humor, Butner writes feelingly about human connection and loss, and about the challenge of moving forward without losing touch with the past.” — Steve Pfarrar, Daily Hampshire Gazette

“Gorgeously mesmerizing.” — Beatrice Toothman, San Francisco Review

“Butner’s new collection of SF stories is a wonderful look at his long-established but back-burner career as a writer of speculative fiction. Richard is beloved by many in Raleighwood for his quirky and often endearing local theatre roles, his championing of local music and its venues, and (among the cognoscenti) his loyalty to Modernist architecture. This review is overtly from the perspective of a Raleigh native who enjoys the many local references in these stories and the bits and pieces of RB rendered in the protagonists.” — John Dancy-Jones, Raleigh Rambles

“Butner’s stories are wonder­fully insidious in a number of ways. He seldom works beyond traditional short story lengths, and the stories tend to be constructed in ways that first seem conventional, with conventional concerns: trying to recapture the past or reconnect with old friends, visiting sideshows and fairs, surviving in anonymous corporations, exploring a spooky old house. Butner also brings along some famil­iar furniture of fantastika, like magic portals, timeslips, and ghosts. But – more through the accumulation of sinister anomalies than through dramatic plot twists – we watch the world of the tale grow estranged around us. . . . Often haunted by a profound sense of loss. If not quite a new voice, Butner’s is one of the most distinctive and memorable I’ve encountered in quite a while.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Landscapes and memories alter, gentrify, and crumble in Butner’s flawless debut collection, which wends ghosts, virtual futures, and the intricacies of friendship into 16 breathtaking, intimate stories. “Holderhaven” slowly unfurls a country house museum’s ghostly mystery into a multifaceted examination of recreation’s limits, who is allowed agency, and the impossible truth behind the legend. “Ash City Stomp,” about an encounter with the devil, and “The Ornithopter,” set in a high-technology future, both imbue their speculative setups with vital humanity. The delicate “Adventure” holds a mirror to the aging process while still honoring a vividly alive present, and in “Sunnyside,” exes attend a successful artist friend’s virtual-reality wake in a breathtaking commentary on the act of remembering. Butner pairs clean, elegant prose with keen and generous human insight, unique imagery, and a broad range of interests, treating Renaissance faires, 1980s counterculture, and rich small-town worlds with the same loving deliberation. Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home in this beautiful, grounded exploration of pasts and futures—and the people suspended between them.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Butner’s short stories are strange little vignettes of people’s lives, tales of the ways time and memory—both what we remember and what we don’t—affect the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us. The collection opens with ‘Adventure,’ with a long-overdue visit to an old friend and a tale told about a stranger, which may be just fantasy, but, setting the tone for the collection, the reality is not entirely clear-cut. There are tales about history like ‘Holderhaven,’ in which a house-turned-museum has plenty of secrets hidden by both the stories the family who owns it tell and in the architecture of the building itself, and tales in which the past is all too real, like the nostalgia-riddled ‘Delta Function.’ Sometimes Butner ventures into near-future speculation, as he portrays people clinging to corporate life in the decaying office park of ‘The Ornithopter’ and climbing the virtual backyard Everest of ‘Give Up.’ All in all, a worthwhile collection of not entirely comfortable stories exploring the past, the present, and the future.” — Booklist

“Butner has a knack for a quirky, eye-catching premise. . . . The stories’ arch tone, offbeat scenarios, and folkloric elements bear a resemblance to George Saunders’ and Carmen Maria Machado’s work, though Butner has his own thematic obsessions. . . . In his best stories, Butner effectively merges the strange setups with a bracing mix of humor and dread.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Grounded by concrete pop culture details, each strange narrative makes what’s familiar seem eerie.” — Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“I’ve been enjoying this debut collection of short fiction by Richard Butner. It’s New Fabulist fiction in the vein of Amber Sparks, Kelly Link, and Aimee Bender but with a flavor all its own.” — Craig Laurance Gidney

“This astonishing story collection stars protagonists with special gifts such as telepathy, time travel, and traversing parallel worlds. A few other stories employ fantastic futuristic technologies to great effect. Butner stretched my brain this way and that and quite possibly reactivated some long-unused circuits. I see a second reading in my not-too-distant future.” — Kay, Boswell Books

Advance Praise for The Adventurists

“Consistently one of my favorite short story writers.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“My heart isn’t large enough to contain all these stories at once.”
— Christopher Rowe, author of Telling the Map

“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

“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.” — John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus

“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

“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

“Richard Butner writes gorgeous, heartfelt stories that are completely his own, each propelled by an inner logic that may or may not match consensus reality, each ringing utterly true. He is unafraid of tough questions and even tougher answers. His characters sweat, grieve, exult, and struggle for understanding, and even when they terrify, they never fail to touch me.”
— Lewis Shiner, author of Outside the Gates of Eden

Table of Contents

Adventure
Holderhaven
Scenes from the Renaissance
Ash City Stomp [listen]
Horses Blow Up Dog City
The Master Key
Circa
At the Fair
Pete and Earl
The Ornithopter
Stronghold
Delta Function [Read an excerpt on Tor.com]
Give Up
Chemistry Set
Under Green
Sunnyside

Reviews of Richard Butner’s stories:

“Captivating and gripping.”— Bookotron

“In the face of even the most absurd scenario, Butner’s writing remains cool and understated; he treats the bizarre as if it were commonplace, eventually convincing the reader that nothing is too far from the real. Indeed, many of the stories’ most bizarre moments are simply exaggerations of the inanities of our world, thrust into the forefront of the plot as a sort of social criticism. . . . Butner picks up the absurdities of high-speed America and throws them back in its face, reveling in the wild, wonderful mess he creates.”— New Pages Review

“A powerful story of obsession.” — Lois Tilton, Locus

“The saddest ghost story you’ll read this year.” — Charlie Jane Anders, Gizmodo

“Haunting and heartbreaking.” — iHorror.com

“Wry, caustic, calculated, impulsive…. Gems of gorgeous weirdness.”— Asimovs

“Finely wrought fiction that earns its effects. Evocative and passionate, meaningful and filled with wonders.” — SF Site

“Butner’s meticulous prose lays a cool surface over some twisty terrain. Understated and profound, deft and smooth, these stories sneak up on you and then don’t let go. Boxes within boxes, wheels within wheels.”— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“If you let Richard Butner’s sideways fiction into your brain it will slice you to ribbons so quietly that you won’t even know why you’re laughing, or crying. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” — John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus

“In the work of writers who have truly burrowed in, often I’ve a sense of there being not many stories but one continuous, ongoing story, ever growing, ever increasing, turning this way and that in shifting light — which is how I feel about Richard Butner’s.” — James Sallis, author of Sarah Jane

Previously

March 16-20, 2022: ICFA, Orlando, FL
April 2, 6 p.m. Richard Butner, John Kessel, & Wilton Barnhardt, So and So Books, Raleigh, NC
May 17, 6 p.m. Richard Butner & Nathan Ballingrud, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
Aug 17, 7 p.m. Richard Butner & Veronica Schanoes, KGB Fantastic Fiction, KGB Bar, NYC
Aug 18, 7 p.m. Little City Books, Hoboken, NJ
March 15-18, 2023: ICFA, Orlando, FL
April 10, 6 p.m. Richard Butner, Karen Heuler, Randee Dawn, Leopoldo Gout, #YeahYouWrite, Someday Bar, 364 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Richard Butner‘s short fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. He has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, and Urban Garden Performing Arts. His nonfiction, on topics ranging from computers to cocktails to architecture, has appeared in IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, The News & Observer, Teacher, The Independent Weekly, The North Carolina Review of Books, Triangle Alternative, and Southern Lifestyle. He lives in North Carolina, where he runs the annual Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference. He and Harry Houdini have used the same trapdoor.

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Never Have I Ever

Tue 23 Feb 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731821 | ebook · 9781618731838
Second printing: May 2022

Polish edition: MAG Jacek Rodek.

Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales all gathered together in one fabulous bundle.

British Fantasy Award winner
Ladies of Horror Fiction Award winner
World Fantasy Award finalist
Ignyte Award finalist
NYPL Best Books for Adults
Crawford Award shortlist

“Am I dead?”
Mebuyen sighs. She was hoping the girl would not ask.

Read a story: Asphalt, River, Mother, Child

Read an essay: MFA vs MBA

Read an interview by Megan Kakimoto at Full Stop.
An interview at My Life, My Books, My Escape.

Bzzzz

“For those who love urban legends, Yap’s debut collection is one for the top of the TBR pile. From stories about high schoolers to goddesses to androids, Publishers Weekly hails Yap as a powerful new voice in speculative fiction, and Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth) calls the book a masterclass collection.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot, 10 Speculative Short Story Collections to Enjoy in 2021

“Drawing from science fiction, Filipino folklore, fantasy and horror, these thirteen stories are monstrous, scary, joyful, unexpected, inventive, eerie and weird.”
— Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine

“A debut collection from Small Beer Press, Never Have I Ever combines fabulism, horror, and science fiction. Charlie Jane Anders says that “these gorgeous stories will help you to glimpse a world that is both stranger and more immense and varied than any you’ve visited before.”
— R. O. Kwon, Electric Lit: 43 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2021

“Yap dances through sci-fi, horror, fabulism, and urban fantasy, and often Filipino folklore.”
— Leah Schnelbach, Bookmarks, 7 SFF Books to Soothe Your February Blues

Reviews

“The horror in these stories isn’t always drawn from a ‘supernatural other.’ Instead, through Philippine folklore, they explore a world where the supernatural is an accepted element of everyday life and the horror is mined from the realities of existing.”
— New York Public Library Best Books of the Year

“Never Have I Ever overflows with life and magic, and if you are not familiar with the vibrant literary scene in the Philippines, let this serve as a worthy introduction.”
— Washington Post

“Absolutely outstanding. . . . Every story is outstanding, and I certainly plan to use this book in future courses. I haven’t read many texts which so deftly explore the murky boundaries between Filipinx folklore and speculative conceits, so it’s a real treat to have this book out in the world. A definite must-read!”
— Asian American Lit Fans

“Yap’s unique voice is oft-praised for a reason — her stories are unique and lyrical. Full of love and pain.”
— Rey Rowlan, Book Riot

“Once they get going, they always peel off a few layers to reveal something incredible—or incredibly dark, mysterious, or strange—that’s living right beneath the surface.”
— Gabino Iglasias, Nightfire

“A wondrous and impressive collection from a gifted writer with a fresh voice.”
— Paula Guran, Locus

“Every one of these stories was a gem. They’re a mix of urban legends and stories inspired by the legends of the Philippines, and many of them also feature queer themes and/or characters. Which is always a plus! It’s such a great, creepy, creative collection that’s also suitably gruesome for folks who want their horror stories to contain a certain amount of viscera and monsters devouring children.”
— Book Riot

“Every story in this book is filled with magic and legend and power. My favorite thing about a short story is when it captivates me so completely I forget that only a fraction of the book is dedicated to this one world, and Never Have I Ever accomplished this again and again. Fans of folklore and myth will be swept up in this wonderful collection.”
— Katherine Nazzaro, Porter Square Books

“Vicious, vindicating, and visceral at once, Never Have I Ever balances compulsively readable humor with the good, transformative sort of devastation. This is a truly powerful, propulsive collection, exploring the makings and reshapings of myth, and the myriad ways we might save each other. Each character is vividly drawn, be it an exhausted magical girl wondering if she and her friends will ever be done slaying monsters, a servant in love with her charge, or the disbelieving new roommate of a vaguely discontented manananggal. Her stories tread somewhere between familiar and uncanny, interrogating human connection and monstrosity, and all unapologetically, beautifully Filipino. Each story with its own specific atmosphere, each its own sort of spirit, each sure to haunt the reader in its own uncanny shape. Here, magic makes mirrors of us, and we won’t always like what we see. Yap writes with an expert hand as she moves the reader through the looming horror and magic of what it is to be alive.”
— Maya Gittelman, Tor.com

“Yap’s characters foster fierce protective love, and her ability to channel those emotions into extraordinary, strange tales is what makes Never Have I Ever such a joy to read.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“I urge you to dig in, to experience the dark wonder of a seriously underrated writer, and to take your time savoring these stories. Yap will surprise you, she will startle you, and she will impress you.”
— Arley Sorg, Lightspeed

“If you love Filipino mythological characters, want to know more about other mythological characters (like the Japanese kappa), or just want to see new perspectives on genre fiction, you can’t go wrong with this book. I guarantee that there’s something in it for everyone who likes stories.”
— Raven Lingat, Rappler Reads

“These 13 captivating short stories entwine fantasy, horror, and science fiction to explore monsters, Filipino folklore, immigration, and queerness. In the dark fairy tale ‘A Cup of Salt Tears,’ Makino’s mother warns her of the dangers of making deals with kappas, even though Makino was saved by kappa as a child. When Makino’s husband falls ill, she seeks out that same kappa. In ‘Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing),’ a group of five girls befriend one another at a summer camp when a goddess charges them with protecting the world from darkness. Ten years later, the the girls are still fighting. These ambiguous, vivid, and dark tales manage deep characterizations despite their short formats.”
— Buzzfeed: 21 Fantasy Books To Get Excited About This Winter

“Yap’s impressive debut collection of 13 fabulist, sci-fi, and horror shorts explores themes ranging from monstrousness, shared trauma, and systemic violence to friendship and the ambiguity of love. Yap is at home with whatever topic she puts her hand to, easily immersing readers in the perspectives of high schoolers, ancient goddesses, androids, and witches. . . . Yap is a powerful new voice in speculative fiction.”
— Publishers Weekly

Advance Praise

“Never have I ever realized how much I’ve been waiting for this book. Full of magic and mystery, monsters, and miracles, everything a reader could need during these troubling times. I just wish I could read it for the first time all over again.” — Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Never Have I Ever proves Yap the master of both the grand and the everyday. In each of these hard-hitting, incredibly assured stories, Yap shows how deft her hand is by sliding effortlessly from marriages and monsters (‘A Cup of Salt Tears’), to future anxiety and food in a near-future Manila (‘Milagroso’) to the uncertain future of grown-up magical girls (‘Hurricane Heels’); her ghost stories terrify as much as they comfort (‘Asphalt, River, Mother, Child’) and are so woven into the fabric of our real and human lives that their power to unsettle is unmatched; imagine if M.R. James had known the precise 1990s desire to own a Baby G . . . But where Yap consistently dazzles is her unsentimental, tender, evocative and brutal examination of the life and interiority of young women and girls: the innate monstrousness of growing up in the shoes marked ‘woman’. A masterclass collection.”
— Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth

“These stories of shy witches, beautiful elementals, bloody and watery monsters, miracles and tender-hearted machines, are written with color and crisp precision, and all their startling invention is firmly grounded in our own familiar and endlessly surprising world.”
— Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book

“Isabel Yap’s fiction channels the wary energy of meeting places: schools, hospitals, offices, hotels. In her work, the spaces of everyday life brim with weird vitality, crossed by ghosts, monsters, and above all, stories.”
— Sofia Samatar, author of Tender

“Isabel Yap’s prose is a constant delight and her characters are endlessly rich and fascinating. I’m in awe of her capacity for playful weirdness and mind-expanding terror. These gorgeous stories will help you to glimpse a world that is both stranger and more immense and varied than any you’ve visited before. My head is just full of images and feelings and ideas after reading these wondrous tales. Isabel Yap is a writer to watch out for, and you need to experience her brilliance for yourself.”
— Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night

“Never Have I Ever is a stunning, lyrical debut by one of SFF’s brightest voices. Isabel Yap’s stories are luminous. Intimate and tender, hilarious and cruel, they cut straight to the bone. This collection is full of deft, painful portrayals of Filipino girlhood, queerness, and struggling to find a place in the world. They remind me of being in my lola’s house in Manila, listening to my titas and titos gossip over the breakfast table. Yap’s stories feel like coming home.”
— Alyssa Wong, the award-winning author of Doctor Aphra

“Biting, searing, exquisitely wrought, Never Have I Ever is a tour de force of dark fantasy. The cultural and mythological vectors driving these stories transform the reader as much as the book’s characters. Isabel Yap is a writer to watch.” — Usman T. Malik, author of Midnight Doorways

“I am full of admiration for Isabel Yap. Her dreams are authentic and her nightmares vivid and inventive.”
— Priya Sharma, author of All the Fabulous Beasts

“The first time I read Isabel Yap’s work—she was in college at the time—it made me smile, it was so polished and assured. The next time I read a story of hers, it made me cry; it was so moving, yet nuanced. Over the years since, as this book proves, Yap has only gotten better, showcasing her impeccable yet seemingly effortless command of language, and a deft balance of emotional honesty and expert restraint. As one of her first editors, I’m filled with pride; as a fellow writer, with envy; and, as a reader, once again, with sorrow and delight.”
— Nikki Alfar, Palanca-award winning author of WonderLust

“The delight created by Yap’s stories rests in her deep understanding of what makes us all human, that irrepressible longing to ask, to understand, to explore, to strive, to hold on, and to let go. In her hands, worlds open up and words become transformative.”
— Dean Francis Alfar, author of Salamanca and editor of Philippine Speculative Fiction

“Isabel Yap’s stories are somehow sharp and vivid and gritty at the same time as they’re timeless and mythic; I’ve been a shameless strung-out addict for years now, and I’m so excited to have this splendid overdose in my hands. And to watch as a whole new audience gets hooked on these stories drenched in heartache and salt water, folklore and monsters and gorgeous prose.”
— Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City

“Never Have I Ever is a showcase of Isabel Yap’s many enviable gifts: gorgeous prose, deep characterization, and exquisite ambiguity. Yap moves from humor to despair with easy confidence, plunging you down into the murkiest depths with the gentlest touch. You’ll get lost in these pages and each word will sit heavy in your chest. The best fiction does that.”
— Cadwell Turnbull, author of The Lesson

Table of Contents

Good Girls
A Cup of Salt Tears
Milagroso
A Spell for Foolish Hearts
Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?
Syringe
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child
Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing)
Only Unclench Your Hand
How to Swallow the Moon
All the Best of Dark and Bright
Misty
A Canticle for Lost Girls

Praise for Isabel Yap’s stories:

“An elegiac story of love, grief and sacrifice.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Lovely and very affecting.” —Sabrina Vourvoulias, author of Ink

“Beautifully crafted. . . . Delightful.” —Ada Palmer, author of Too Like the Lightning

“Isabel’s gift for writing friendships is out in force.” —Sara Saab

“Oh, this story… What a gem it is, a sharp and sweet fairytale about friendship and love, fate and duty, and the freedom that might be there for the taking (if you dare to grab hold of it). . . . Gorgeous and mesmerizing prose.”
—Maria Haskins

“‘How to Swallow the Moon’ by Isabel Yap is a love story crossed with a fairy tale. Anyag is a binukot, a girl kept away from the world to enhance her value as a bride. Amira is Anyag’s servant, but also her dearest friend, caregiver, and protector. She’s also in love with Anyag. Male suitors arrive one after another and Amira suffers in silence. It turns out Anyang feels the same way about Amira. Complications arise. Both young women must be heroic. Connec­tions to Philippine mythology freshen this well-told tale.” —Paula Guran, Locus

Cover

Cover illustration “Serpent’s Bride” © 2020 by Alexa Sharpe (alexasharpe.com).

Isabel Yap (@visyap) writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. She attended the Clarion Writers Workshop and is the secretary for the Clarion Foundation. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

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Reconstruction

Tue 5 Jan 2021 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 300 pages · $17 · 9781618731777 | ebook · 9781618731784

Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist
Ignyte Award finalist

An immersive, rich collection from an author whose work reaches across time and continents to explore unexpected and untold stories.

Reviews

“This collection is such a punch. From the opening story right on through it is putting you on notice. You’re gonna go some places here and you’re not gonna be able to look away. . . . The stories are not easy and I think they’re not supposed to be. . . . They are so good. She is such good short story writer — she’s also an excellent novelist — but you really feel the power of her short fiction in this collection. And there’s a really interesting author note at the end.”
— Book Riot

“Vivid, imaginative, and often brutal prose.” — Jake Casella Brookins, Chicago Review of Books

“Johnson is one of the few writers in the genre who handles high emotion without preciousness, and she brings an almost unbearable pathos to many of these stories.” — Simon Ings, The Times of London

“Beginning with the stunning, Nebula-award-winning vampire story ‘A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,’ (I’m currently rereading this story and am again astounded by its depth and perfection) the collection carries a theme of characters navigating their humanity in inhumane conditions.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot, 10 Speculative Short Story Collections to Enjoy in 2021

“Reconstruction collects ten stories from writer, musician, and scholar Alaya Dawn Johnson—two for the first time! Like much of Johnson’s work, these stories focus on oppressed people finding (often supernatural) ways to survive in systems that want to crush them.
“The collection roves all over the map, both in geography in genre—the title story, for instance, tells the story of a formerly enslaved woman using protective magic for a Black regiment of the Union Army, while ‘The Mirages’ chronicles a postapocalyptic Mexico City. Johnson’s range can be seen in her two very different takes on vampires: ‘Their Changing Bodies’ is a breezy story about summer camp, while the Nebula award-winning opening story, ‘A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,’ (you can read it here!) drops us in an alternate take on our own world, but one in which vampires have conquered the Earth and imprison humans as food sources.”
— Leah Schnelbach, BookMarks, The Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of 2021

“Of particular interest, though, are the two original stories, ‘The Mirages’ and ‘Reconstruction’, each of which seems restrained compared to the coruscating imagery of some of the other tales, but which feature some of the most memorable char­acters of all.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Well worth reading.” — Buzzfeed: 21 Fantasy Books To Get Excited About This Winter

“Johnson pulls from folklore, myth, and scientific discovery to create rich stories of complicated relationships and love amidst strange, uncanny circumstances. While the worlds are themselves fascinating, the true success of Johnson’s stories lies in the careful crafting of their vibrant emotional cores.” — Booklist

“Johnson breaks down genre boundaries, combining elements of  fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and horror, in settings ranging from the historical and familiar to the wildly imaginative. Unified by Johnson’s sensuous prose, these stories will delight existing fans and serve as an excellent introduction for those new to Johnson’s work.”
— Publishers Weekly

“The first story in this collection, the Nebula award-winning ‘A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,’ opens in a prison where vampire conquerors imprison humans to feast upon. Key is a human caretaker doing what she  can to survive in a world where hope and integrity are seemingly impossible. This theme of resilience in inhumane conditions continues throughout the collection. In the title story ‘Reconstruction’ — one of two stories original to the collection — Sally uses her grandmother’s spells to help protect a Black Civil War regiment while meditating on anger. These ten immersive stories embrace multiple speculative genres and take place in worlds both real and unreal. Much like Lovecraft Country, the stories combine horror and fantastical elements with anti-racist themes.”
— Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed

“Alaya Dawn Johnson’s debut collection spans work from the breadth of her career, from 2005 to this year, and there’s some impressive gems within.” — Adr Joy, Nerds of a Feather

Table of Contents

A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i [read]
They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass
Their Changing Bodies
The Score
A Song to Greet the Sun [read]
Far and Deep
Down the Well
Third Day Lights
The Mirages
Reconstruction [read an excerpt on Tor.com]

Praise for Alaya Dawn Johnson’s books:

“Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story…in a word: Awesome.”
― N.K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season

“Great, fresh audacity.”
― Entertainment Weekly

“Like leaping into cold water on a hot day, this original dystopian novel takes the breath away, refreshes, challenges, and leaves the reader shivering but yearning for another plunge.”
― Booklist, starred review

“Compelling.”
― Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An art project, a rebellion and a sacrifice make up this nuanced, original cyberpunk adventure. . . . Luminous.”
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Beautiful prose.”
— BookPage

“This book will steal your heart!”
― Marika McCoola, Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

Cover

Cover art “Marie-Thérèse and Dieunie” copyright © 2020 by Tessa Mars (tessamars.com). All rights reserved.

Alaya Dawn Johnson (@alayadj) is the author of seven novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent novel for adults is Trouble the Saints. Her young adult novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award and Love Is the Drug won the Norton Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Mexico City where she received a master’s degree with honors in Mesoamerican Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for her thesis on pre-Columbian fermented food and its role in the religious-agricultural calendar.

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Dance on Saturday

Tue 25 Aug 2020 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 336 pages · $17 · 9781618731722 | ebook · 9781618731739

Philip K. Dick Award finalist
NPR Best Books of the Year
Locus Notable Books

Planted deeply in the dark, musical fantastic heart of American storytelling, Cotman’s half dozen tales are ripe for the picking.

In the title novella, Cotman imagines a group of near-immortals living in Pittsburgh in an uneasy truce with Lord Decay. Their truce is threatened when one of them takes pity on a young woman who knows their secret. In “Among the Zoologists,” a game writer on their way to a convention falls in with a group of rogue Darwinists whose baggage contains a great mystery. A volleyball tournament devolves into nightmare and chaos in “Mine.” In Cotman’s hands, the conventions of genres from fairytales to Victorian literature to epic fantasy and horror give shape to marvelously new stories.

NPR Best Books of the Year
“Elwin Cotman’s third collection of short fiction is only six stories long, but each story is packed with rich depth, like jeweled fruits glinting in wet loam. Mixing mythic and contemporary, humor and horror, melancholy and optimism, Cotman’s stories range from present-day Pittsburgh to fantasy Africa, with a beautifully flexible polyvocal prose. My two favorite stories make up about half the book: ‘Seven Watsons’ and the title story both deliver all the sophistication and complexity of a novel at a third of the length, and center Black joy and endurance.”
— Amal El-Mohtar, book critic and co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War

Nonfiction

Why Are We Learning About White America’s Historical Atrocities from TV? on Electric Lit

To Be Black in This Country Is to Live a Life of Trespass on Buzzfeed

Read “The Son’s War” on The Offing

Reviews [BookMarks]

“Cotman wields a compelling literary voice packing both a wallop and a deft touch.” — Fred Shaw, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Karen Russell’s cover blurb praises Cotman as ‘a synthesizer … of lewd dialect and high lyricism.’ I’ll speak instead of Cotman’s high dialect and lewd lyricism, of how his fashioning of character voices is superbly disciplined, lit from within, while his lyricism is the realm of bawdy jokes and opacity, a kind of literary trolling. “She was tall and wide like a sonnet,” one character notes — and you’ll just have to trust me on the contrast with the bawdy bits, none of which my editor will let me cite.
“The core of the book is a cleareyed survey of the complexities of Black American experience, distilled in a few lines from the title story: ‘I hated the powers for what they had done. But I learned the pride. That I was of a people who could take all the hate and poison of this world, and laugh, and go dance on Saturday.’”
— Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review

“Cotman utilizes the entire spectrum of fantasy and speculative fiction to write powerful stories on race, power, and human nature. The title novella is particularly stellar, about a group of immortals in Pittsburgh who can extend their life (and limbs) by growing and consuming certain fruit. It’s a timely collection filled with wit and beautiful language.”
— Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

“The landscapes of Elwin Cotman are mythical, searching, and stimulated by haunting fanaticism. Among his third and most ambitious story collection are tales of magical scope—they do more than simply spellbind; they seduce, invite, crack open the extraordinary. . . . In the mold of Octavia Butler and Karen Russell, Dance on Saturday is a bold leap of speculative fiction.”
— Jason Parham, Wired, Ultimate Summer Reading List

“Cotman blends humor, emotional clarity, and wild imagination to bring life to stories about identity, power, and human nature.”  — Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed, 29 Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down

“Fantastically weird short stories infused with elements from Black culture. . . . Each story provides a singular and riveting reading experience.” — Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed, 17 Summer Must-Reads For Fantasy Lovers

“Above all, Cotman is not afraid to combine the grotesque and surreal with the mundane and emotional. The result is a collection that rebels against the pigeonhole design of genres and creates something original and enlightening.” — Julia Romero, October Hill 

“It should sit on your shelves.” — Paul Di Filippo, Locus

“Cotman (Hard Times Blues) wields biting wit, powerful emotion, and magic large and small throughout these six superlative stories. From the epic fantasy ‘The Son’s War,’ which wrestles with themes of imagination and greed as a prince creates two automaton companions, one out of diamond and one out of jade, and soon favors one over the other, to the claustrophobic social thriller ‘Mine,’ set at a high school volleyball tournament in Hell as the teen girl players become increasingly cruel and the behavior of the adults around them increasingly inappropriate, Cotman utilizes genre conventions to examine racism, sexism, power imbalances, and hypocrisy. ‘Among the Zoologists’ is a sexually charged fever dream about a zoology conference that blurs the line between humans and animals. The title story is the strongest, imagining a group of immortals with the ability to extend their lives by growing and consuming fruit, in prose that ranges from humorous (‘[She] grabbed the first three Mariah Carey LPs for maximum positive energy’) to lyrical (‘She adored the sight of melons hanging like rotund trapeze artists from their own vines’). Readers will be blown away by this standout tale, which grapples with the responsibility of holding power, and whether that power can, or should, be shared. Cotman’s bold and timely speculative fiction marks him as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fun, inventive fiction that refreshes the fantasy genre with elements of black heritage and culture.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Inventive, incandescent stories, rich in strangeness. Elwin Cotman’s writing is a tonic to ward off drabness and despair.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Table of Contents

Dance on Saturday
Seven Watsons
Mine
The Son’s War [The Offing]
Among the Zoologists
The Piper’s Christmas Gift

Reviews & Praise for Elwin Cotman’s stories:

“Elwin Cotman is one of the most original new voices you will encounter—he is a synthesizer of the domestic and the fantastic, of soaring myth and the grittiest realities, of lewd dialect and high lyricism. His stories are profound engagements with suffering of every stripe—they will also make you hoot with laughter. I was amazed by the force of Mr. Cotman’s pinwheeling imagination.” — Karen Russell, author of Orange World

“Remarkable stories that are as ambitious as they are personal. Cotman is a first-class stylist with a heart and a wit to match.” — Paul Tremblay, author of Survivor Song

“With its intoxicating blend of rock and roll and the supernatural, crazed religion and visionary prose, Hard Times Blues is a wild ride down the same shadowy American sideroads traveled by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Greil Marcus and Samuel R. Delany. A marvelous collection by a strikingly original new voice in contemporary fiction.” —Elizabeth Hand, author of Errantry

“With hyperbolic, technicolor imagery and engrossing characters that radiate intrigue, these modern tales comprise a new book of essential fables for our time—read it, close your eyes, and delight in the words still glowing hot inside your brain.” — Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Starbursts of talent . . . and a knack for biting and imaginative language.” — Lauren O’Neal, The Rumpus

“Proves that magic and grit don’t have to be mutually exclusive.” — Christine Stoddard, Quail Bell Magazine

“Cotman’s interests are wide-ranging: Punk rock intersects with D.C.’s Dominican community, African-American folktale intersects with Greek myth, Goth teen suburban angst in 1990s Ohio sits side by side with racist atrocity in the pre-Civil Rights South . . . Yeah, there’s magic in some of these stories, but the real magic is in Cotman’s words themselves—stark and deadpan one moment, lushly descriptive the next.” — Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship

“This is not always a comfortable book to read, but it is a magnificent one. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP: A Collection of Fantasies is comprised of short stories and vignettes that flow into one another like the Mississippi rushes over the Delta. Elwin Cotman is a writer, an activist, a performance artist and above all, an impeccable storyteller. . . . With raw and sometimes shocking authenticity, Cotman turns the ordinary into the sublime. There is no pretension here, just a million-watt light shining into corners of the human condition that many people would prefer forgotten, with a large helping of fantastic creatures, classical myth, and modern mayhem.” — Erzebet YellowBoy, Cabinet des Fées

“Elwin Cotman’s carefully wrought, gracefully accomplished, and lyrical narratives range in tone and style from picaresque and carnivalesque to elegiac, ironic, and melancholy. Yet, while tonally distinctive and aesthetically vivid, his stories are not so much driven by style or voice, as they are by love in the largest sense. For love does not exclude chaos nor avoid the vicissitudes of history and neither do Cotman’s socially engaged, brilliantly crafted stories.” — Miranda Mellis

Cover art “Actaeon” copyright ©2020 by Christopher Myers.

About the Author

Elwin Cotman is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Dance on Saturday and two previous collections of short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. In 2011 he was nominated for a Carl Brandon Society Award. He has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He is at work on his first novel.

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Stray Bats

Tue 5 Nov 2019 - Filed under: Books, Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin

saddle-stitched paperback · 68 pages · 9781618731753 · ebook, 9781618731760

Number 13 in the Small Beer chapbook series.

Aurealis Award finalist

Dachshund droids, sinister crones, shapeshifting children, a plethora of witches, dragonstalkers, familiars, slithering eels and, of course, bats, flit and fly through these pages, aided and abetted by Kathleen Jennings’s inspired pencil drawings. Stray Bats is a madcap miscellany consisting of fifty vignettes based on poems by Australian women. Lanagan delights in playing with language, rhyme, and rhythm.

This could be the perfect gift for that slightly otherworldly person in your life—or for yourself, when you need a moment of magic, a dip into darkness, a spark of light.

For the reader who would like to explore further, there are a list of poems that inspired the author and notes on where those poems might be found.

Reviews

“What a breath of fresh air this chapbook collection is. From start to finish I was enthralled with the wildly original takes Margo Lanagan has on storytelling. . . . Highly recommended.” — Charles de Lint, F&SF

“Those who, like me, feel the occasional need for an infusion of Margo Lanagan’s visceral, sometimes knotty, and always elegant prose could do no better than to wander through the 50 short pieces of Stray Bats, many of them inspired by the work of Aus­tralian women poets.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“The 50 very short impressionistic stories in this evocative collection from Lanagan (Yellowcake) take inspiration from the works of a wide range of Australian female poets, each of whom is credited in the acknowledgements. In flash fiction pieces that occasionally read like character sketches or prose poems themselves, Lanagan conjures eerie ghostly girls, travelers lost in strange lands, and, most frequently, fey folk and spellcasters on the fringes of society. Lanagan fully inhabits the characters, conveying short bursts of intimate emotion and precise psychologies in rich, sensuous prose: the shapeshifter of “Foxwife” inhales nocturnal scents “of star and moth, earth and fungus, corpse and sister, frog and scuttling mouthful;” the witch narrator of “Flight School” describes flying “between hill- and cloudscape… the wind in our teeth.” Kathleen Jennings’ delicate line drawings provide perfect complements to Lanagan’s fairy tale imagery.” — Publishers Weekly

About the author

Margo Lanagan has published two dark fantasy novels, and Stray Bats is her eighth short story collection. She collaborated with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti on the New York Times-bestselling YA superheroes trilogy, Zeroes. Her work has won four World Fantasy Awards, nine Aurealis and five Ditmar Awards. Her books and stories have been translated into 19 languages. Margo lives in Sydney. Her twitter is @margolanagan.

About the illustrator

Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator and writer in Brisbane, Australia. She is a Hugo Award finalist and has been shortlisted three times for the World Fantasy Award and has received the E. G. Harvey Award for Australian SF Art and several Ditmar Awards for professional and fan art. Many of her illustrations and incidental drawings appear on her blog tanaudel.wordpress.com and she tweets @tanaudel.

Table of Contents

A Wind Age
Kites in the fog
Constellation
Maiden
More Information to Help You Get to Rookwood
Sail Away
Maiden Flight
Stray Bats
Readying
Shrunken Alice
Flight to Loreto
Familiars
Shore
Party to an Invocation
Emplotment
Hag-Hunter
Flight School
The Axe
Win
Foxwife
Being Summoned
Spirit Girl
Dragon Bride
Wyrm-Witch
Ingratitude
Interlacing
Aged Caring
Buff-house Review
Passed Master
Hand Magic
Digs
Getting There
Costumier
Those Women
Unchosen
Kez the Gardener
Tower View
Pounce
Invitations
Rabbit’s Foot
A Small Affair
Spring Visitor
Dormitory
Witches of a Certain Age
To a Mentee
The Evidence
Dragon
Fritzel
Feejee Mermaid
Peeping

 

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Taboo

Tue 3 Sep 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 304 pages · $17 · 9781618731692 | ebook · 9781618731708 · audiobook now available

A century after a rural Western Australian massacre, a group of Noongar people are invited back by an elderly farmer to the land where it happened.

Now shipping signed copies.

Read: an excerpt on Lithub.

Interview: Kim Scott on Book Riot’s Recommended podcast.

Kim Scott reads at the Library of Congress Book Fest from Gavin Grant on Vimeo.

From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a haunting yet optimistic novel charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years . . .

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar’s ancestors, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife’s dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.

But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.

We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. Taboo won four literary awards, was longlisted for four and shortlisted for three more. It is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.

WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER’S AWARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER’S INDIGENOUS WRITER’S PRIZE 2018
WINNER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD 2018
WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARD FOR INDIGENOUS WRITING 2019
Shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
Short-listed for Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018.
Short-listed for Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Fiction 2018.
Short-listed for Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction 2018.
Short-listed for Colin Roderick Award 2018.
Long-listed for Dublin Literary Award 2019.
Long-listed for ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2018.
Long-listed for Indie Book Awards Fiction 2018.
Kate Challis RAKA Commendation 2021.

PRAISE FOR TABOO

“A story that offers a mix of magic, history, violence and reconciliation — elements that make up the larger story of the clash between Australia’s Aboriginal people and the white settlers who killed them and pushed them aside to take their land.” — Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette

“In this potent, ghostly book, Scott, part of the Noongar people of Western Australia, tells what happens when a group of Noongar return to the site of a massacre which followed the killing of a white man for kidnapping a black woman. The book wrestles with the haunt of history, and poetry lives on each page. ‘Now his own house was haunted, and he was glad.’ In the taboo farmland, the group reckon with language and connection, and what reconciling with the past means for the present. They face the way the history and its sins live on, and how rebirth demands destruction. ‘Death is only one part of a story that is forever beginning,’ Scott writes.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“Deeply acclaimed upon its initial release in Australia, Kim Scott’s novel Taboo follows a group of characters revisiting the site of several acts of historical violence. In doing so, Scott charts the complexities of pain, forgiveness, and the sins of the past—often in harrowing ways.”
— Vol. 1, Brooklyn

“In this assured, complex novel, Scott (True Country) delves into the fraught history of race relations in Western Australia. . . .  Scott’s novel memorably describes this dramatic resurrection and the enduring power of ancestral traditions.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A teenage girl and her extended family return to the site of a centuries-old massacre of Aboriginal people. Kepalup is a small town in Western Australia with a dark history. In the 19th century, a white man was killed by an Aboriginal man, and his family retaliated by murdering scores of Aboriginal people. Recently widowed Dan Horton still lives on the land where his ancestor was killed; now, he’s invited the descendants of the Aboriginal people who died at the site to visit even though their culture labels the place as taboo. To Dan’s surprise, one of the people among the group who’s accepted the invitation is Tilly Smith, who was briefly his foster child until she was returned to her birth mother. That’s the only parent Tilly has known until she was summoned out of the blue by an inmate in a nearby prison, who happens to be her real father. An Aboriginal person of Noongar ancestry, Tilly’s father has turned over a new leaf from his former violence and drug addiction and is teaching fellow inmates the old language and customs. But along with meeting her dad and being introduced to a new culture and extended family, Tilly is introduced to some of his unsavory associates. When Tilly shows up in Kepalup with her relatives, she bears a number of dark secrets that threaten to collide with the largest darkness of all: the loss and generational trauma borne by her people. Scott (That Deadman Dance, 2010, etc.) has created a shadowy and elliptical story, but it is not as hopeless as it sometimes feels: Tilly is a survivor, and though her Aboriginal culture is not a perfect salvation, it nevertheless provides her with a touchstone in the chaos.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“If Benang was the great novel of the assimilation system, and That Deadman Dance redefined the frontier novel in Australian writing, Taboo makes a strong case to be the novel that will help clarify — in the way that only literature can — what reconciliation might mean.” — Australian Book Review

“Scott’s book is stunning — haunted and powerful . . . Verdict: Must Read.” — Herald Sun

“Remarkable.” — Stephen Romei, Weekend Australian

“Stunning prose.” — Saturday Paper

“This is a complex, thoughtful, and exceptionally generous offering by a master storyteller at the top of his game.” — The Guardian

“Undaunted, and daring as ever Scott goes back to his ancestral Noongar country in Western Australia’s Great Southern region; back in time as well to killings (or a massacre, the point is contested) of whites and Aborigines there in 1880. . . Taboo never becomes a revenge story, whether for distant or recent wrongs . . . The politics of Taboo — not to presume or simplify too much — are quietist, rather than radical. Ambitious, unsentimental [and] morally challenging.” — Sydney Morning Herald

“Scott is one of the most thoughtful, exciting and powerful storytellers of this continent today, with great courage and formidable narrative prowess- and Taboo is his most daring novel yet.” — Sydney Review of Books

“Scott’s most accessible novel.” — Reading Matters

Previously

Aug. 31, 10 a.m “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers” with Jeanine Leane and Brenton McKenna , Library of Congress Book Festival, Washington, D.C.
UVA
— Sept. 3, 5:30 p.m. Reading & Signing, Brooks Hall Commons
— Sept. 5, 6 p.m. “Truth Telling,” Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, 400 Worrell Dr., Charlottesville, VA 22911
Sept. 6, 7 p.m. White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA
Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m., NYU
Sept. 9, 7 p.m. Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

About the Author

Kim Scott is a multi-award winning novelist. Benang was the first novel by an Indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Award and That Deadman Dance also won Australia’s premier literary prize, among many others. Proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar, Kim is founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project, which has published a number of bilingual picture books. A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott deals with aspects of his career in education and literature. He received an Australian Centenary Medal and was 2012 West Australian of the Year. Kim is currently Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University.

Cover designed and photographed by Sandy Cull.

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Air Logic

Tue 4 Jun 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 400 pages · $17 · 9781618731609 | ebook · 9781618731616

The fourth and final novel in the award winning Elemental Logic series.

Locus Notable Books
Otherwise Honor List for Series

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

Laurie J. Marks returns at last to Shaftal for the long-awaited conclusion to her acclaimed series. Karis and those who love her must figure out, in the aftermath of war and an assassination attempt, how to bring together Sainnites and Shaftali in a country where old wounds and enmities fester and Air magic conceals the treason hidden in the heart of the G’deon’s household. When Medric is taken hostage to force Karis’s hand, a strange boy will guide Zanja to the place where she may yet save him, a mother must remember the son she has been made to forget, and Air children will find what their place in the world may yet be.

“If you’ve been looking for an exciting, thoughtful, queer, diverse, politically aware, complex, timely, beautifully written saga of a fascinating world and set of characters, here it is.” — Delia Sherman

Reviews “Laurie Marks’s epic fantasy world is brilliantly realized, gratifyingly queer, and satisfyingly, humanly complicated. Now that the story of Shaftal is complete, it’s one that every fantasy fan should experience for themselves.” — Electra Pritchett, Strange Horizons

“You might not believe me, but this is the truth: Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic books are as good as Elena Ferrante’s monumental Neapolitan Quartet. They achieve the same depth, the same spellbinding quality, and the same sense of falling entire into a world on the page, tethered to real life by the sure hand of a master writer. They expose a talent as mighty as Le Guin’s for building intricate moral dilemmas inside fantasy universes, for creating characters the reader will remember for decades, and for presenting solutions that amount to much more than throwing soldiers or magic at the problem. These books are a profound achievement in fantasy literature.” — Katherine Coldiron, Locus “Not everyone survives, and no one survives unscathed. . . . The discipline of hope relies on communal life and love, doing the hard work of coming together and staying together across differences in culture, belief, conviction. Marks time and time again refuses pessimism or grim acquiescence in favor of insisting that, while some people might be monsters, the far greater portion have the capacity for good. There is real power in the dedicated, intentional, thoughtful project of hope with a steel core. The Elemental Logic series provides a compelling, thorough argument in its favor, one I’ve enjoyed reading from beginning to end and which left me cautiously optimistic about the world in which I’d like to keep striving toward a more survivable future.” — Lee Mandelo, Tor.com

“The entire series is highly recommended to anyone looking for a series that presents not only a queer fantasy world, but also one of the most well-wrought and engaging fantasy worlds out there.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Marks brings her much-loved, long-unavailable Elemental Logic series (most recently 2007’s Water Logic, and all recently republished by Small Beer) to a superb finale. . .  an extraordinary fantasy saga that’s well worth revisiting or exploring for the first time.” — Publishers Weekly

“Shaftal is a convincing world, lovingly detailed and fiercely envisioned. Marks’ characters are so real. . . . as the last note in a familiar melody, this book rings true. A final book that stays true to the spirit of the whole, sending readers out of Shaftal on a high note.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Marks (Water Logic) draws a satisfying conclusion to this quartet of novels perfect for readers of K. Arsenault Rivera and previous fans of the series.” — Library Journal

The Elemental Logic series:

Fire Logic Elemental Logic: Book 1
Spectrum Award winner
Romantic Times Reviewers Choice award nominee

The martial Sainnites have occupied Shaftal for fifteen years. Every year the cost of resistance rises. Emil, an officer and scholar; Zanja, a diplomat and last survivor of her people; and Karis, a metalsmith, half-blood giant, and an addict, can only watch as their country falls into lawlessness and famine. Together, perhaps they can change the course of history.

Read an excerpt.
Listen to the author read Chapter 1: part 1 · part 2

Reviews for Fire Logic “Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“Marks has created a work filled with an intelligence that zings off the page.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and elemental magic.” — Robin Hobb

“Marks vividly describes a war-torn land, and the depth of character development makes this novel a page-turner.” — VOYA

“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.” — Nalo Hopkinson

Earth Logic Elemental Logic: Book 2
Spectrum Award winner

The second book of Shaftal. The country has a ruler again, a woman who can heal the war-torn land and expel the invaders. But she lives in obscurity with her fractious found family. With war and disease spreading, she must act. And when she does, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.

Read an excerpt.
Listen to the author read Chapter 2 or “Raven’s Joke”

Reviews for Earth Logic

“Marks produces another stunner of a book. The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart.” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“The struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.” — Publishers Weekly

Water Logic Elemental Logic: Book 3
Amid assassinations, rebellions, and the pyres of too many dead, a new government forms in the land of Shaftal—a government of soldiers and farmers, scholars and elemental talents, all weary of war and longing for peace. But some cannot forget their losses, and some cannot imagine a place for themselves in an enemy land.

Read the first chapter.
Listen to the author read Chapter 1: part 1 · part 2

Reviews for Water Logic

“How gifts from the past, often unknown or unacknowledged, bless future generations; how things that look like disasters or mistakes may be parts of a much bigger pattern that produces greater, farther-reaching good results.” —Booklist (Starred Review)

“Finely drawn characters and a lack of bias toward sexual orientation make this a thoughtful, challenging read.” — Library Journal

“Marks’s characters are real people who breathe and sleep and sweat and love; the food has flavor and the landscape can break your heart. You don’t find this often in any contemporary fiction, much less in fantasy: a world you can plunge yourself into utterly and live in with great delight, while the pages turn, and dream of after.” — Ellen Kushner

Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

On the web:

• Laurie J. Marks | bio
• Library Thing

Credits

• Cover image © Kathleen Jennings.
• Author photo © Deb Mensinger.
• Map of Shaftal © by Jeanne Gomoll.

Laurie J. Marks (website) has published nine fantasy novels, including Dancing Jack, The Watcher’s Mask and the Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic). She has been writing since her childhood in California, inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander. Her books have been shortlisted for the James D. Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and have twice been awarded the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts with her wife, Deb Mensinger, and their Welsh corgi, Serendipity.

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Tender

Tue 9 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade cloth · 288 pages · $24 · 9781618731265 | ebook · 9781618731272
April 2019: trade paper ·$17 ·  9781618731654
Desk / Exam copies

World Fantasy Award finalist
British Fantasy Award finalist
Locus Award finalist
“Fallow” shortlisted for the Nommo Award

NPR Best of 2017
“Most of the 20 sumptuous tales in Sofia Samatar’s collection Tender take place on Earth – although not always the Earth we might recognize. Sprawling in subject from the supernatural power of names to the loneliness of a half-robot woman, Tender redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. Where Samatar’s acclaimed fantasy novels exist in a strange, dreamlike world, her short stories daringly explore the overlap of familiarity and otherness.”

Divided into “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” these twenty stories travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality.

The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized many times including in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.

Tender includes two new stories, “An Account of the Land of Witches” and an expansive novella, “Fallow.”

New

Interview and Podcast: Sofia Samatar’s Arabian Fantasies Get Dosed in Reality

Sofia Samatar, Five Elegant and Moody Fantasies

An excerpt from Fallow introduced by Chris Abani.

Just up on Lithub, a phenomenal heartbreaking story from Sofia Samatar, Meet Me in Iram — first published as a chapbook by Guillotine and selected for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Read a new story from Tender on The Offing: An Account of the Land of Witches

Reviews

Carmen Maria Machado, The Week: “6 Favorite Story Collections”
“When Tender was published last spring, I had been waiting for a short-story collection from Sofia Samatar for what felt like 10 million years. Samatar is a novelist, poet, scholar, and author of science fiction and fantasy stories, and this book combines previously published award-winning short fiction with two new pieces, a novella and a story, that give life to the breadth and width of her astonishing imagination.”

Maria Dahvana Headley, Electric Lit
“This is a short story collection containing wonder after wonder, done with casual intensity. These are all sharp knives of stories, and it’s definitely possible to think oneself unsliced until the blood starts to pour. I encountered Samatar’s short work in 2012, probably, with her short Selkie Stories are for Losers, and was floored on sight. She’s published two novels as well, but the short fiction is my first love. Unlike the rest of the authors on this list, I actually know Sofia, and I’m as moved by her in person as I am by her work. Her wide-ranging and deeply researched interests are fully showcased in her prose, which moves from nonfiction to speculative surrealism, from historical automatons to victims of warfare, all at the same time. There are witch stories, and ripped from the headline stories, stories about longing for other planets, stories about the human condition of pain. They cross all genre divides, and smash them. This collection was edited by Kelly Link, herself a lighthouse of mine, and her work has common ground with Samatar’s, just as both of their work has common ground with everything else on this list. These are all authors whose works are sui generis, but who constitute a tribe of writer warriors as far as I’m concerned. Everyone here is an obliterator of tropes and received myth, a reviser of hierarchy, and a deeply skilled storyteller and maker of worlds. I can’t even believe I get to live in a time in which writers like the ones on this list exist, let alone get to have their brains feed mine.”

Jenn Northington, Bookriot
“A wide-ranging collection by an author who is as at home in a contemporary satire as she is in a beautifully atmospheric fable. For readers who love seeing what a master can do with short fiction.”

Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
“Samatar is a master at not only weaving imaginative tales, but deftly layering them with emotional truths. While some stories are playful, many are sad, and others are disturbing. Many of the stories are suspenseful, not necessarily because of their structures, but from not quite knowing the emotional terrain they’ll tackle. And yet it’s easy to trust Samatar as she takes you into unfamiliar territory with prose that is skillful, controlled, and lovely.”

Pain Is the Heaviest Thing: The Many Meanings of Tender by Sofia Samatar Reviewed by Sara Rauch
“On top of all that Tender has going for it, the poetry of Samatar’s language fairly sings off the page. Tender begs to be read out loud . . . ”

Ilana Teitelbaum, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A relentless, challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar’s Tender transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text, demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a way of getting under your skin.”

Jason Heller, NPR:
“Tender‘s longest story is also a science fiction tale set in the future — and like ‘The Red Thread,’ it toys with the ambiguity between dystopia and utopia. Told from the perspective of a child named Agar Black Hat, who lives in an extraterrestrial colony after cataclysmic climate change and a universal draft have forced a sect of religious pacifists from Earth, the story is a feast of ideas. It’s reminiscent of vintage Ursula K. Le Guin in its combination of social science and hard sci-fi, even as it probes the nature of belonging and belief.
“The book’s beating heart, though, is its title story. ‘Tender’ starts out with a clever play on words — ‘tender’ is used as a noun, as in, one who tends — and employs some tricky unreliable narration and splintered points-of-view. But Samatar’s virtuoso flourishes of form serve a higher purpose: They couch a quietly devastating account of a woman who gave up her life as a career woman and mother to become a cyborg, one who, alone, tends to a radioactive waste facility which she may never leave. While Samatar slowly unspools her character’s reasons for leaving her former life — delivering a primer on the haunting philosophies and damaged psyches of the scientists who gave us nuclear power along the way — ‘Tender’ redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. As does Tender as a whole.”

Lee Mandelo, Tor.com:
“I was also impressed with both of the pieces original to this collection. . . . ‘Fallow’ is the second original piece, a novella, and is by far the longest in the collection. It’s also the best novella I’ve read in quite some time. . . . a heady mix of science and grim hard-scrabble religious life in a dystopic and closeknit society. . . . I’d strongly recommend giving the literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected here a read. It’s as good as I’d hoped, and just as smart too.”

Gary K. Wolfe, Locus:
“Tender: Stories includes two excellent new pieces together with 18 reprints, and one of them, “Fallow”, is not only the longest story in the collection, but also her most complex and accomplished SF story to date. On the basis of her award-winning debut novel A Stranger in Olondria and its sequel The Winged Histories, Samatar’s reputation has been mostly that of a fantasist, and her most famous story, ‘‘Selkie Stories Are For Losers’’ (the lead selection here) seemed to confirm that reputation – although once Samatar establishes the parameters of her fantastic worlds, she works out both her plot details and cultural observations with the discipline of a seasoned SF writer and the psychological insight of a poet.”

7 Standout SFF Short Story Collections to Start Your Summer
“Sofia Samatar has made a name for herself as a fabulist with two critically acclaimed novels and numerous short works. Tender collects many of her shorter endeavors, from a field guide to ogres in Africa, to a story of young women experiencing an unusual event at summer camp, to one of a sapient brass automata’s father-daughter relationship with her creator. While, like all good fabulists, Samatar’s lyricism and atmosphere are pitch perfect, it is her unique grasp of character voices that puts Tender in the top tier.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.”

adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood:
“Sofia Samatar’s stories are just so good. Surprising. Suspenseful at an emotional level — I kept finding myself plummeted into an emotion face first, everything built up so steadily, with such subtle and meticulous storytelling. Samatar earns readers’ trust and uses it to take us into unexpected territory, to make us see ourselves in our power, in our messiness. Tender is the right word, so many of these stories touched into the place of gasping, or tears. Each story had me like, “Oh this is my favorite, I must mention this one.” But then I would read the next story which would be Another Whole Paradigm, similar only in that the writing was astonishing, each word so precise. This collection is an exquisite exploration of what otherness and belonging and place and language and love do to us all. It is visionary fiction. Please accept this as my enthusiastic recommendation to let this book have its way with you.”

Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls:
“Equal parts brutal and beautiful, flinty, and acrobatic, Samatar’s stories explore lesser known territories of the imagination. The results chime with all the strangeness of dream and the dark-hearted truth of fairytale. I loved it.”

Ben Loory, Tales of Flying and Falling
“If a library came alive, and spent ten thousand years walking up and down upon the earth, exploring and dreaming and falling in and out of love, it might write stories like these.”

David Connerley Nahm author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky:
“The stories in Sofia Samatar’s Tender are perfect and profound works of art written with the impossible ease of someone who has unlimited access to the secret knowledge of the exact right order in which words are supposed to go. The stories ring in sympathy with the reader like the favorite stories of childhood or youth or old age: Familiar and strange in the same proportion. These stories give you several new lives to live and with each reading–because you will read all of them several times–you discover new tales and new possibilities hidden within and you are filled endlessly with the pure pleasure of great literature.”

Publishers Weekly:
“The first collection from one of fantasy’s rising stars, showcasing her rich, lyrical language and intricate storytelling in 20 short works.”

Table of Contents

Tender Bodies
Selkie Stories Are for Losers
Ogres of East Africa
Walkdog
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
Olimpia’s Ghost
Honey Bear
How I Met the Ghoul
Those
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals
How to Get Back to the Forest

Tender Landscapes
Tender
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies
Dawn and the Maiden
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold
An Account of the Land of Witches
Request for an Extension on the Clarity
Meet Me in Iram
The Closest Thing to Animals
Fallow [excerpt]
The Red Thread

Praise for Sofia Samatar’s Books

“The excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make you run out and buy the book. Just don’t overlook her short “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” the best story about loss and love and selkies I’ve read in years.” —K. Tempest Bradford, NPR

“An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” —Hello Beautiful

“Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. . . . There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Samatar’s use of poetic yet unpretentious language makes her one of the best writers of today.” —Romantic Times Book Reviews (4.5/5 stars, Top Pick)

“If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language and can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, then read The Winged Histories.”
— Marion Deeds, Fantasy Literature

“Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Beauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story.”—Jason Heller, NPR

“Highly recommended.” —N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review

Previously

February 8 – 11, AWP Conference, Washington, DC
February 9, 10:30 a.m., Book signing, Small Beer Press table, Bookfair
February 11, 4:30 – 5:45 p.m., Panel: “The Short Story as Laboratory,” Marquis Salon 9 & 10, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two
March 24, 6:00 — 7:30 p.m., Virginia Festival of the Book, Panel: “Building (and Breaking) Worlds in Contemporary Science Fiction & Fantasy,” Central JMRL Library, Charlottesville, VA
May 18 – 21, Festival les Imaginales, Épinal, France

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

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Earth Logic

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

February 19, 2019 · trade paper  · $16 · 9781618730930 | ebook ·  9781618730947 · Edelweiss

New edition with interlocking cover art by Kathleen Jennings now available.
Elemental Logic: Book 2
Spectrum Award winner

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

A thought-provoking sometimes heartbreaking novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics and power shifts between oppressed and oppressor.

The second book of Shaftal. The country has a ruler again, Karis, a woman who can heal the war-torn land and expel the invaders. But she lives in obscurity with her fractious found family. With war and disease spreading, Karis must act. And when Karis acts, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.

Read an excerpt. Listen to the author read Chapter 2 or “Raven’s Joke”

See the Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

Reviews

“With this follow-up to Fire Logic, Marks produces another stunner of a book. The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart. Definitely for the thinking reader.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“The sequel to Fire Logic continues the tale of a woman born to magic and destined to rule. Vivid descriptions and a well-thought-out system of magic.”
— Library Journal

“Twenty years after the invading Sainnites won the Battle of Lilterwess, the struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel to Fire Logic. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Rich and affecting. . . . A thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel.”
— BookPage

“Intelligent, splendidly visualized, and beautifully written. Laurie Marks’s use of language is really tremendous.”
— Paula Volsky

“A dense and layered book filled with complex people facing impossible choices. Crammed with unconventional families, conflicted soldiers, amnesiac storytellers, and practical gods, the story also finds time for magical myths of origin and moments of warm, quiet humor. Against a bitter backdrop of war and winter, Marks offers hope in the form of various triumphs: of fellowship over chaos, the future over the past, and love over death.”
— Sharon Shinn

“A powerful and hopeful story where the peacemakers are as heroic as the warriors; where there is magic in good food and flower bulbs; and where the most powerful weapon of all is a printing press.”
— Naomi Kritzer

“Earth Logic is not a book of large battles and heart-stopping chases; rather, it’s more gradual and contemplative and inexorable, like the earth bloods who people it. It’s a novel of the everyday folk who are often ignored in fantasy novels, the farmers and cooks and healers. In this novel, the everyday lives side by side with the extraordinary, and sometimes within it; Karis herself embodies the power of ordinary, mundane methods to change the world.”
— SF Revu

“It is an ambitious thing to do, in this time of enemies and hatreds, to suggest that a conflict can be resolved by peaceable means. Laurie Marks believes that it can be done, and she relies relatively little on magic to make it work.”
— Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

Praise for Fire Logic, Elemental Logic: Book 1

* “Marks has created a work that is filled with an intelligence that zings off the page. . . . This beautifully written novel includes enough blood and adventure to satisfy the most quest-driven readers.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict.” — Robin Hobb

Fire Logic and Earth Logic both received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

Cover art by Kathleen Jennings.

Laurie J. Marks (website) has published nine fantasy novels, including Dancing Jack, The Watcher’s Mask and the Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic). She has been writing since her childhood in California, inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander. Her books have been shortlisted for the James D. Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and have twice been awarded the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts with her wife, Deb Mensinger, and their Welsh corgi, Serendipity.

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Fire Logic

Tue 22 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper  · $20 · 9781618730886 | ebook ·  9781931520393
2nd printing: November 2022

An occupying army, cut off from their homeland, has to make peace with those they have brutally suppressed.

Elemental Logic: Book 1
Spectrum Award winner
Romantic Times Reviewers Choice award nominee

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

The martial Sainnites have occupied Shaftal for fifteen years. Every year the cost of resistance rises. Emil, an officer and scholar; Zanja, a diplomat and last survivor of her people; and Karis, a metalsmith, half-blood giant, and an addict, can only watch as their country falls into lawlessness and famine. Together, perhaps they can change the course of history.

Read an excerpt. Listen to Chapter 1 read by the author: part 1 · part 2

See the Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

Benjamin Rosenbaum and Jake Casella Brookins talk Fire Logic on the Ancillary Review of Books podcast.

Reviews

“Fire Logic is a delightful, feminist fantasy epic featuring a ragtag bunch of misfits, swashbuckling, romance, and some weird elemental magic.”
— Bustle

“I’m re-reading after some years away, and loving the book even more than I did the first time! Marks creates a realistic society in which women are the dominant sex. The home country has been conquered by an army with no home to return to, and its leaders have been fighting a long, guerilla war against them. What they need is the leader who is joined by her magic with the earth, but the one who inherited the office from the former leader is a drug addict and former prostitute who doesn’t believe in her worth or her job. The second-in-command of the army is beginning to see that her people have to re-think what they are doing if they are to survive, as do some of the rebel leaders. The characters are complex, facing complex problems. I . . . love them and the world-building.” — Tamora Pierce, author of Tempests and Slaughter

“I’m a longtime fan of this series. . . . Zanja is one of my favorite protagonists in fantasy fiction — smart, courageous, and passionate despite the heavy weight of being the only surviving member of her people. These books look at oppression, queer identity, and morality during a protracted civil war — definitely worth picking up.”
— Gretchen Treu, A Room of One’s Own

“Marks has created a work filled with an intelligence that zings off the page.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and elemental magic.”
—Robin Hobb

“Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

“Like real life, it is all about shades of gray. . . . an immensely political and unflinchingly optimistic novel. Differences are celebrated as often as scorned, and love can be found even with an enemy without the costs that might be expected in our world. Fire Logic questions both the real magic behind faith and the self-selective blindness involved in following a leader: religious, military or political. Characters and story come together effortlessly even as Marks refuses to shy away from complex issues of self-determination, ownership and multicultural coexistence.”—BookPage

“A deep and intriguing read.” – BookSense Daily Pick

“Contained in Fire Logic are some of the most sensual and tender sexual encounters ever captured on paper. She perfectly portrays the timidity, the lust, the uncertainty, of that first connection and the exultation of discovery. The emotion, so raw and vulnerable, is arresting and humbling.”
– ME Reviews

“A cast of memorable characters whose lives, loves, and sacrifices combine to imbue faith in a shattered land.”
—Library Journal

“Marks vividly describes a war-torn land, and the depth of character development makes this novel a page-turner.”
—VOYA

“Cuts deliciously through the mind to the heart with the delicacy, strength, beauty, and surgical precision of the layered Damascus steel blade that provides one of the book’s central images.”
—Candas Jane Dorsey

“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Entertaining and engaging—an excellent read!”
—Kate Elliott

“This is a treat: a strong, fast-paced tale of war and politics in a fantasy world where magic based on the four elements of alchemy not only works but powerfully affects the lives of those it touches. An unusual, exciting read.”
—Suzy McKee Charnas

“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.”
—Nalo Hopkinson

“Most intriguingly, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the low-key magical facets of her characters’ elemental magics rise away from simply being fancy “weapons” and evoke—for both the readers and the characters—that elusive sense of wonder.”
—Charles de Lint, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“An exquisite novel of quiet charm. Fire Logic is a tale of war and magic, of duty, love and betrayal, of despair encompassed by hope.”
—SF Site

Cover art by Kathleen Jennings.

Laurie J. Marks (website) has published nine fantasy novels, including Dancing Jack, The Watcher’s Mask and the Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic). She has been writing since her childhood in California, inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander. Her books have been shortlisted for the James D. Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and have twice been awarded the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts with her wife, Deb Mensinger, and their Welsh corgi, Serendipity.

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Terra Nullius

Tue 18 Sep 2018 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $17 · 9781618731517 | ebook · 9781618731524

Download Terra Nullius Reading Group Guide (7299 downloads ) .

In the near future Australia is about to experience colonization once more. What has been learned from the past? A daring debut novel from the winner of the 2016 black&write! writing fellowship.

“So smart, unexpected, and surprising. . . . Incredibly moving and eye-opening.”
— Hugh Jackman

“Deftly twists expectations. . . . a debut that leaves you excited for what’s next.”
— NPR Best Books of the Year

“A gut punch of a book in the style of Le Guin, Atwood, and Butler. Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel blazes with truth.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Wikipedia: Terra nullius (/ˈtɛrə.nʌˈlaɪəs/, plural terrae nullius) is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land”,^[1] and is a principle sometimes used in international law to describe territory that may be acquired by a state’s occupation of it.^[2]

Nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2019
Shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the Reading Women Award, the Neukom Institute Debut Literary Arts Award, the ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writers, and the Aurealis Award.
Winner of the Norma K. Hemming & Tin Duck awards.
Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Longlisted for the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction
Locus Recommended Reading List

Interview To Change the Dialogue: An Interview with Claire G. Coleman by Robert Wood on the Los Angeles Review of Books

Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from.

The Natives of the Colony are restless. The Settlers are eager to bring peace to their new home, and they have a plan for how to achieve it. They will tear Native families apart and provide re-education to those who do not understand why they should submit to their betters. Peace and prosperity are worth any price, but who will pay it? This rich land, Australia, will provide for all if only the Natives can learn their place. Jacky has escaped the Home where the Settlers sent him, but where will he go? The Head of the Department for the Protection of Natives, known to Settlers and Natives alike as the Devil, is chasing Jacky. And when the Devil catches him, Sister Bagra, who knows her duty to the ungodly, will be waiting for Jacky back at Home. An incendiary, timely, and fantastical debut from an essential Australian Aboriginal writer, Claire G. Coleman. Do you recognize this story? Look again. This is not Australia as we know it. This is not the Australia of our history books. This Terra Nullius — shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize and Highly Commended for the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards — is something new, but all too familiar.

Reviews

“What Claire Coleman does with the theme of colonialism is something the like of which I haven’t seen before, something that only speculative fiction can do. I’m tempted to elaborate, but I shall desist. Readers should experience the power of this astonishing book for themselves. As the words at the back of the book say, ‘Do you recognize this story? Look again.'”
— Vandana Singh, author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories

“Terra Nullius is a striking debut from a new Australian Aboriginal voice. The speculative–fiction lens reframes European invasion, shifting and unsettling the reader’s perspective. The devastation of colonisation and displacement is explored with originality, compassion and insight.”
— State Library of Queensland Dublin Literary Award Nomination

“More than anything, a tireless belief in the promise of the future in the face of destruction, violence, and even genocide distinguishes the nature of survivance and the active gesture towards futurity contained in Indigenous storytelling — the power to animate science fiction with new knowledge, ideas, and experience,”
— Dr. Billy J. Stratton, LA Review of Books

“Coleman’s skillful use of science fiction elements enhances her story, causing readers to recognize the alien as something all too familiar. Terra Nullius possesses a universal impact and stands as one of the best novels addressing colonialism that we’ve ever read.” — Reading Women

“Fantastic. . . . Unbelievable.” — Liberty Hardy, Book Riot

“A difficult and powerful book.” — Catherine Rockwood, Reckoning

“Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius employs sci-fi tropes to challenge the reader’s identification with the story — and history.”
— Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project in the Sydney Morning Herald

“Terra Nullius is a moving, horrific, and confrontational exploration of Indigenous Australian experiences of the apocalypse wrought by British colonialism. The novel demands that Indigenous voices and knowledges are included in the formation of shared futures. As such, it is a deeply necessary text. Coleman is an exciting new voice who has taken SF’s flexibility, and its position as arguably the best literary mode for the fictioning of the otherwise, and gone some way to realising the genres under-tapped potentials. Her work signifies how the SF genre can address past injustice, through remembering rather than trying to forget, and thereby nurture new ways of being collectively. Coleman’s work challenges SF to be better, revitalising and compelling the genre to realise its political importance as an incubator for counterfutures, alternative imaginaries and as a home for the people yet to come.”
— Rachel Hill, Strange Horizons

“I thought I knew what to expect, going in to Terra Nullius.” — Adri, Nerds of a Feather

“Demonstrates Coleman’s promise as a creative storyteller. VERDICT Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal (starred Review)

“Coleman stuns with this imaginative, astounding debut about colonization. . . . Coleman universalizes the experiences of invaded indigenous populations in a way that has seldom been achieved. Artfully combining elements of literary, historical, and speculative fiction, this allegorical novel is surprising and unforgettable.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred Review)

“The novel, which was originally published in Australia and New Zealand in 2017, literally hits the ground running. Its opening sentence, introducing us to the fugitive who is one of the main protagonists, is ‘Jacky was running,’ and the pace never really lets up. . . . gripping, harrowing, but ultimately deeply humane tale.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Australian natives living under the oppressive brutality of forced colonization struggle to survive, let alone fight back. It’s little wonder that Australian Aboriginal writer Coleman has been praised and nominated for awards in her own country for her thoughtfully woke debut novel about an invasion of Australia by punishing settlers and the subsequent resistance by a native people. The title refers to an obscure legal principle used by Britain to justify the taking of Aboriginal territory—the term literally means ‘Nobody’s Land.’ This harsh scene of brittle détente in the Australian Outback, set during an ambiguous point in the country’s troubled history, is viewed through the eyes of several characters, all struggling in their own ways. Jacky is an orphaned boy, now a slave on the run, trying to get home even as trooper Sgt. Rohan hunts him through the desert. Sister Bagra is a cruel headmistress at a mission for native children, abusing her livestock with malicious glee. Esperance is a kind young woman who tries to protect her flock of starving refugees. A government official charged with the protection of natives is so evil even his own wife calls him “Devil,” like the natives do. By far the most interesting character is Johnny Star, a trooper who betrayed the colonizers and has accepted his fate as an outlaw traveling with a rough bunch of native comrades. It’s a cruel scene indeed, made more so by Coleman’s purposeful parallels to the evil treatment of native peoples during the British colonization of Australia in the 17th century. . . . Coleman doesn’t hurry in bringing these disparate characters together, but when it happens, a powerful myth comes to life before readers’ eyes.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The novel’s striking realism is productively complicated by its science fiction.” — BCCB

“Coleman’s timely debut is testimony to the power of an old story seen afresh through new eyes.” — Adelaide Advertiser

“In our politically tumultuous time, the novel’s themes of racism, inherent humanity and freedom are particularly poignant.” — Books + Publishing

“Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nulllius is an arresting and original novel that addresses the legacy of Australia’s violent colonial history. . . . Coleman’s punchy prose is insistent throughout, its energy unflagging. Terra Nullius is a novel for our times, one whose tone is as impassioned as its message is necessary.”
— Stella Prize Judges’ Report

“Noongar writer Claire Coleman’s debut novel, Terra Nullius, envisions a continent disturbingly familiar and worryingly futuristic. . . . It is a future beyond the boundaries of familiar 21st-century post-colonial settler discourse on reconciliation and ‘settlement’ in a nation founded on the dispossession of Aboriginal lands, and ongoing ‘unfinished business’ with the first people.”
— Sydney Morning Herald

“A powerful, sobering piece of writing that makes us face an Australia we try to forget, but should always remember.”
— Adelaide Review

“A speculative sci-fi struggle meaningfully grounded in Coleman’s own Indigenous culture, Terra Nullius offers something new — a skilfully constructed pastiche of colonisation, resistance and apocalyptic chaos with parallels that sit unsettlingly close to home.”
— Big Issue Australia

“Coleman makes a significant contribution to the emerging body of Aboriginal writers such as Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright who write spectral and speculative fiction to critique the vicious fiction of the colonial archive.”
— Canberra Times

“Witty, weird, moving and original.” — Weekend Australian

About the Author

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman whose family have belonged to the south coast of Western Australia since long before history started being recorded. She writes fiction, essays and poetry while (mostly) traveling around the continent now called  Australia in a ragged caravan towed by an ancient troopy (the car has earned “vintage” status). Born in Perth, away from her ancestral country she has lived most of her life in Victoria and most of that in and around Melbourne. During an extended circuit of the continent she wrote a novel, influenced by certain experiences gained on the road. She has since won a Black&Write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship for that novel, Terra Nullius.

Originally published in Australia by Hachette Australia.
Cover Design by Grace West.

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Alien Virus Love Disaster

Tue 14 Aug 2018 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 248 pages · $16 · 9781618731494 | ebook · 9781618731500

Neukom Institute Debut Literary Arts Award shortlist
Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Booklist Top 10 Debut SF&F
Locus Recommended Reading List

“An exciting voice. . . . dreamy but with an intense physicality.” — Washington Post Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2018

Fiction that will inspire you to blow open the doors and kick out those supposedly in charge.

Listen Abbey Mei Otis is interviewed on KMSU’s The Weekly Reader.
Read An interview by Ian McDowell in YES! Weekly
Read “Rich People” in Tin House.
Read “Blood, Blood” on Strange Horizons.
Read “Sweetheart” on Tor.com.

Abbey Mei Otis’s short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, putting kids from the moon into a small beach town and then the putting the rest of the town under the microscope as they react in ways we hope they would, and then, of course, in ways we’d hope they don’t. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the twelve stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

Table of Contents

Alien Virus Love Disaster [Recommended by Dan Chaon on Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading]
Moonkids [The Offing]
If  You Could Be God of Anything Teacher [Watch the author’s reading at Flyleaf Books]
Blood, Blood [Strange Horizons]
Sex Dungeons for Sad People
Not an Alien Story
Sweetheart [Tor.com]
I’m Sorry Your Daughter Got Eaten by a Cougar [Guernica]
Rich People
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Evicted by Now
Ultimate Housekeeping Megathrill 4

Reviews & Praise for Abbey Mei Otis’s stories:

“Otis’s work always retains a dark humor and unique narrative sensibility; there are consistently shocking turns, and these stories often end in unexpected ways. Definitely a standout collection, one well worth revisiting for future reads.” — Asian America Literature Fans

“Otis actually belongs with writers like Kelly Link, who freely borrow genre materials to construct elegant literary fictions far more about character than spectacle. . . . As odd as these worlds are, they are populated by sharply drawn characters we come to care about through Otis’ luminescent prose.” — Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

“Abbey Mei Otis is an exciting voice in contemporary science fiction. Her new book “Alien Virus Love Disaster” (Small Beer) is a short-story collection that explores those left behind in typical sweeping science fiction adventures — the children, discarded robots, school dropouts and blue-collar workers with the misfortune of being near something toxic. A stand-out story is “Moonkids,” about young humans from the moon who find themselves living and working on a beach town on Earth after being expelled from lunar society. Humans born on the moon end up becoming physically changed from the atmosphere, and if they fail a high-stakes exam, they are returned to Earth with nothing to do but be gawked at by normal people. Like many of Otis’s stories, it’s dreamy but with an intense physicality that belies the violence behind the longing.” — Everdeen Mason, Washington Post Book World

“It’s a collection that will keep your heart half in your throat and half in your toes, and I recommend it.” — Tor.com

“In these stories, yes, there are aliens, robots, sex dungeons, chicken puppets, ghosts, and blobs of unknown origin and nature. But there is also tenderness and the absence of it. There is prose that delights. There are plastic people, and people not sure if they can bleed. What these stories do best is sci-fi. What these stories do best is love. And if you need to distinguish between the two, then Abbey Mei Otis is here to deny you. For if barriers between what is ‘science fiction’ and what is ‘literature’ haven’t already broken down, then this collection is Abbey Mei Otis burying a glowing-neon hammer into that tired beige wall.” — Columbia Journal

“Otis is a writer of vision, attuned to the complexities of privilege and the ways technology married to capitalism tends to produce and exacerbate inequality.” — Evan Fackler, Entropy Magazine

“Abbey Mei Otis publishes in literary journals as well as SF magazines, so many of the weird SF and fantasy-infused stories in Alien Virus Love Disaster will be new and delightful for our readers.” — Tim Pratt, Locus

“Taut, freaky, unsettling speculative fiction where actual aliens, viruses, love, and disaster abound. So do great sentences. This book feels like the future. All hail the new writer generation.” — Chelsey Johnson, The Millions

“Otis doesn’t use science fiction to lift the veil of the familiar and peer at what’s beneath. Instead, with great shrewdness and courage and originality, she reveals that the veil was itself an illusion, and the familiar a construct of anything but.” — Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, IGMS

“Many of the stories share an emphasis on physicality and embodiment, whether it be bodies distorted by alien environments or artifacts or people thrown into their own bodies through suffering at other, human hands. . . . highly recommended for anyone interested in weird fiction, sf, or just a breathtaking reading experience.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Abbey Mei Otis’s stories are incandescently dark, if you can imagine such a thing (but maybe only she can). Full of danger and strangeness, but written in carbonated and astounding prose that is all her own, these stories create worlds and will make you contemplate (and worry about) our own.” — Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“These are amazing, electric stories—you can feel the live wire sizzling in them from the first sentence, and you know you’re about to take a wild, unforgettable trip. Abbey Mei Otis is my favorite kind of writer: her worlds are uniquely strange yet eerily relatable, and she knows how to make you laugh and weep at the same time.” — Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

“Abbey Mei Otis deposits the reader in bargain bin worlds remaindered from the near futures of the more fortunate, worlds filled with space junk and toxic glitter, gel candy and gutted elk. These are stories for the many, for lovers and mourners, for those who want to split their minds from their bodies and those who know how to merge their organs in a single skin. In Alien Virus Love Disaster, language itself is in phase change. This book is a volatile, dangerous gift.” — Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan

“After I read this book, I woke up with bumpy, reddish growths along my spine. They burst, releasing marvels: aliens, robots, prefab houses, vinyl, chainlink, styrofoam, star stuff, tales from the edge of eviction, so many new worlds. Alien Virus Love Disaster is a super-intelligent infection. Let Abbey Mei Otis give you some lumps.” — Sofia Samatar, author of Tender

“The aliens have already arrived in ‘Blood Blood.’ Abbey Mei Otis has them visiting in a way we’ve seldom seen before in genre science-fiction: Not as hunters, conquerors or even ambassadors, but as wildlife observers. . . . As brilliant as this cosmos and narrative is, Otis also manages to supply rich characterizations. It’s a concept sci-fi piece that tries something new and succeeds on every level.” —Matt Funk, Full Stop

Cover art copyright © 2018 by Te Chao.

About the Author Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller and a firestarter raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. She studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX and the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and now teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her stories have recently appeared in journals including Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Barrelhouse, and Tor.com.

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The Invisible Valley

Tue 3 Apr 2018 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 400 pages · $16 · 9781618731456 | ebook · 9781618731463

A teenager working in a mountain encampment during the Chinese Cultural Revolution stumbles upon an ambiguous utopia.

World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2018

Read a bilingual excerpt on Samovar.

Read an excerpt

Lu Beiping is one of 20 million young adults the Chinese government uproots and sends far from their homes for agricultural re-education. And Lu is bored and exhausted. While he pines for romance, instead he’s caught up in a forbidden religious tradition and married off to the foreman’s long-dead daughter so that her soul may rest. The foreman then sends him off to cattle duty up on Mudkettle Mountain, far away from everyone else.

On the mountain, Lu meets an outcast polyamorous family led by a matriarch, Jade, and one of her lovers, Kingfisher. They are woodcutters and practice their own idiosyncratic faith by which they claim to placate the serpent-demon sleeping in the belly of the mountains. Just as the village authorities get wind of Lu’s dalliances with the woodcutters, a typhoon rips through the valley. And deep in the jungle, a giant serpent may be stirring.

The Invisible Valley is a lyrical fable about the shapes into which human affection can be pressed in extreme circumstances; about what is natural and what is truly deviant; about the relationships between the human and the natural, the human and the divine, the self and the other.

Watch: an excerpt from a video of Austin Woerner telling the story of his life in translation and his relationship with Su Wei at Duke Kunshan in Shanghai, China.

Praise for The Invisible Valley

“The Invisible Valley is an extraordinary novel. It opens, even to Chinese readers, the world of a southern hinterland, a world of rubber groves, mystery and superstition.  At the same time, the novel is intimately rooted in China’s modern history and resonates with universal implications. Austin Woerner’s vivid and supple translation has made it even more readable.”
— Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award

“Su Wei’s The Invisible Valley is a remarkable work, pungent, funny, and mind-widening. Austin Woerner’s translation is nearly invisible: it erases all barriers of strangeness and places the reader deep within a Chinese experience that comes to seem as familiar to us as our own daily round — if ours too had ghost brides and very big snakes.”
— John Crowley, author of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

“Su Wei’s The Invisible Valley is a rich romantic story told with sharp humor and filled with vivid descriptions of the lush, dense highlands of a remote Chinese tropical island. Translated with a light hand and subtle wit by Austin Woerner, the novel moves in quick graceful stages after its hapless young hero, Lu Beiping, discovers to his dismay that he’s been ghost-married to a dead girl. Bizarre folkways, rituals and superstitions abound, along with hints of a great serpent awakening. It’s a joy to read such a strange, wonderful tale by a Chinese master in this brisk and lucid translation.”
— Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum

“Su Wei’s remarkable novel The Invisible Valley has drawn praise in Chinese literary circles both inside and outside China. Su Wei belongs to the generation of Chinese writers who ‘went down to the countryside’ at the behest of Chairman Mao in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his novel was inspired by his personal experience in the wild, semi-tropical hills of Hainan Island in China’s far south.  The power of this natural background—typhoons, jungles, giant snakes, pungent odors, and more—pervades the work and melds into the vivid human characters that populate it.”
— Perry Link, Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Princeton University

Reviews

“The Invisible Valley is the product of a serendipitous encounter. It is a respectful portrait of real history, whose prose and storytelling give it a fantastical flourish. Su Wei’s challenging early life and Woerner’s pains-taking translation have resulted in a book that crosses that critical threshold where life is pushed to its limits.”
— Kevin McGeary, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Invisible Valley takes the reader along a journey full of mystery, magic, and political intrigue. The characters are full of nuance and contradiction, each keeping their own secrets. As each secret is revealed, the reader comes closer to understanding the larger picture. Combined with the balance between the natural and supernatural, this makes the novel interesting for any reader.”
— Amy Lantrip, World Literature Today

“There are books that you devour, slurping them up like thick stew, or a hearty noodle dish, because they’re so brilliant, so lulling in their language, yet so dense with events. So delicious. Invisible Valley is one such book.”
— Katya Kazbek, ABCInsane

“In The Invisible Valley, Su Wei asks us to broaden our definition of reality, as Lu does, in order to better understand the peoples and landscapes around us.” — SF in Translation

“In 1960s China, life takes a dramatic turn for 21-year-old Le Beiping immediately after he is tricked into entering a “ghost marriage” with Han, the dead daughter of the foreman from his reeducation group. Sent off to work as a cattle herder in a remote area called Mudkettle Mountain, Lu meets Jade, a woman in a free, loving community of “driftfolk,” who has three children by three different men in the community. Lu is soon adopted into the group and enjoys the contentedly nudist lifestyle of several individuals there. Based on the author’s own experiences, the story may surprise readers expecting a ghost story, but what comes to light at the end is more shocking and gritty than anticipated. The vernacular of the driftfolk, well translated by Woerner, recalls Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; obviously these characters are not in the mainstream.”
— Library Journal

“During China’s Cultural Revolution, Lu Beiping is sent down to a Hainan rubber plantation for reeducation. After being tricked into ghost-marrying the foreman’s dead daughter, he is sent to herd cattle outside the camp. In the mountain jungles, he can read forbidden books and meets a makeshift family of woodcutters who live on the edge of society, eking out a barely legal existence. A strict set of rules and laws on how to appease the local spirits govern their otherwise free-loving, carefree ways. When the details about Lu Beiping’s ghost bride’s death, the camp’s zealousness for Chairman Mao’s edicts, and the woodcutters’ lifestyle clash, the effect is more destructive than the typhoons that ravage the mountains. Although Wei’s tale lacks the magic realism of those by the renowned Chinese author Yan Lianke, readers will recognize the same ever-shifting ground as the memorable characters take the plot in unexpected directions. As an outsider, Lu Beiping (and by extension, the reader) finds himself constantly, if vaguely, aware that he is missing context and subtext. The truth slowly reveals itself in Wei’s lushly atmospheric and haunting novel.” — Jennifer Rothschild, Booklist Online

Previously

March 16, Shanghai Literary Festival
March 24, Macau Literary Festival
July 12, 7 p.m. Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA (with Su Wei) [Facebook]
July 25, 7 p.m. Asian American Writers’ Workshop, NYC (with Su Wei)
July 28 at 7 p.m. Elliot Bay Books, Seattle, WA

About the Author

Like many Chinese writers of his generation, Su Wei spent his teenage years being “re-educated” through farm labor in the countryside, working for ten years on a rubber plantation in the mountains of tropical Hainan Island. He is known for his nonfiction essays as well as for his highly imaginative novels, which are seen as unique in their treatment of the Cultural Revolution. He left China in 1989, and since 1997 he has taught Chinese language and literature at Yale University. The Invisible Valley is his first book to be translated into English.

Austin Woerner is a Chinese-English literary translator. His works include two volumes of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and Phoenix. He served as English translation editor for the innovative Chinese literary journal Chutzpah!, and co-edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah!: New Voices from China. He holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School.

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Ambiguity Machines

Tue 13 Feb 2018 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $16 · 9781618731432 | ebook · 9781618731425
February 2018 · Second printing: February 2019

Philip K. Dick Award finalist · Locus Recommended Reading List

Publishers Weekly

• Holiday Gift Guide: Fiction “A delicate touch and passionately humanist sensibilities sweep through this magnificent collection.”
• Top 10 SF, Fantasy & Horror Spring: “Physicist and SF author Singh’s first collection for U.S. readers is a spectacular assembly of work and not to be missed by fans of cutting-edge SF with a deeply human sensibility.”
• Starred review: “A perfect introduction to her work.”

B&N, Year’s Best Collections
“Combine scientific sharpness with quiet, lyrical power.”

Spectrum Culture, Favorite Books of 2018
“Brilliant. . . . Singh’s stories are acts of relentless ingenuity and reports of human yearning. . . . Her ambiguity machines grant dangerous wishes and that’s always the best kind of writing. It is the type of book that doesn’t just sit on the tomb of your bookcase once you’ve finished your first pass. It will leave a clear mark in the dust due to constant visitation.”

Nonfiction by Vandana
Tor.com: Beyond Hope and Despair Teaching Climate Change
Powell’s: Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future

Listen: Vandana Singh on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, as featured on Wired.
Listen: Vandana Singh on PW Radio with Rose Fox.
Read: Transcending Boundaries, an interview with Vandana Singh by Kylie Korsnack in Los Angeles Review of Books

Exploring the uncertainty with which we move through space and time, by ourselves and with others.

In her first North American collection, Vandana Singh’s deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. In “Requiem,” a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance.

Singh’s stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and often reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.

Praise for Ambiguity Machines:

“Singh defies expectation with every exquisite turn of phrase. She gives you strange, powerful visions that move the heart and challenge the mind.”
— Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Ranging in scale from the smallest life to far-ranging interplanetary adventures, and drawing upon both science and mythology, Vandana Singh’s stories are luminous and compassionate.”
— Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit

Table of Contents

With Fate Conspire
A Handful of Rice
Peripeteia
Life-pod
Oblivion: A Journey
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra
Are you Sannata3159?
Indra’s Web
Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
Sailing the Antarsa
Cry of the Kharchal [read on Clarkesworld]
Wake-Rider
Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
Requiem

Reviews

“Science fiction written by a scientist! These stories involve artificial intelligence, time travel, space travel, and more. It’s a fantastic collection about people navigating the unusual situations they find themselves in, whether by their own making or not.” — Liberty Hardy, Book Riot

“Vandana Singh’s poetic collection Ambiguity Machines: And Other Stories is as ambitious and cerebral as the various experiments her scientist characters embark on. The stories are full of the musings of these scientist-philosophers as they navigate relationships, grief and the space-time continuum — fitting, as Singh herself is a physicist. “A Handful of Rice,” told in the cadence of a biblical tale, explores the friendship of two men after one becomes a powerful king. “Are You Sannata 3159?” is like the darkest “Black Mirror” plot, about a young boy who follows his hunch that the new slaughterhouse that has brought jobs and food into town is more than it seems. “Ruminations of an Alien Tongue” is a trippy look at how people are connected across time and universes, how they remain familiar even as they change. There’s a wonderful discordance between the cool, reflective quality of Singh’s prose and the colorful imagery and powerful longing in her narratives. Singh’s final novella — exclusive to this collection — has no finality to it. It’s a new beginning.”
— Washington Post

“For all the book’s diversity, though, a few signal traits stand out. Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ms. Singh is drawn to scientists, and her speculative worlds are often fleshed out through field reports and research abstracts. . . . The capstone to this hopeful, enriching collection is the small masterpiece ‘Requiem,’ set in Alaska in a future scarred by climate change and dominated by massive tech corporations. A university student named Varsha has gone to a polar outpost to collect the effects of her aunt Rima, a brilliant scientist and engineer who died while researching whales. There Varsha witnesses a whale migration herself, and it’s this miraculous encounter amid the increasingly artificial world that reaffirms the ‘tenuous, temporal bridge between being and being.’ The more mechanized our future, Ms. Singh suggests, the more precious our connections with the living will be.”
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Through the complexities of physics and the wisdom of ancient stories, Singh breathes new life into the themes of loneliness, kinship, love, curiosity, and the thirst for knowledge. Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is a literary gift for us all.”
— Rachel Cordasco, World Literature Today

“Singh’s detailed explorations of far- and near-future tech are grounded in a feeling and therefore messy human quotidian. In ‘Peripeteia,’ for example, we learn that the physicist-narrator Sujata can see through matter, and perceive the flow of time, but her own understanding of these abilities is shaped by two recent experiences of personal loss. In ‘Indra’s Web,’ new technology brings hope, and is shown to depend entirely on vital, communal working relationships. It’s a wonderful collection, contemporary and clear-eyed.”
— Catherine Rockwood, Strange Horizons

“A major short story collection.”
— Jonathan Strahan, Locus

“An essential short fiction collection in a year that saw many good ones. Singh’s superb work has appeared in a wide range of venues, and it is good to have a representative selection in one place.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year), Locus

“Story, in fact, and how we are defined by it, is really Singh’s grand theme, and while her sophisticated narra­tive choreography may give some readers pause – since her tales often begin with classic SF tropes and then move elsewhere – it’s what makes her one of the most compelling and original voices in recent SF.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“Vandana Singh tells sci-fi stories that stray far from the norm. In her debut collection, residents of a future version of Earth build machines to look into the past and rediscover some lost part of their humanity; a self-aware lifepod floats through space carrying both human and alien passengers; and the Ministry of Abstract Engineering studies machines that battle loneliness through time travel and transmutation. Ambiguity Machines is a remarkable and thought-provoking collection.”
— Virginia Living Magazine

“The novella original to the collection, ‘Requiem,’ comes at the question of life, connection, and the near-future of our planet by putting Indian and Native Alaskan cultures into conversation among the backdrop of a rising tide of White Nationalism in America. Singh’s story of a woman coming to retrieve her much-beloved aunt’s personal and research materials from a far-north research facility is rich, dense, and balanced in its handling of grief as well as its argument about whales, humans, and the languages that can connect us all.”
— Lee Mandelo, Tor.com

“There is immense beauty and aching longing to be found in these stories. Singh’s gorgeous prose and high-concept ideas clasp hands like perfectly compatible lovers, putting her on par with some of our finest living writers of SFF and “literary” cross-genre short fiction, such as Ted Chiang and Carmen Maria Machado.”
— Indrapramit Das, Scroll.in

“The stories include a fair share of spaceships, slaughterhouses, nanoplagues and alien races, but with each one the author is trying to create an ambiguity machine that defies and blurs the usual narrative and genre structures. The messiness of the term experimentation doesn’t properly define what Singh has done with these stories. There’s a specificity to her genre bending that garners the readers trust. She is also a master of the captivating first sentence, a talent that caused those feelings of love reported above, who trusts her audience to follow her fierce imagination with minimal expository guideposts. As a teacher of physics she is undoubtedly adept at communicating big ideas with ease and clarity, but how she does so in prose is a wonder. Aspiring writers should consider this collection a conceptual space they need to map and dissect to improve their craft.”
— Don Kelly, Spectrum Culture

“Singh is laying the groundwork attempt to re-write the plots of Chosen Ones, dystopian governments, and self-actualizing hero tropes common to Western literature, where the quest for “the meaning of life” is often seeking a single endpoint, an origin. Singh’s characters wish only to know for the sake of knowing. Life isn’t defined by linear time, it is the richness of experience.”
— Aerogram

“Singh often makes even weird science concepts sound like beautiful poetry. The most engaging aspect of this book is her own widely-ranging and visionary imagination, where she merges eastern and western tropes and traditions and even blurs the lines between genres and narrative styles.”
— PopMatters

“Singh’s compassionate imagination and storytelling talents are here clearly on display.”
— Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Intergalactic Medicine Show

“Exhibiting Ursula K. Le Guin’s prescription for hard times, the voice of this visionary writer explores alternative ways to live and offers hope, joining other ‘realists of a larger reality.’ The takeaway from Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is: We are all story. Vandana Singh underscores the ultimate point that stories make the world and the universe has a place for all of them.”
— Lanie Tankard, Woven Tale Press

“A delicate touch and passionately humanist sensibilities sweep through this magnificent collection, which ranges from the near future of our world to eras far away in space and time. Highlights include “With Fate Conspire,” in which Gargi, taken from slum life because of her ability to use a device which lets her look through time, has more power to influence history than the scientists around her suspect; “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” about an 11th-century Indian poet who has become the companion of a spacefaring folklorist; and “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination,” a story in the form of a test that pushes the limits of narrative by trying to define what is not possible rather than what is. The short piece “Indra’s Web” is more interested in depicting its solar-powered utopia than in plot or characterization, but in general this collection is full of risky experiments that turn out beautifully: colorful, emotionally resonant, and consistently entertaining. Refreshingly for this flavor of SF, the protagonists are often bright, passionate women in middle life, driven by some kind of art or science or cause and in no way defined by their relationships with men. Those not familiar with physicist and SF author Singh (Younguncle Comes to Town) will find this a perfect introduction to her work.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In ‘Wake Rider,’ a young woman faces death in different forms as she also contemplates the possibilities of her life. In ‘Oblivion: A Journey,’ a long-held need for revenge keeps the protagonist striving for life beyond death until the realization sets in that mortality may be the only relief. The heroine of ‘Requiem’ travels to Alaska a year after her aunt’s disappearance, seeking answers. All of the stories here feature characters who are trying to discover the nature of their existence and how their lives connect others. VERDICT Rising star Singh draws on her Indian roots and physics background to bring her first North American collection to readers. Admirers of literary sf will want to read this.”
— Library Journal

“The best science fiction requires a protagonist who normalizes the fantastic to tell their story. Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories achieves this and more, with a bold collection of stories about fate, worth, and inner magic. . . . From plot to setting to payoff, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is a marked achievement in science fiction.”
— Foreword Reviews

“Reading a Vandana Singh story is a bit like finding a new window in a familiar room, opening the blinds, and being astonished at the richness and beauty of the light streaming in: often, they show us the familiar, but illuminated strangely. Singh is both a physicist and a writer, and her stories combine scientific sharpness with quiet, lyrical power. She makes constant connections between history, the present, and the future; humans and nature; space and Earth. An old woman travels back in time in search of ancient poetry. A man tries to achieve immortality. A human looks for revenge against a machine by trying to find its true name. An engineering exam that considers the classification of three new types of machine life. In every story, she brings big, fantastically speculative ideas so close, it feels as if you can reach out and touch the worlds they inhabit.”
— Joel Cunningham, B&N, Favorite Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018

Reviews of Vandana Singh’s stories:

“A most promising and original young writer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Lovely! What a pleasure this book is . . . full of warmth, compassion, affection, high comedy and low.”
― Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses

“Vandana Singh’s radiant protagonist is a planet unto herself.”
― Village Voice

“Sweeping starscapes and daring cosmology that make Singh a worthy heir to Cordwainer Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.”
― Chris Moriarty, Fantasy & Science Fiction

“I’m looking forward to the collection . . . everything I’ve read has impressed me.”
—Niall Harrison, Vector

“Opulent space opera . . . literate and compelling.”
— Locus

“The first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world … she writes with such a beguiling touch of the strange.” —Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard

“I read the story again because of the artist and mathematician, and those moments of quiet pathos. In rereading, I became conscious of the tensions between the introduction and the vignettes. There is, first of all, the obvious tension between the standardized answers of an exam and the profligate forms of emotion and experience, typically left out of the simple rights and wrongs of institutionalized knowledge. But “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” also contains a strong, deliberate tension between “possible” and “impossible,” those dual realms which the fantastic stitches together. According to one hoary perspective, the impossible — and, by extension, fantasy — is false. Back before there was even a genre called fantasy, Tolkien and Lewis were defending the inherent truth of the unreal against naysayers. Personally, I am less interested in inherent truth than I am in the relationships between truth, untruth, speaker, and listener. I’d hazard a guess that Singh is, too. . . . For readers who love the friction of contradictions, ‘Ambiguity Machines: An Examination’ offers so much more than what is described here. Each reading offers new strings, tightened and tuned, far more than I have had time to strum.”
— Sessily Watt, Bookslut

“Echoing Le Guin to some extent, Singh follows Anasuya, who has a visceral ability to understand mathematics, as she helps visitors from a distant planet… It’s a complex setup, hinting at quite a fascinating galactic backstory.”
— Rich Horton, Locus

“Singh writes with a beautiful clarity. Each character is sharply drawn, and the inevitability of the story pulls the reader headlong with it—helped by a compelling sparseness of prose. . . . It is the best short fiction, and possibly the best fiction, I have read this year.”
— Michael Fay, The Fix

“[A] subtle tale of possession, humanity, and history that is compelling to read and written with a great sensitivity to language and detail. Singh combines a few different SF concepts in a rich and vital story, one that succeeds at provoking thought by creating multifaceted characters and situations.”
— Matthew Cheney, SF Site

“Singh plays with expectation versus reality, and the notion that reality simply can’t contain some people – or some machines – they will always want more. Singh builds an intriguing pattern of repeated images woven through the story – stones and tiles and individuals out of synch with the world around them. These repetitions make the story itself a machine, a delicate network of circuitry made up of interweaving lives. There’s a hint of the mythic as well. What is literal and what is metaphor can’t be trusted. The machines here are the memory and face of loved one left behind, a courtyard that separates lovers through a walked pattern, a device that slips an entire group of people out of phase with the world. Themes of impermanence and loss run through the tales, but there’s beauty as well. A message that could be taken from the story is that our desires may never be fulfilled, but that it isn’t a tragedy, unless we make it one. It’s part of what makes life worth living, not resting easy, but following the drive to turn one more corner and find out what happens next.”
— A. C. Wise, SF Signal

“Some day, Vandana Singh’s going to write that novel, put out that story collection. There may not be dollar signs winking around the book to signify its importance, but read it . . . simply because she writes with such a beguiling touch of strange.”
— Nilanjana S. Roy

Vandana Singh was born and raised mostly in New Delhi, India and currently lives in the United States near Boston, where she professes physics and writes. Her short stories have appeared in numerous venues and several Best of Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and she is a recipient of the Carl Brandon Parallax award. She is the author of the ALA Notable book Younguncle Comes to Town and a previous short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (Zubaan, Penguin India).

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Telling the Map

Tue 11 Jul 2017 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 264 pages · $16 · 9781618731326 | ebook · 9781618731333

Finalist for the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award

Stories that sometimes begin in the hills of Kentucky and head out into complicated and sometimes hopeful futures.

“Precision was his watchword and his sacrament.”

There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novella “The Border State” Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded story “The Voluntary State.” Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the border . . . into Tennessee.

Read an excerpt from “The Border State.”

Reviews & Previews

“Christopher Rowe’s new book of stories, “Telling the Map,” (Small Beer Press, $16), features Kentucky and Tennessee — just not the way you know them. They’re the Kentucky and Tennessee you know, geographically speaking — but they’re also places of strange occurrences, bizarre histories and technology that seems to permeate the very air molecules.”
— Lexington Herald-Leader

“It is no accident that Christopher Rowe dedicates his first story collection Telling the Map to fellow Kentuckians Terry Bisson and Jack Womack. It’s also no accident that Rowe, on the basis of no more than a couple of dozen stories over nearly 20 years (of which 10 are collected here), managed to gain a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from this period. This is not only because he writes with lyricism and great precision of style, but because of his firm geographical grounding, which is reflected in all the stories here (as well as in his title), but is a key factor in several (‘Another Word for Map is Faith,’ ‘The Voluntary State,’ ‘The Border State’). This isn’t the geography of fake world-building, with all those Forbidden Zones and Misty Mountains, but rather the geography of locals who measure distances between towns in hours rather than miles, and who know which bridges you’ll need to cross to get there. It’s also a world in which agriculture and religion are daily behaviors rather than monolithic institutions. As weird as Tennessee gets in Rowe’s most famous story, ‘‘The Voluntary State’’ (and that is very weird) it’s a Tennessee we can map onto the trails and highways that are there now.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“[T]here is one other consistent thread running through the entirety of the collection, and that is setting. In Telling the Map, Rowe has rendered Kentucky over and over again with a lush, loving, bone-deep accuracy—one that startled and thrilled me so thoroughly, as a fellow native son, that I had to read the book through twice to begin to form a critical opinion. . . . Across these stories, the drive to achieve and to exceed is a common factor. . . . Overall, though, this was a stellar set of stories that mesh well together. . . . Truly, Rowe’s skill at shifting the weirdness of the Appalachian South—the odd border state that Kentucky is—to a magic realist or scientifically fantastical future is singular and impressive. The result for a native reader is a feeling akin to awe, or perhaps just homecoming, but I suspect the result wouldn’t differ much for an unfamiliar audience either. If anything, the depth and breadth of comfort with a not-often-accessed culture and setting makes these stories fresh and engaging. It’s home for me; it might be a provocative unexplored landscape for someone else—but regardless, Rowe’s facility with language, description, and emotional arcs makes for a solid, intentional, and satisfying collection of short fiction.”
— Lee Mandelo, Tor.com

“Though most of the stories in Christopher Rowe’s new collection Telling the Map are SF, its cover is reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s weirdly off-kilter illustrations for disturbingly dark children’s books. That cognitive dissonance is a perfect replication of Rowe’s style: in “The Border State,” long-awaited sequel to his acclaimed 2004 story “The Voluntary State,” Rowe pits hymn-singing, bicycle-racing teens against a nanotech-wielding rogue AI; in “Another Word for Map Is Faith,” earnest Christians remake the world in the image of holy maps — with deadly consequences. Delightfully strange, these ten stories transport readers to futures full of sentient cars pining for their owners, automated horses, and tomatoes grown to give blood transfusions — an odd and interesting and deceptively bucolic setting for the narration of some astonishing events.”
— Nisi Shawl, Seattle Review of Books

“Science fiction isn’t always about futuristic cities, as Christopher Rowe reminds us in the complex and inventive stories that make up Telling the Map, his first collection, which often take place in rural Kentucky or Tennessee. But there’s nothing rustic about Rowe’s most famous story, ‘The Voluntary State,’ set in a Tennessee ruled by an artificial intelligence that has radically altered the environment through nanotechology. Police robots appear on flying bicycles, cars have personalities and try to repair themselves, and telephones literally chase you. A story new to the collection, ‘The Border State,’ explains something of how this world came about. It’s more traditional in form, concerning a brother and sister entering a Tour de France-style bicycle race through this transformed landscape.
“One of the best stories, ‘The Contrary Gardener,’ involves the Kentucky Derby. When the title character, a girl skilled at growing vegetables, gets a ticket from her father, she soon finds herself caught up in corporate conspiracies and emerging artificial intelligences. Another story, ‘The Force Acting on the Displaced Body,’ recalls the tall-tale traditions of the mid-South, describing a wine enthusiast who saves up enough corks to build a boat for a journey from his local creek all the way to Paris. Rowe is endlessly inventive in presenting us worlds that are often dystopian, sometimes funny, but always original — and completely his own.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

io9.com: Must Read SF&F for July · Chicago Review of Books: 12 Books You Should Definitely Read This July

“Christopher Rowe’s new collection of short fiction contains ten explorations of the surreal and the fantastical. Rowe also adds a regional dimension into his work, and volleys out questions of place, of borders, and of family along the way–a thematically rich approach to storytelling.”
— Vol 1 Brooklyn

“Christopher Rowe is unique voice in science fiction, and this collection provides an excellent survey of his work. He engages with some familiar themes, such as ecological catastrophe and prejudice, but also themes that see less exploration in other genre works. In particular, he has a refreshingly original and nuanced take on faith, a comparative rarity. If you are looking for beautifully written, thoughtful science fiction that cares as much about characters as ideas, then Rowe will not disappoint.” — SF Revu

“In his inventive debut collection, Rowe bends the world we know, remaking regions of the southern United States. Appalachian settings, recurring characters, and dystopian themes of societal degradation link the stories. . . . Wild creativity, haunting imagery, and lyricism—as displayed in “Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms”—urge readers forward . . . an immersive and original reading experience.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A clutch of complex, persuasive visions of an alternative South.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“A visionary writer known for writing haunting prose about people and societies with haunting problems.”
— Elizabeth Bear, author of Karen Memory

“Christopher Rowe is among my favorite authors. He writes a wild story, but his particular brand of weird is shot through with warmth and humor. His voice is addictive, his worlds astonishing. His tales lift your spirit, always needed but now in particular.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Extraordinary and subtle stories rooted in landscapes — real and imagined — that Christopher Rowe has charted with a telling eye and a sure hand.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Table of Contents

The Contrary Gardener
Another Word For Map is Faith [listen]
Jack of Coins
The Unveiling
Nowhere Fast
Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms
Gather
The Force Acting On the Displaced Body
The Border State [excerpt]
The Voluntary State

Reviews of Christopher Rowe’s stories

“Rowe’s vision of an American South, hauntingly different from the one we know, begins with an artist sketching what appear to be children floating in a body of water. But as the inhabitants of this alternate reality know, the convincing cherubs that kick and struggle in the surf are not really children at all, but highly sophisticated decoys used by submerged predators. They are ‘nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.’
Rowe intends this scene, and its suggestion of swimmers enticed to their deaths by a Spielbergian impulse to save youth at all costs, to be taken literally. But as a metaphor, it is an extremely potent representation of the science-fiction and fantasy community’s complicated relationship with the idea of nostalgia — a dynamic simultaneously defined by an inextinguishable yearning to search for lost time, and by an eternal vigilance for the dangers that even a quick glance in the rearview mirror can pose to forward-looking genres.”
— Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review

“Imagery, actually, is Rowe’s great talent, and he keeps refining it — witness ‘The Force Acting on the Displaced Body’, which is a model of what an imaginative writer can accomplish.” — Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus

“Wonderfully weird and challenging; always a half-step ahead of my complete understanding of what was really going on…. Fascinating imagery (like the flying Tennessee Highway Patrolmen) and high-concept ideas (like mind-control and sentient cars) made this story seem fresh and filled with a sense of wonder.” — SF Signal

“Rowe’s stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter’s night when the fire starts burning low. Terrific.”
— Justina Robson, author of Glorious Angels

“As good as he is now, he’ll keep getting better. Read these excellent stories, and see what I mean.”
— Jack Womack, author of Going, Going, Gone

“If you’ve read and enjoyed any speculative fiction, then you probably come across Rowe’s great short stories.”
— Guyslitwire

“… an archetypically Southern viewpoint on life’s mysteries, a worldview that admits marvels in the most common of circumstances and narrates those unreal intrusions in a kind of downhome manner that belies real sophistication.”
— Asimov’s

“As smooth and heady as good Kentucky bourbon.” — Locus

Events

July 11, 2017: Launch Party, Joseph Beth Booksellers, Lexington, KY
Nov. 2-5: World Fantasy Convention, San Antonio, TX

Christopher Rowe  (@ChristopherRowe) has published a couple of dozen short stories, and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, praised by the New York Times Book Review, and long listed in the Best American Short Stories. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writer’s Studio and works at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. Rowe and his wife Gwenda Bond co-write the Supernormal Sleuthing Series for children, and reside in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky.

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The Bodies of the Ancients

Tue 21 Feb 2017 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade cloth · 266 pages · $16.95 · 9781618731289 | ebook · 9781618731296

The Final Dissenters Novel

The Sykes family is faced with revelations from without and within. Whatever happens: nothing will ever be the same again.

How well do you know your family? In the third and final installment in the thrilling Dissenters series, the Sykes family are hoping to enjoy a normal Cape Cod summer. But there are strong and surprising forces lined up against them and there will be unexpected revelations and the highest price will have to be paid.

Cara and her two brothers are hoping life will be a bit calmer now that their mother has come home. No such luck.

Reviews

“Children, adults, and myriad creatures fight the final battle in a war over climate change…. genrewise, the book completely fuses science fiction with fantasy…. relationships are tender. Memorably unusual.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Boston-born novelist Lydia Millet has racked up some serious recognition for her adult books, including the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction for My Happy Life, also a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her 2009 novel Love in Infant Monkeys.
“In more recent years, Millet, now living in Arizona, has turned to Young Adult fiction. In an eco-fantasy trilogy known as the “Dissenters” series, three siblings — two teens and their younger brother — search for their shapeshifting mother, who has disappeared fighting evil forces that are worsening climate change to try and remake the planet to their liking.
“The series, set in Cape Cod, is published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton.
“In The Bodies of the Ancients, the trilogy’s final book, Cara and her older brother, Max, are momentarily relieved when their mother returns. But new trouble looms: the head evil creature, ‘The Cold One,’ takes over a U.S. Navy submarine and threatens to use its nuclear missiles to destroy vents on the Atlantic floor that would release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
“Battling back are a host of fantastical creatures as well as the three siblings and their mother. Cara, the middle sister, has the ability to “summon,” or see distant places, while her younger brother, Jax, can control others, read minds, even enter the internet with his mind.
“Along with their mother, the three siblings will have to use all their resources to win this final battle against climate change.”
— Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette

Praise for Lydia Millet’s Dissenters Series:

“Millet’s prose is lyrically evocative (“the rhythmic scoop and splash of their paddles”). A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series.”
— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“A thoughtful and thought-provoking beginning to a new fantasy series. The Cape Cod woods, wildlife, and beaches are depicted with loving detail, and the dark forces arrayed against the young protagonists are at once tantalizingly mystifying and alarmingly timely.”
— Patricia McKillip

“Lydia Millet knows the sea like a selkie. The Fires Beneath the Sea smells of salt and tastes of mist, and that beauty speaks as strongly as its story of peril and hope for the future of our fragile world.”
— Kathe Koja (author of Talk)

“Readers will want to leave the lights on well after finishing this book as the detail depicted will create similarities in your mind to Clive Barker’s Abarat books. Readers will likely want Cara on their team as they jump, like Alice down the rabbit hole, through the guide book that turns into a window through another world.” — VOYA

Cover by Sharon McGill.

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of many novels for adult readers, including My Happy Life, which won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction in 2003, and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, about the scientists who designed the first atomic bomb, which was shortlisted for the UK’s Arthur C. Clarke Prize. She has also written three books for children in her Dissenters series. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Arizona and now works as a writer and editor at an endangered-species protection group called the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Best Worst American

Tue 14 Feb 2017 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 200 pages · $16 · 9781618731241 | ebook · 9781618731258

Imaginary countries. Real countries. The best and worst of both in short, cutting, refreshing stories.

Winner of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction (video)
Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction of 2017

Read an Interview: The Rumpus

These are the best Americans, the worst Americans. In these stories (these cities, these people) there are labyrinths, rivers, wildernesses. Voices sound slightly different than expected. There’s humor, but it’s going to hurt.

In “On Paradise,” a petshop manager flies with his cat to Las Vegas to meet his long-lost mother and grandmother, only to find that the women look exactly like they did forty years before. In “The Spooky Japanese Girl is There For You,” the spooky Japanese girl (a ghost) is there for you, then she is not.

These refreshing and invigorating stories of displacement, exile, and identity, of men who find themselves confused by the presence or absence of extraordinary women, jump up, demand to be read, and send the reader back to the earth changed: reminded from these short stories how big the world is.

Nate Corddry read “Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote” on Selected Shorts.
Cristin Milioti read “Best Worst American” on Selected Shorts.

Interviews

Supermarkets, Capes, and Secret Societies: Vol. 1 Brooklyn

New City Lit Interview: Obsessed with the Impossible

Read

Research Notes on Necessary Fiction.

Reviews & Praise for Juan Martinez’s stories:

“In his longest and best stories, Martinez mines both the small details and the large absurdities of life to show us our own strange world in a new way.”
— Lincoln Michel, New York Times Book Review

“What a short story collection! Martinez takes us across the country (and possible countries) in these brisk tales that range from sci-fi and horror to realism and metafiction.” —Adam Morgan, “The Best Fiction Books of 2017 So Far,” Chicago Review of Books

“Best Worst American will draw in readers looking for a hit of everything they never knew they wanted, whether it’s whimsical reflections on whether dolphins are bigger jerks, in the grand scheme, than the lead singers of rock bands, depictions of the romantic failures of professional lawn mowers, or even rants on the rarely-considered concept of hobbledehoydom.
“Entering Martinez’s sphere of influence with optimism: you will emerge changed by his imagination, ready to see the world in a different light.”
— A. M. Dellamonica, Tor.com

“Weirdness builds upon delectable weirdness throughout the whole book.”
— Nisi Shawl, Seattle Review of Books

“In a podcast conversation about this book’s title story, Israeli writer Etgar Keret praises the suspense Martinez builds by packing scenes with high emotion while withholding information from the reader. This disorienting energy infuses many of the two-dozen short stories collected here, including “Roadblock,” which opens with a pyromaniac aunt and a series of suspicious airplane accidents. Martinez parlays this odd sense of estrangement and tension into subtle, absurd humor. In “Well Tended,” the narrator finds himself caring for a missing neighbor’s houseplants, and he winds up alone in a room with them, watering can in hand, with the ridiculous sensation of being ignored by the plants. Other stories are more bluntly funny, like “Your Significant Other’s Kitten Poster,” which deciphers the contents of innocuous wall hangings and closes with a hilariously violent encounter with a professor in a pool hall. Throughout, Martinez reimagines urban landscapes like Orlando as hellish and spectacular, “lakes afire with reflected light,” and the “aggressively ethnic streets of Culver City.” In his idiosyncratic approach to fiction, Martinez delivers truly new ways to read the world.”
— Booklist

“Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American is a set of subtly connected, hilariously smart stories that present a chaotic, absurd, yet strikingly familiar world.”
— The Arkansas International

“A master of the absurd who serves up contemporary American life in rare, blistering slices.”
— Kelly Link, Get in Trouble

“Twenty-four semiexistential short stories that have appeared in the likes of McSweeney’s and Selected Shorts from Colombia-born writer Martinez. The author has an interesting way of injecting absurdity into everyday life and humor into the phantasmagorical in this wide-ranging, mostly engaging collection of tall tales. . . . there are also occasional moments of grace. . . . Some are just flat-out funny. . . . Martinez even makes the frightening funny. . . . promising debut collection of short stories, some unique in their execution.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“These 24 wide-ranging stories are the gut-punch kind: intense, innovative tales that skew your vision for the rest of the day. Martinez writes with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue, and his characters — often alone and unloved, often haunted — are worthy observers of both the horrors and wonders of this world.”
— Rebecca Makkai, Music for Wartime

“I feel sure that some smart and appreciative person will praise Juan Martinez for his ‘skewed vision,’ but Martinez’s view of the world is startlingly clear. It’s just that the rest of us haven’t caught up yet. Deep and comic and deeply comic, his is a collection of wonders for any human to enjoy.”—Jack Pendarvis

“Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American is filled with droll, cunning, funny, and formally innovative stories that fall somewhere between stand-up comedy and literary fiction. These excellent works mark him as a writer both to read and watch.”
— Tom Bissell

“A little out of the ordinary…. He takes this very unnatural environment and changes it into a landscape.”
— Hannah Tinti

“I loved it.”
— Etgar Keret

Table of Contents

Roadblock
Strangers on Vacation: Snapshots
Machulín In L.A.
On Paradise
Domokun in Fremont
The Women Who Talk To Themselves
Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote
Your Significant Other’s Kitten Poster
Well Tended
Souvenirs from Ganymede
The Coca-Cola Executive in the Zapatoca Outhouse
Correspondences between the Lower World and Old Men in Pinstripe Suits
The Lead Singer Is Distracting Me
Errands
Liner Notes for Renegade, the Opening Sequence
Hobbledehoydom
My Sister’s Knees
The Spooky Japanese Girl Is There For You
Big Wheel, Boiling Hot
After The End Of The World: A Capsule Review
Debtor
Forsaken, the Crew Awaited News from the People Below
Northern
Best Worst American

About the Author

Juan Martinez was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. He now lives in Chicago with his wife, the writer Sarah Kokernot, and their son and two cats. He’s an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work and has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, Huizache, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, the Cossack Review, the Santa Monica Review, National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts, Norton’s Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere. Visit and say hi at fulmerford.com.

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The Winged Histories

Tue 15 Mar 2016 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

March 15, 2016 · trade cloth · 337 pages · $24 · 9781618731142 | ebook · 9781618731159
April 11, 2017 · trade paperback · 337 pages · $16 · 9781618731371

Best Books of the year: NPR
Locus Award finalist
Rights sold: Poland (MAG); India (Juggernaut Books); and Japan (Tokyo Sogensha).

NPR, Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade: The Olondria Series

“‘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.'”

Using the sword, pen, body, and voice, four women confront a rebellion and the older, stranger threat behind it.

Four women—a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite—are caught up on opposing sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their loyalties and agendas and ideologies come into conflict, the four fear their lives may pass unrecorded. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.

Here is the much-anticipated companion novel to Sofia Samatar’s World Fantasy Award-winning debut, A Stranger in Olondria. The Winged Histories is the saga of an empire—and a family: their friendships, their enduring love, their arcane and deadly secrets. Samatar asks who makes history, who endures it, and how the turbulence of historical change sweeps over every aspect of a life and over everyone, no matter whether or not they choose to seek it out.

Interviews

David Naimon and Sofia Samatar chat about The Winged Histories on the Between the Covers podcast.
“Why Read Fantasy?” interview on Bookslinger by Cassidy Foust
Los Angeles Times interview by Lilliam Rivera.
Mahvesh Murad interviews Sofia for the Midnight in Karachi podcast.
Weird Sister interview by Katie Heng.
Podcast interview: SF Signal.

More

“On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer” on LitHub.
Kirkus Feature, “Who Tells Your Story” by Ana Grilo: “A hopeful and beautiful story of tragedy and war.”
Read the first chapter on Tor.com.
28 Books to Read in 2016: The Week.

Reviews

“It is dazzlingly beautiful and as close to perfect as a reader can hope. . . . The Winged Histories is one of the finest fantasy novels of 2016, or any year.”
— Jane Franklin, Rain Taxi

“Samatar’s second novel’s lyrical and gorgeous prose explores the lives of four very different women caught up in the brutality of war.”
— Recommendations from the Booksmith in the San Francisco Chronicle

“Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences. . . . The Winged Histories is a fantasy novel for those who take their sentences with the same slow, unfolding beauty as a cup of jasmine tea, and for adventurers like Tav, who are willing to charge ahead into the unknown.”
— Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“All of it is harrowing — and written in such heart-stoppingly beautiful language there’s a good chance readers will ignore the plot and spend a few hours just chewing on the words, slowly, to draw out the flavor. Then they’ll need to read it again. Fortunately, this is a short book; also fortunately, there’s a lot of novel packed into relatively few pages. A highly recommended indulgence.”
— N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review

“The lush syntax is often so spellbinding that entire paragraphs demand an immediate re-read, and the plot map follows tributaries as often as the river itself. Rhythmically, it varies between traditional fantasy fiction and a sort of poetic prose. Samatar’s women are realistically flawed, and the storylines have intentionally frayed edges and visible brutalities and, of course, monsters and magic. Based on just a first read of this lyrical work, Samatar’s fascination with language and the human condition is very apparent, and perhaps even contagious. Excerpts of in-world books and songs, plus an intricate family tree and glossary, help transform this fantasy into a world so real that when the book ends, Olondria becomes a red balloon, ever-present but just out of reach. For every moment of power and adrenaline, an equally crushing or lovely or strange occurrence is offered. But then, such is war, and life.”
— Jessi Cape, Austin Chronicle

“Throughout it all, Samatar ponders weighty questions. “What is the difference between a king and a monster?” Tialon asks; “What is music?” wonders Seren. But Histories isn’t a book about easy answers, any more than it’s driven by plot. It’s circuitous and hypnotic, told through flashbacks, meditations, and stories within stories. Tialon pores over a history book written by her aunt; Seren sifts through the traditional songs she sings. Rather than being distractions, these nested texts ring with lyricism.
“At the same time, they underscore one of Samatar’s profound themes: how words make us, every bit as much as we make them. At one point Seren,  waxing philosophical about the distinction between sorcery and literacy in Olondria, says that writing is “like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more.” Accordingly, Samatar carries a great deal with her in the pages of The Winged Histories: beauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story.”
— Jason Heller, NPR

“Told by four different women, it is a story of war; not epic battles of good and evil, but the attempt to make things right and the realities of violence wielded by one human against another, by one group against another. It’s about the aftermath of war, in which some things are better but others are worse. Above all, it’s a story about love—the terrible love that tears lives apart. Doomed love; impossible love; love that requires a rewriting of the rules, be it for a country, a person, or a story.”
— Jenn Northington, Tor.com

“An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.”
— Hello Beautiful

“This book. This perfect book.” — Amal El-Mohtar, Lightspeed

“If you think Samatar has the ear and soul of a poet, you will love this book. . . . If One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, are favorites of yours, you will love how Samatar shows us a rebellion and a civil war through the lens of a central family. Each of the viewpoint characters (there are four main ones) brings not only a different perspective, but new information about a prince’s attempted coup and a warrior’s attempt to free her nation… or the rise of the Priest of the Stone. . . . If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language and can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, then read The Winged Histories.”
— Marion Deeds, Fantasy Literature

“I wouldn’t normally taunt you with a book you can’t have for two months, but this time is different, ok? Because the book in question is a sequel, which means you have time to go and read A Stranger in Olondria, and then be ready for Winged Histories in all its glorious glory. In Olondria, Samatar built us a beautiful fantasy world, full of diverse peoples and customs, gorgeous landscapes, and a dark undercurrent. Our guide to Olondria, Jevick, found himself caught up in the midst of a troubled political situation, in a country on the brink of war. In Winged Histories, we see that war from four perspectives. And, god, what perspectives they are. Samatar has created characters that you will carry around with you for weeks (months?). If you love strong voices, world-building, and books that tell hard truths with beautiful language, these are for you.” — Jenn Northington, Book Riot

“Samatar’s use of poetic yet unpretentious language makes her one of the best writers of today. Reading her books is like sipping very rich mulled wine. The worldbuilding and characterization is exquisite. This suspenseful and elegiac book discusses the lives of fictional women in a fantasy setting who fear their histories will be lost in a way that is only too resonant with the hidden histories of women in our own age.” — Romantic Times Book Reviews (4.5/5 stars, Top Pick)

“The Winged Histories is a saga, all right, focusing largely on a single family, but its prose, while characteristically graceful and evocative and often stunningly beautiful.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

“It is obviously not coincidental that Samatar’s narrators are all women: The Winged Histories addresses that which is so often elided in conventional fantasy novels – the absence of women, or at best, the limited roles available to women. If Lord of the Rings shows us only privileged women, able to disguise themselves in order to fight, or else to remain sequestered from the grubbiness of war, Samatar’s women have to deal with the effects of war head on, because in their various ways they are all involved. While it may be true that Tavis presumes on her status in order to learn to fight, she is nonetheless part of a sustained military campaign, and all that entails. Likewise, she and Siski have always been aware of their significance as nieces of Olondria’s ruler, the Telkan, thanks to their aunt, Mardith, who seeks to gain power through matchmaking. However, through Seren and Tialon we see women who are nominally reliant on men in order to survive, and the ways in which they negotiate survival in a world that is rapidly changing. . . . And still there is more to be said about The Winged Histories and its predecessor. Thoughts and notes piled up as I read on, and I reached the end wanting nothing so much as to return to the beginning and start all over again. Samatar’s work really benefits from rereading, which is more than can be said for a lot of contemporary novels. This is a very satisfying novel to read, challenging and troubling too, as the very best fiction ought to be.”
— Maureen Kincaid Speller, Interzone, 265

“Tav, a teenage girl from the House of Telkan, ‘the most exalted bloodline’ in Olondria, has run away to become a swordmaiden in the army. As she fights alongside the men, she realizes the war is a distraction while the ruling branch of her family subjugates her native kingdom, Kestenya, and surrounding territories. . . . Samatar is a writer of uncommon beauty, and she takes a genre that has historically tended to focus on the heroic exploits of men and shows how those exploits involve and affect women. This novel teaches us the importance of giving voice to experience and bearing witness; as one character says, writing is less about words than ‘how we are written into one another. How this is history.’ A lyrical immersion into a finely wrought world.” — Kirkus Reviews

“In 2013 Sophia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria introduced us to new world described with such poetic verve that is has since become a living classic of fantasy fiction. With her new book, The Winged Histories, Samatar’s great storytelling talent and wickedly beautiful prose takes us to an Olondria wracked by war. Despite this bloody and turbulent time, four women will have their voices resonate above the fray. Their stories and the stories they tell themselves are vivid portraits of women willing to challenge the conventional and fighting in myriad ways to be remembered. Samatar’s creative use of a section titled “A Common History” unites the voices of these women to unrelated yet connected people or events which adds an emotive depth to the story. She also includes a richly imagined mythology that is shared by the characters, a scintillating vein of ideas bringing such beauty and darkness, but that helps us understand unearthly changes need to be embraced, despite our fears, in order to be truly free.”
— Raul M. Chapa, BookPeople, Austin, TX

“Can I smear tears on a piece of paper and call that a review? This was GORGEOUS and emotionally bruising and so so wonderful and engaging and many other perfect words. There is so much world-building, a fascinating mythology, and beautiful language (I’m trying not to yell about Seren’s little language lessons). There are amazing epigraphs, which I’m always a huge fan of. Samatar winds the stories of four very different women through a monumental period of Olondrian history, and it’s one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in the last year. Poetic and bloody, lovely and dark, this is a book to be SAVORED, and I will be re-reading it again soon, at a much slower pace.”
— Allison Senecal, Book Shop of Fort Collins

“Sofia Samatar’s work is a revelation. Her prose has only become richer and more assured between her debut novel and this follow-up. The Winged Histories gives the stories of four women whose stories are linked by the events that shape them (and that they help to shape). The contexts of the complicated class and national histories the inform these women is described in such clear detail that I feel that I know them all, their histories and their inner realities. Amazing, incredible, lush, emotionally rich, politically fascinating, this is one of the most satisfying novels I have picked up in ages. It begs the reader in each moment to consider how histories are created, and the costs and inequalities behind how we all must fight to be a part of history, however it gets written.”
— Gretchen Treu, A Room of One’s Own, Madison, WI

“Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. Samatar’s writing strongly recalls Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy, which reads like historical fiction, but there are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Advance Readers

“A nuanced and subtle tale of war, love, duty, family, and honor. It’s like polyphony—a chorus of voices singing different melodies, sometimes at odds, but ultimately harmonious. And moving. And exciting. Have I mentioned exciting?”
— Delia Sherman

“Sparse and magical, beautiful and terrible; The Winged Histories is a story spun out of stories and the lives of fierce women, each a warrior in her own right.”
— Nalo Hopkinson

“A brightly moving narrative that crystallizes into scenes as delicate, hard, and changing as ice, that rises up to meet four women in the midst of warfare, and the most devastating kinds of devotion and rebellion. It is astonishing what The Winged Histories does with language, what it does as a novel.”
— Amina Cain, author of Creature

About the Author

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Excerpt

“But those on the border write no histories. Their book is memory. Their element is air.”
— Karanis of Loi, The Eighth Meditation

Book One: The History of the Sword
Everywhere the sound of wings.

1. Secrets

The swordmaiden will discover the secrets of men. She will discover that men at war are not as men at peace. She will discover an unforeseen comradeship. Take care: this comradeship is a Dueman shield. It does not extend all the way to the ground.
The swordmaiden will discover her secret forebears. Maris the Crooked fought for Keliathu in the War of the Tongues. Wounded and left with the high-piled dead, she was rescued before the pyre was lit by the man who most despised her: her second lieutenant, Farod. “Farod,” she said to him, “what have you done?” And he answered: “Do not thank me, General. I am like a man who has preserved his enemy’s coin; and I am like a man who, having seen his enemy safely submerged among crocodiles, has drawn him out again.”
The swordmaiden will discover that her forebears are few. There was Maris, and there was Galaron of Nain, and there was the False Countess of Kestenya.
The swordmaiden will hear rumors of others, but she will not find them.
Her greatest battle will be waged against oblivion.
— Ferelanyi of Bream, The Swordmaiden’s Codex

I became a swordmaiden in the Brogyar war, among the mountains.
I was fifteen when I went there to school. Fifteen, and a runaway. The old coach swayed, the pink light of the lantern bounced against the mountainside, and I sat with my hands clenched in embroidered gloves. My furs were cold. I made Fulmia stop the carriage at the officers’ hall, so that I could give them my letter. This hall had once been a temple of Avalei; now fires burned among its smoke-stained pillars, and battered shields lay stacked up in the porch. Nirai stood in the doorway and cried in the wind: “What news from the Valley?” Then he peered closer and started. “It’s all right,” I said. “I have a letter from the Duke.” Inside they were all there, Uncle Gishas, Prince Ruaf, and others. They passed my letter around the great stone table.

Praise for Sofia Samatar’s debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria:

“It’s the rare first novel with no unnecessary parts – and, in terms of its elegant language, its sharp insights into believable characters, and its almost revelatory focus on the value and meaning of language and story, it’s the most impressive and intelligent first novel I expect to see this year, or perhaps for a while longer.”
—Locus

“The excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make you run out and buy the book. Just don’t overlook her short “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” the best story about loss and love and selkies I’ve read in years.”
— K. Tempest Bradford, NPR

“Sofia Samatar’s debut fantasy A Stranger in Olondria is gloriously vivid and rich.”
— Adam Roberts, The Guardian, Best Science Fiction Books of 2013

“Books can limit our experiences and reinforce the structures of empire. They can also transport us outside existing structures. The same book may do both in different ways or for different people. Samatar has written a novel that captures the ecstasy and pain of encountering the world through books, showing us bits and pieces of our contemporary world while also transporting us into a new one.”
— Bookslut

“The novel is full of subtle ideas and questions that never quite get answered. It is those dichotomies that lie at the heart of this novel, such as what is superstition and what is magic? How much do class and other prejudices affect how we view someone’s religion? Jevick often believes himself above such things, as does the current religious regime of Olondria, but in a way both are haunted until they believe. . . . Samatar gives us no easy answers and there are no villains in the book — simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right.
— io9.com

“As you might expect (or hope) from a novel that is in part about the painting of worlds with words, the prose in Stranger is glorious. Whether through imaginative individual word choices—my favourite here being the merchants rendered “delirious” by their own spices . . . Samatar is adept at evoking place, mood, and the impact of what is seen on the one describing it for us.”
­— Strange Horizons

“Vivid, gripping, and shot through with a love of books.”—Graham Sleight, Locus

“With characteristic wit, poise, and eloquence, Samatar delivers a story about our vulnerability to language and literature, and the simultaneous experience of power and surrender inherent in the acts of writing and reading.”—Amal El-Mohtar, Tor.com

“Samatar’s sensual descriptions create a rich, strange landscape, allowing a lavish adventure to unfold that is haunting and unforgettable.”—Library Journal (*starred review*)

“Sofia Samatar has an expansive imagination, a poetic and elegant style, and she writes stories so rich, with characters so full of life, they haunt you long after the story ends. A real pleasure.”
—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames

“A book about the love of books. Her sentences are intoxicating and one can easily be lost in their intricacy…. Samatar’s beautifully written book is one that will be treasured by book lovers everywhere.”
—Raul M. Chapa, BookPeople, Austin, TX

“Thoroughly engaging and thoroughly original. A story of ghosts and books, treachery and mystery, ingeniously conceived and beautifully written. One of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in recent years.”—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass

“Mesmerizing—a sustained and dreamy enchantment. A Stranger in Olondria reminds both Samatar’s characters and her readers of the way stories make us long for far-away, even imaginary, places and how they also bring us home again.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club

“Let the world take note of this dazzling and accomplished fantasy. Sofia Samatar’s debut novel is both exhilarating epic adventure and loving invocation of what it means to live through story, poetry, language. She writes like the heir of Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“Imagine an inlaid cabinet, its drawers within drawers filled with spices, roses, amulets, bright cities, bones, and shadows. Sofia Samatar is a merchant of wonders, and her A Stranger in Olondria is a bookshop of dreams.”
—Greer Gilman, author of Cloud & Ashes

Cover illustration by Kathleen Jennings.

Previously

Mar. 30, 7:30 p.m., The Last Bookstore, 453 S Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90013
Apr. 1, 10:30 a.m., AWP, Small Beer Press: 15th Anniversary Reading, F161, Room 513, Meeting Room Level, LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA (Sofia Samatar,  Ayize Jama-Everett,  Gavin J. Grant,  Juan Martinez,  Maureen F. McHugh)
Apr. 2, 12:00 p.m. AWP, “In the Realms of the Real and the Unreal,” S171. (Katharine Beutner,  Sofia Samatar,  Carmen Machado,  Alice Sola Kim,  Kelly Link)

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You Have Never Been Here

Tue 24 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 320 pages · $16 · 9781618731104 | ebook · 9781618731111
New and Selected Stories

None of this has ever happened. You haven’t either.

World Fantasy Award finalist
Shirley Jackson Award finalist
Locus Recommended Reading List

Locus interview.

Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.

Mary Rickert has long been an undiscovered master of the fantastic. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, received the Crawford and World Fantasy awards, and stories from this collection of new and selected work have received the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.

Read an interview.

Reviews

“Each protagonist deals with their own fantastical yet distinctly human interactions with love. In ‘Memoir of a Deer Woman” for example, when the protagonist hits a deer on New Years’ Eve, it is her relationship with her husband that holds the reader’s attention as impossible events and repercussions unfold.”
— Mary Kay McBrayer, BookRiot

“My favorite collection of the year – a voice that is chilly, sharply intelligent and quite unique.”
— Henry Farrell, Washington Monthly

“A few years ago Mary Rickert achieved the rare distinction of winning two World Fantasy Awards in one year, for a story and a collection. That story, ‘Journey into the Kingdom,’ is a highlight of this retrospective collection. . . . The strangeness of Rickert’s fiction is more than balanced by her acute insights into families and disturbed minds.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

“Reading a Mary Rickert story quite often is like sinking through layers of such worlds. We begin in one place, blink, and open our eyes to somewhere—something—else.”
— James Sallis, F&SF

“There are writers able to create stories where the world becomes a place full of magic and human life, with its joys and its sorrows, a wonderful ride across time and space, full of mystery and enchantment. Mary Rickert is one of those writers, endowed with a remarkable imagination and an extraordinary ability to mesmerize the readers with her spellbinding narrative style.”
— SFRevu

“You Have Never Been Here is stupid good. There’s no other way to say it. This collection of short stories is at once uniform and eclectic; the stories share threads—both thematic and aesthetic—that bind them together, but each story is clearly and uniquely its own thing. The book opens with the story of a woman slowly turning into a deer, a story that begs to be metaphorized but actually thrives better without the clunkiness of questions like “But what does her turning into a deer represent?” And this is true for many of the stories in Rickert’s collection: fantasy tales that at once ask the audience to find truth in them and at the same time question the nature of that truth. Reading this stories is an experience, and it’s one everyone should have. And buoying up each story is Rickert’s unbeatable prose. . . . I could go on about each of these stories. The way Rickert plays with form, always experimenting: in “Cold Fires,” she tells stories within the story, embedded narratives that, like a few of these pieces, draw on fairy tales and ricochet off one another. Or in “You Have Never Been Here,” the title story, how she messes with second person in a way that is at once creepy and fascinating. These stories stick with you after the reading, begging you to consider them further, to take another peek inside the book, to dig deeper into the characters and narrative. There’s so much to say about each one, but I’ll leave some of the mystery for you to discover on your own.”
— Hazel and Wren

“Rickert’s work, its superbly subtle handling of deepest human yearning for something to heal the howling void behind our increasingly demythologized world, shows the ineffable power—and value—of fantastical storytelling.”
— See the Elephant

“Rickert’s latest collection contains haunting tales of death, love, and loss. In stories that are imbued with mythology, beasts, and fantastical transformations, Rickert captures the fanciful quality of regret and longing. . . . Rickert’s blend of dark and whimsy is reminiscent of Angela Carter. Perfect for readers looking for something unique, melancholy, and fantastical.”
— Booklist

“Beautiful, descriptive prose enriches tales of ghosts, loss, and regret in this leisurely collection. . . . Fans of Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link will appreciate Rickert’s explorations of myth and memory.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Short stories about people haunted by loss and transformed by grief. Ghosts walk through this collection. Witches are rumored. People collect bones, sprout wings, watch their feet turn into hooves. Above all, people tell stories—stories that cast spells, stories that change the world. In “Journey into the Kingdom,” a tale about ghosts who walk out of the sea has a powerful effect on a young widower. In “Anyway,” a mother asks herself what she would sacrifice to save her son’s life. In the collection’s longest story, “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” a group of women are drawn together when they realize their newborn babies have something very strange in common. Not every piece sings, but those that do have a powerful, haunting effect. As the mother of a dead girl puts it in “The Chambered Fruit,” the best of these stories show how “from death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create,” how “this is what it means…to be alive.” Rickert’s (Holiday, 2010, etc.) writing is crystal-clear, moody, occasionally blood-chilling. Her characters maneuver through a world where strange, troubling transformations are possible, but they live and breathe on the page, fully human. The worlds Rickert creates are fantastical, but her work should appeal not just to fantasy fans, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told tale.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Mary Rickert’s latest collection, You Have Never Been Here, packs a punch with stories that are quietly devastating and haunting in their strange imagery.” — Campus Circle Holiday Booklist

Table of Contents

Memoir of a Deer Woman
Journey into the Kingdom
The Shipbuilder
Cold Fires [audio]
The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece
The Christmas Witch
Holiday
The Chambered Fruit
The Mothers of Voorhisville
You Have Never Been Here

Cover photo “Angel” © 2015 by Emma Powell.

Reviews of Mary Rickert’s writing:

“I’ve seldom read a book as gentle, and yet as powerful as The Memory Garden.”— io9.com

“The Memory Garden is a lovely book of women, friendship, sadness and healing, and it is genuinely uplifting. Like the garden of its title, this is a book to take in slowly, to spend time in, to wander through; you’ll likely find yourselves the better for it.”
— NPR

“This is a novel haunted by mortality — with people who died young, with people now old and dying, with ghosts. But it is often a joyful novel, a novel of life, forgiveness and good meals with friends and strangers.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Rickert writes with a blend of poetical language and dark suspense . . .” — Washington Post

”Best of all, in a brilliant alchemical turn, Rickert transforms the lead-weight problem of indecisive identities into storytelling gold in this bewitching marvel of a book.”
— BookPage

“A potent brew of guilty secrets and tragic histories, but also of enduring friendship and love. Add a pinch of the botanical. Serve on a luminous night faintly reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Eve. A totally charming, totally engaging story told by Rickert, a magus of the first order. Magic in every line.” — Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Rickert writes with a blend of poetical language and dark suspense… The Memory Garden is a tale of tragedy, hope and kinship.” — The Washington Post

“A wise portrayal of the way women relate to each other, of how communities deal with their outsiders, of how secrets are held among friends, with the strands of narrative united by the garden and its flowers. But it’s also a superb fantasy novel. The supernatural elements may be as carefully measured and restrained as in a Graham Joyce novel… but the magic is real.” —  Chicago Tribune

“Unwinds the magic and mystery of a mother and daughter and three old friends, all at the fragile juncture of truth and forgiveness. Rickert can build an audience that will marvel at her witchy talents.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With its fairy-tale qualities, this debut novel is sure to charm … Readers who enjoy the magical realism of novels by Sarah Addison Allen, Laura Esquivel, and Alice Hoffman will savor Rickert’s mesmerizing and magical novel of friendship and family.” – Library Journal

“Tiny fireballs shooting across the reader’s brain, delving into dark and scary parts of our imagination that other writers don’t reach. . . . Rickert’s writing is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, Connie Willis or Doris Lessing, writers who are unapologetically political and who use mythology as the underpinning to explore modern life. As with those writers, Rickert occasionally uses humor to heighten the darkness of her writing. But, in this collection at least, Rickert is very comfortably settled in the use of science fiction and fantasy to explore the lives of the outsiders and misfits who populate her work. All of this comes together in stories such as “Peace on Suburbia,” an odd Christmas tale about a family dealing with a grandparent’s Alzheimer’s, snowflakes that might be angels and the random suburban paranoia triggered by worries about who is knocking on the front door. Rickert has a satisfyingly vigorous imagination which scales from the smallest detail to the grandest conceit, and she corrals and controls it in an incredibly skilled manner.”
— BookPage

“Mary Rickert’s debut novel is absolutely stunning. An emotionally complex story bridges the divide between the past and the present, between generations, and between age-old friendships compromised by a web of secrets and lies. Be prepared to fall under this novel’s strange and sensuous spell.” – Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow

“Rickert has created a slew of magical and unforgettable characters that will steal readers’ breath away. This is a great story that must be devoured in one sitting.” — RT Book Reviews

About the Author

Mary Rickert has worked as kindergarten teacher, barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and in the personnel department of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She is the author of two collections and a novel, Locus Award winner The Memory Garden. She has a Masters of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Wisconsin. Find her online here.

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The Entropy of Bones

Tue 22 Sep 2015 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 232 pp · 9781618731036 | ebook · 9781618731043
2nd printing: April 2022

The Liminal People · The Entropy of Bones · The Liminal War · Heroes of an Unknown World

A Liminal People novel. A young martial artist finds there is more to the world than she can kick, more than she can see

Chabi doesn’t realize her martial arts master may not be on the side of the gods. She does know he’s changed her from being an almost invisible kid to one that anyone — or at least anyone smart — should pay attention to. But attention from the wrong people can mean more trouble than even she can handle. Chabi might be emotionally stunted. She might have no physical voice. She doesn’t communicate well with words, but her body is poetry.

Read: Chapter One on Tor.com.

Literary Soundtrack Interview with Lilliam Rivera
Personal Essay: Diff’rent Strokes for Different Folks: How the 80s Approached What TV is Afraid to Talk About Today
Largehearted Boy: Book Notes playlist
SF Signal: The Liminal People and The Entropy of Bones
City Lights: 5 Questions

Reviews

“Jama-Everett’s book consistently resists easy categorization. Chabi’s mixed racial background offers a potentially nuanced look from a perspective that seems underserved. And by setting the book in a weird, if recognizable, Bay Area, ­Jama-Everett captures something about the way it feels to live so close to so much money and yet so far; he traces the differences between postindustrial East Bay towns, the gray melancholy of an older city, the particular feeling of struggling while surrounded by otherworldly wealth. If the book veers among different approaches — now a philosophical kung fu master story, now a seduction into a rarefied subculture, now an esoteric universe made from liner notes and the journal entries of a brilliantly imaginative teenager — there’s nevertheless a vitality to the voice and a weirdness that, while not always controlled or intentional, is highly appealing for just that reason.”
— Charles Yu, New York Times Book Review

“Chabi breaks the mold for superheroes in more ways than one. She begins fight training with Narayana, while still in high school. She is Mongolian on her father’s side and Black on her mother’s side. She loves dubstep with an obsessive, almost propulsive force, and spends nights out at clubs dancing as a portal into bliss. And she’s got a sense of humor, with a strong voice that permeates the book and moves the narrative forward. . . . Luckily, if the end of all things is a possibility, having a superhero around at least offers some modicum of comfort. If that superhero happens to be a twenty-something, old school hip-hop and dubstep-loving, half-Mongolian and half-Black woman who lives on a rusted old houseboat in Sausalito, all the better.”
—Leilani Clark, KQED

“Like The Liminal People, the book brims with originality, and features a protagonist with a captivating narrative voice. The story is not easy in many ways. For one thing, Narayana Raj, self-styled pirate captain and Chabi’s teacher, is not a good person. The things he subjects her to as part of ‘training,’ are vicious. This is a case where depiction isn’t approval. The story isn’t confused about Narayana even if Chabi is. Other characters give us insight into Narayana as the story progresses, and Chabi finally comes to a resolution about her old teacher. In this world, in this battle, conventional lines of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ don’t always serve us well.” — Marion Deeds, Fantasy Literature

“Rooted in Chabi’s voice, the story is spare, fierce, and rich, and readers will care just as much about the delicate, damaged relationship between Chabi and her mother as the threat of world destruction.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“. . . a novel of initiation, another tale of a novice trained physically and spiritually in awesome mysteries. Think the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix movies. Think Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles comic book series.
“When we meet Chabi, she is a teenage girl living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, and taking martial arts lessons from a mysterious Indian man named Narayana Raj. Disconnected from her alcoholic mother, she is able to speak without opening her mouth (and without, apparently, having anyone remark on that peculiarity). She’s also a fearsome adolescent warrior, able to run incredible distances at blazing speed and capable of fighting and killing fearsome opponents, human and otherwise. When her teacher abandons her, she must decide whether she wants to use her skills in the service of the rich and powerful.
“Chabi is . . . in over her head, but she doesn’t quite know it. Her inability to see the big picture gives The Entropy of Bones a poignancy that is not often found in a genre where the good guys are always expected to win.”
— Michael Berry, LA Review of Books

“If The Entropy of Bones was a sandwich, it would chip your tooth. If it was a drink, it would make you blind for a few panicked seconds before the world returned. The ending is relentless, breathless, and tragic.”
— Nerds of a Feather

“Chabi would never be like other teens in the Bay Area. Her black-Mongolian heritage, her lack of a father, her mother’s alcoholism–those make her unusual but what really sets her apart is that she is liminal, able to do things that normal humans simply can’t. Although mute from birth Chabi can push her thoughts into the minds of others. Trained from a young age to be an unstoppable killer by a man with shady motives, Chabi falls into a dangerous crowd led by the charismatic Rice after her mentor disappears. Before she can fall completely under Rice’s sway, a man familiar with liminals tries to tell her the score. VERDICT In this follow-up to “The Liminal People” and “The Liminal War”, Jama-Everett focuses on an outsider character who can show us more of the powers at play in his world. When the novel succeeds, it does so mostly on the strength of Chabi’s voice.”
— Library Journal

Reviews of The Liminal People:

“The action sequences are smartly orchestrated, but it is Taggert’s quest to retrieve his own soul that gives The Liminal People its oomph. Jama-Everett has done a stellar job of creating a setup that promises even greater rewards in future volumes.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“Fast-paced and frequently violent, Jama-Everett’s engaging and fulfilling debut offers a compelling take on the classic science-fiction convention of the powerful misfit; incorporates an interesting, multiethnic cast of characters; and proves successful as both an action-packed thriller and a careful look at the moral dilemmas of those whose powers transcend humanity.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A great piece of genre fiction. But picking which genre to place it in isn’t easy. The first in a planned series, it’s got the twists and taut pacing of a thriller, the world-warping expansiveness of a fantasy yarn, and even the love-as-redemption arc of a romance. Oh yeah, a lot of the characters in it have superhuman powers, too.”—The Rumpus

“Ayize Jama-Everett has brewed a voodoo cauldron of Sci-Fi, Romance, Crime, and Superhero Comic, to provide us with a true gestalt of understanding, offering us both a new definition of “family” and a world view on the universality of human conduct. The Liminal People — as obviously intended — will draw different reactions from different readers. But none of them will stop reading until its cataclysmic ending.”
—Andrew Vachss

“Ayize’s imagination will mess with yours, and the world won’t ever look quite the same again.”
—Nalo Hopkinson

About the Author

Ayize Jama-Everett calls the Bay Area his home despite being born in New York City. He holds a Masters degrees in Divinity, Clinical Psychology, in Fine Arts, Creative Writing. He has worked as a bartender, a translator, a drug and alcohol counselor, a stand-up comedian, a script doctor, a ghostwriter, a high school dean, a college professor, and for a brief time, a distiller of spirits. Jama-Everett’s Liminal series began with The Liminal People and continued with The Entropy of Bones and The Liminal War. He has also written a graphic novel, Box of Bones with two-time Eisner Award winner John Jennings and has written for The Believer and the LA Review of Books, among others.

Previously:

Jan 17, 2016: BCAF, San Francisco, CA
BookRiotLive, NYC, Nov. 12-13, 2016

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The Liminal War

Tue 9 Jun 2015 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

trade paper · 192 pp · $16 · 9781618731012 | ebook · 9781618731029

The Liminal People · The Entropy of Bones · The Liminal War · Heroes of an Unknown World

Locus Recommended Reading List · Notable Books

Taggert wants to look after his family so when his adopted daughter disappears he only has one option: find her.

There is something wrong in this world and Taggert must do what he must.

“I read bodies the way master musicians read music.”

The Liminal War is a propulsive novel that starts with a kidnapping in London and takes off running. Taggert is a man with a questionable past and the ability to hurt or heal with his thoughts alone. When his adopted daughter goes missing, he immediately suspects the hand of an old enemy. In order to find her, Taggert assembles a team of friends, family, and new allies who don’t quite trust he has left his violent times behind. But their search leads them to an unexpected place: the past.

Getting there is hard, being there is harder, and their journey has a price that is higher than any of us can afford.

Start reading right now.

Ayize’s Book Notes playlist at Largehearted Boy

Read: Literary Soundtrack Interview with Lilliam Rivera

Ayize take the Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe.

Watch an interview from BCAF:

Reviews

“The Liminal War bounces between scenes of high-octane, superpowered battles, and surprisingly low-key interludes. The entire middle of the novel follows Taggert, Tamara, and Mico, the high priest of the mannah, as they travel back in time to 1971 so that Mico can jam with a young Bob Marley. Music, in fact, has tremendous power in this story, and the final confrontation with Nardeen is powered by the music of Robert Johnson, whom the group meet in 1938 in the book’s final third…. Books like The Liminal War and The Entropy of Bones won’t make up for the fact that the dominant genre of our pop culture is so completely wedded to the past and the status quo, but they point the way to how that might—if we embrace change and creativity—someday change.”
— Strange Horizons

“In Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal War, the family one chooses is just as important as the one a person is born into. Taggert is a “Liminal,” a being who can manipulate human molecules and DNA, allowing him to both harm and heal. When his adopted daughter is kidnapped by his psychotic former mentor, Taggert will rent the fabric of time and space to make sure his daughter is found before his former master can twist her mind. While there are forces stronger than Liminals bent on stopping Taggert and his friends — a pot-smoking god and a musician who takes him back to 1970s London — they may be outmatched by Taggert’s biological daughter, Tamara, who will risk her own life to save her sister’s.”
— Nancy Hightower, Washington Post

“Like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler before him, Jama-Everett has a knack for braiding issues of spirituality and race throughout a compelling fantasy landscape.”
— Leilani Clark, KQED

“Where Liminal People is a quick thrill ride that rarely lets up, The Liminal War is a slower, more contemplative book. Jama-Everett introduces concepts and characters that take a bit more processing to get used to and understand. He takes a world that was, if not exactly our world, a close approximation and adds in some elements that might be considered a bit more fantastical and less science fictional. This includes a plant based sentient life-form billions of years old, beings comprised of entropy, and a human representative of the four winds. And surprisingly, within the context of The Liminal Wars, it all makes sense.”
— SF Revu

“It’s been a long wait since Jama-Everett’s 2009 debut, The Liminal People, but the same raw wattage that lit up healer/killer Taggert’s epic introduction to his daughter, Tamara, and his split with his sociopathic mentor, Nordeen, is at work in this rich, dense sequel. This episode opens with a characteristic blast of pure psychic chaos from Tamara, who’s discovered that Prentis, a child Taggert calls “mine by choice,” has disappeared from the sensory realm commanded by superpowered liminals like Taggert’s family. Taggert’s sure that Prentis isn’t dead, but beyond that he’s stumped. His lover, Samantha, guides him to the Rasta-tinged commune of London’s Eel Pie Island, where he encounters the avatar of a four-billion-year-old vegetable god who allies with him in the search. And that’s just the first 30 pages. Jama-Everett writes with such cyclonic energy and verbal legerdemain that occasionally the plot has to be taken on faith, but the noir-infused verve of the telling makes it all work.”
— Publishers Weekly

“. . . a scrappy group of people with superpowers who careen through a criminal underground, the space-time continuum, and frequently outrageous battles to rescue a young woman who’s gone missing. Taggert, a former criminal, can “read bodies” and manipulate them on a molecular level. He’s lying low in London, working a shadowy business of healing people with terminal diseases and keeping an eye on his teenage daughter, Tamara, and adopted daughter, Prentis. Both Tamara and Prentis are also “liminals”—people with supernatural abilities—and survivors of Taggert’s criminal past. When Prentis vanishes from the planet, invisible even to Tamara’s powerful telepathy, Taggert and Tamara set out to look for her. They find themselves thrown into alliances with legendary musicians and the worshipers of a strange god and pitted against viciously ruthless nonhuman entities called “alters.” The plot moves swiftly, cramming incident after incident into a novel that seems surprisingly slim for this breed of action-adventure. . . . An engaging sequel that sets its likable cast of characters against a fast-paced sequence of dangers.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Liminal War did something I thought was impossible. It was even better than its predecessor, which knocked my socks off when I read it last year. Science fiction and fantasy fans, run—don’t walk—to go read Ayize Jama-Everett’s Liminal series.”
— A Bookish Type

“The Liminal War is thus rich in action and meaning that is impressive for its short length. . . . an effective and remarkable novel . . .  I really look forward to the next entry in this series, the further growth of its characters and its textured layers of Black culture and history.”
— Skiffy and Fanty

Reviews of The Liminal People:

“A great piece of genre fiction. But picking which genre to place it in isn’t easy. The first in a planned series, it’s got the twists and taut pacing of a thriller, the world-warping expansiveness of a fantasy yarn, and even the love-as-redemption arc of a romance. Oh yeah, a lot of the characters in it have superhuman powers, too.”—The Rumpus

“The action sequences are smartly orchestrated, but it is Taggert’s quest to retrieve his own soul that gives The Liminal People its oomph. Jama-Everett has done a stellar job of creating a setup that promises even greater rewards in future volumes.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“You’ll be sucked into a fast-paced story about superpowered people struggling for control of the underground cultures they inhabit…. The novel is a damn good read. It’s a smart actioner that will entertain you while also enticing you to think about matters beyond the physical realm.”
—Annalee Newitz, io9

“The story’s setup . . . takes next to no time to relate in Jama-Everett’s brisk prose. With flat-voiced, sharp-edged humor reminiscent of the razors his fellow thugs wear around their necks, Taggert claims to read bodies ‘the way pretentious East Coast Americans read The New Yorker … I’ve got skills,’ he adds. ‘What I don’t have is patience.’”
—Nisi Shawl, The Seattle Times

“A fun and fast-paced thriller. Recommended for: Mutants, misfits, anyone who’s ever felt partway between one thing and another.”
— The Ladies of Comicazi

About the Author

Ayize Jama-Everett calls the Bay Area his home despite being born in New York City. He holds a Masters degrees in Divinity, Clinical Psychology, in Fine Arts, Creative Writing. He has worked as a bartender, a translator, a drug and alcohol counselor, a stand-up comedian, a script doctor, a ghostwriter, a high school dean, a college professor, and for a brief time, a distiller of spirits. Jama-Everett’s Liminal series began with The Liminal People and continued with The Entropy of Bones and The Liminal War. He has also written a graphic novel, Box of Bones with two-time Eisner Award winner John Jennings and has written for The Believer and the LA Review of Books, among others.

Previously

BookRiotLive, NYC, Nov. 12-13, 2016.

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Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales

Tue 21 Apr 2015 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

hardcover · June 2009 · 9781931520553 | ebook · 9781618730145
April 2015 trade paperback · 9781618731050

Winner of the Tiptree Award
Mythopoeic Award finalist

Also available: Cry Murder! in a Small Voice · Exit, Pursued by a Bear

In the eighteen years since her IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing. Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: “Jack Daw’s Pack” (Nebula Award finalist), “A Crowd of Bone” (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and the new third part, a whole novel, “Unleaving.” Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.

Listen to Greer Gilman reading from Cloud & Ashes at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Greer is introduced by Faye Ringel and after the reading, Sonya Taafe sings Lal and Mike Waterson’s song “The Scarecrow”—one of the keys to the mythos of Cloud. Download/listen to the (large) MP3 here.

Also:  A reading from the 2010 Boskone convention in Boston.

Reviews

“The best fantasy novel of the twenty-first century.”
— Matthew David Surridge, Black Gate

“A short story, a longer one, and a novel continue the exploration of the world of Faerie begun in Greer Gilman’s lavishly praised 1991 first novel Moonwise. Wind and weather influence the doings of besotted humans and even stranger life forms, in domestic dramas that accelerate subtly into near-Shakespearean conflicts and quests, all expressed in a rich poetic prose laden with fetching archaisms that’s unlike anything else being written today. Brilliant and truly innovative fiction, not to be missed.”
—Bruce Allen, The Washington Times

“A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origins. Seasons, weather, lust, pain, sacrifice … the stuff of old ballads becomes intensely real, with the natural contradictions of a cold wind that both chafes and dances…. And the payoff is immense. I finished Cloud & Ashes almost tempted to write a thesis that compares it favorably to what James Joyce did in Ulysses and tried in Finnegan’s Wake, yet feeling like I’d lived through it all.”
—Locus

“Every so often, and it’s a rare event, you read a book and you know, because of its depth and excellence, that you will return to it in the years to come. For me, this is one of those books. It’s a tale, or tales, not just for reading, but for pondering and rereading. It’s a book to pluck off the shelf of a winter’s night, just for the sake of wandering again within its pages; for the sake of finding unnoticed connections, for savouring language, and for pondering the nature of stories, souls, and the stars.”
—Matthew David Surridge, Black Gate

“Cloud & Ashes is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It’s also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.) There might seem to be a contradiction in those words, and there might well be, were every human to read. But to my, mind reading is an effort that exists outside its own exercise; that is when we read, it may feel like an internal, unshared, indeed unsharable experience. But that is not, I think the case. When we read, we go to the place where writing comes from, and in so doing, I think we leave something of ourselves behind as readers. Greer Gilman found whatever it is that is left behind, she has captured it in her net of words and managed to write it down and get it published. That is a herculean feat. It may only happen once in her lifetime or in ours. But it’s happened here and now. What you do with it is up to you. For eternity, as it happens.”
—Rick Kleffel

“A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
—Paul Kincaid, SF Site

“Gilman’s ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“‘Green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk’: Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back, well back, in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language, riddled with bones and iron, sodden with witches’ blood.”
—Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels

“Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant, heart-rending triptych, a mosaic of folklore, intellectual pyrotechnics, and marvelous, motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster.”—Catherynne M. Valente, author of In the Night Garden

“No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers, in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do, the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve, read Cloud & Ashes.”
—Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting

Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. and Mythopoeic awards She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Praise for Greer Gilman’s writing:

“Greer Gilman is a writer like no one else. Many try to employ the matter of myth and folktale, but their tongues are inadaquate—Gilman can employ words as the bards of Ireland did, to make realities . . . Moonwise doesn’t resemble a work of the past age—it is the past age come back new, in its clothes and its language and its dark riddling heart. Moonwise simply has no peers.”
—John Crowley

“Greer Gilman’s diamond of a novella . . . might reward a lifetime of re-reading. A question like ‘What is it about?’ is as useful applied to Gilman’s novella as asked of a snow leopard. Both simply are.”
—Locus

“Moving, engaging, mysterious, glorious…In her flying pastiche of words and images Gilman does in the fantasy vernacular what Joyce aimed for.”
—Tangent

Contents

“Jack Daw’s Pack”
(Nebula finalist, 2001)
He is met at a crossroads on a windy night, the moon in tatters and the mist unclothing stars, the way from Ask to Owlerdale: a man in black, whiteheaded, with a three-string fiddle in his pack.

“A Crowd of Bone”
(World Fantasy Award winner, 2004)
Margaret, do you see the leaves? They flutter, falling. See, they light about you, red and yellow. I am spelling this in leaves.

“Unleaving” (A new novel-length story.)
When a star falls, we do say: the Nine are weaving. Look! The Road’s their skein, that endlong from the old moon’s spindle is unreeled. Their swift’s the sky. O look! says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes. Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy’s coat.

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On the web:

• Greer Gilman · Livejournal
• ISFDB | Wikipedia | Library Thing | Goodreads
• Greer Gilman was Guest of Honor at Readercon 20, July 2009, in Boston.
• Locus interview.
• Trampoline interview | Bio
• Find Cloud & Ashes in a library near you.

Credits

Cover art Kathleen Jennings.

Author photo courtesy of Liza Groen Trombi/Locus Publications.

Readers who ordered Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes before December 31, 2008, have their names printed on the inside of the dustjacket.

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Young Woman in a Garden: Stories

Tue 11 Nov 2014 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

November 11, 2014 · paper · $16 · 9781618730916 | ebook · 9781618730923 · Edelweiss

A long anticipated first collection of fabulous stories with ghosts, fairies, artists, and even a merman.

Selected as one of Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year and recipient of 2 starred reviews.
Locus Recommended Books

Read the title story, “Young Woman in a Garden” and an interview in Uncanny Magazine.

In her vivid and sly, gentle and wise long anticipated first collection, Delia Sherman takes seemingly insignificant moments in the lives of artists or sailors—the light out a window, the two strokes it takes to turn a small boat—and finds the ghosts haunting them, the magic surrounding them. Here are the lives that make up larger histories, here are tricksters and gardeners, faeries and musicians, all glittering and sparkling, finding beauty and hope and always unexpected, a touch of wild magic.

“Real magic, right next door, indeed; each of the 14 stories in Young Woman in a Garden deals with some version of that equation, and it’s a testament to Sherman’s award-winning knack for fabulism that she pulls off such impossibilities with whimsy, dazzle and heart — not to mention a sharp edge of darkness.”
— Jason Heller, NPR

“Known primarily for her novels, Delia Sherman now graces us with her debut story collection, Young Woman in a Garden, and proves she is as adroit at shorter lengths as she is with longer narratives. . . . The only flaw in this collection is that there are not more stories on the table of contents. You need this in your library.”
— Paul Di Filippo, Asimov’s

“Some of the people you will meet in Delia Sherman’s collection of stories include a mysterious painter, a ghost, a woman who knows her way around a sea cucumber, a young man enthralled by a ship’s figurehead, the owner of a very unusual ruby, and a prickly choirmaster — all of whom encounter someone, something, or some place that doesn’t quite fit with the world as they think it ought to behave. The witches have an unreasonably large garden; the ghost breaks ghostly rules; the man who falls in love with a fairy doesn’t get what he bargained for. But all the characters in Sherman’s stories adjust their expectations — some easily, some with more difficulty — and go on to fall more in love with an endlessly surprising world. Young Woman in a Garden is a lovely reminder to look up, and over the wall, and around the corner, even when you think you know what’s there.”
— Words for Nerds

“Readers fond of good, solid fiction regardless of genre barriers, are going to greatly enjoy this fascinating collection.”
— SF Revu

* “Lightly flecked with fantasy and anchored in vividly detailed settings, the 14 stories in Sherman’s first collection are distinguished by their depictions of determined women who challenge gender roles in order to make their way in the world. In “The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor,” a servant girl parlays her acquaintance with an ancestral ghost into a professional relationship with the descendant whose house it haunts. The title story toggles between present and past as an art history student researching the life of an Impressionist painter unravels the hitherto unknown role his model played in the creation of his art. Although Sherman (The Porcelain Dove) grapples with serious themes, she leavens a number of her tales with gentle humor, notably “Walpurgis Afternoon,” in which a pair of lesbian witches comically discompose an ordinary suburban neighborhood when their Victorian estate springs up in a vacant lot overnight. Readers who enjoy sophisticated modern fantasy fiction, both light and dark, will greatly admire Sherman’s skill with a variety of narrative forms and the gentle touch of her magic wand.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

* “In this first collection from Sherman (The Porcelain Dove; The Freedom Maze), what seems ordinary consistently veers into the extraordinary and often downright surprising. . . . Ranging in length and style, these tales are captivating and odd, with characters and settings fully and memorably fleshed out.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

Praise for Sherman’s previous books:

“Multilayered, compassionate and thought-provoking.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Fantastic in every sense of the word, Sherman’s (Through a Brazen Mirror) second novel is a skillfully crafted fairy tale that owes as much to E.T.A. Hoffman as to Charles Perrault. . . . The Porcelain Dove is no dainty vertu but a seductive, sinister bird with razored feathers.”—Publishers Weekly 

Table of Contents

“Young Woman in a Garden”
“The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor”
“The Red Piano”
“La Fée Verte”
“Walpurgis Afternoon”
“The Parwat Ruby”
“The Fairy Cony-Catcher”
“Sacred Harp”
“The Printer’s Daughter”
“Nanny Peters and the Feathery Bride”
“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”
“The Maid on the Shore”
“The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”
“Land’s End”

Delia Sherman was born in Japan and raised in New York City. Her work has appeared most recently in the anthologies Naked City, Steampunk!, and Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. She is the author of six novels including The Porcelain Dove (a New York Times Notable Book), The Freedom Maze, and Changeling, and has received the Mythopoeic and Norton awards. She lives in New York City.

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