Exit, Pursued By a Bear
Tue 23 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Books, Chapbooks| Posted by: Gavin
saddle-stitched paperback, 9781618730954 · ebook, 9781618730961
Ben Jonson has written the part of a lifetime for the Prince of Wales: he will play Oberon, the King of Faerie. It’s only theater. What could go wrong?
Welcome to Ben Jonson’s second adventure, courtesy of none other than Greer Gilman. Her first exceptional Jonson adventure, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, was a Shirley Jackson Award winner. As with Cry Murder!, Exit is available as both a print chapbook and as an ebook.
Exit, Pursued By a Bear
Henry Stuart, heir to the British throne, is everything he should be; clever, handsome, a real hero. Unfortunately, he is also tone-deaf in his dealings with the Unseen World. Unbeknownst to him, his ambitious plans for a coming-of-age court masque taking Faerie as its subject have enraged his neighbor monarchs, Oberon and Titania, who perceive in Henry’s theatrical project a slight to their authority.
Seeking recompense, they assign the undead poet Kit Marlowe a task peculiarly suited to his wild imaginative powers: to bring them the heir to the throne, and rewrite the course of human history.
As supernatural storm clouds gather, the poet Ben Jonson must struggle both to execute the masque-commission set him by Prince Henry, and investigate the trail of unsettling events that has begun to surround rehearsals with a sinister and uncanny aura.
Actors go missing, the special effects can’t be counted on, and of course Henry would insist on a chariot pulled by live bears, but more worryingly: what are these dreams which shake royal performers and professional actors alike? Can Ben work out their portents in time, or will Kit Marlowe have the last laugh, after all?
For the bears, in septentriones sempiterne.*
Review
— Publishers Weekly
An excerpt:
At Whitehall, St. Stephen’s Day, 1610
Halfway in the air, the moon stuck fast.
“Boy,” said the Surveyor, wearily.
But already a fellow in a satyr’s netherstocks had swarmed the scaffolding with five or seven of his rout, all twitching at the shrouds.
And now she toppled on her back, lay hicketing and heaving toward an exaltation endlessly denied.
Ben Jonson–mere Poet to these Roman pomps–snorted. “I wrote her for a virgin; see, she labors.” . . .
Cover by Kathleen Jennings.
Greer Gilman’s mythic fictions Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales have (between them) won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Crawford Awards, and have been shortlisted for the Nebula and Mythopoeic awards. Besides her two books, she has published other short work, poetry, and criticism. Her essay on “The Languages of the Fantastic” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, and a sometime forensic librarian at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.
* In the North stars eternally.
Sherwood Nation
Tue 9 Sep 2014 - Filed under: Benjamin Parzybok, Books| Posted by: Gavin
paper · $16 · 9781618730862 | ebook · 9781618730879 · Audiobook
As drought-stricken, Portland, Oregon, falls apart, a new city rises from within.
2016 Silicon Valley Reads — download the booklet.
Listen to the kick-off event with Emmi Iteräntä and Benjamin Parzybok on the Commonwealth Club podcast.
Read now:
Read an excerpt.
Free pdf download:
A Reader's Guide and Companion to Sherwood Nation (6884 downloads )
.
Audio Interviews:
Spokane (SPR): The Bookshelf
Portland (KBOO): Between the Covers · Author Interview · Old Mole Variety Hour
Seattle (KUOW): If Portland Collapsed, How Would The City Fare? (interview on “The Record”)
Text: The Rumpus · Josh Cook, Porter Square Books · Oregon Live · Street Books · Latenight Library interview by Anne Rasmussen · Writer, with Kids
&c: Largehearted boy book notes · Necessary Fiction: Research Notes
Dried out West Coast cities are crumbling and being abandoned by the East. In Portland, Oregon, water is declared a communal right and rations are down to one gallon per person per day. The Mayor is proposing digging a trench to the Pacific Ocean and hoarding and riots persist.
A water activist nicknamed Maid Marian is caught on film giving out water from a hijacked water truck and becomes a folk hero. She escapes into an ungoverned part of the city and rides her and becomes an icon to a city in need.
Even as Maid Marian and her compatriots build a new community one neighbor at a time, they make powerful enemies in the city government and the National Guard. Their idealistic dream is quickly caught up in a brutal fight for survival.
Sherwood Nation is a quirky, personal post-collapse non-apocalyptic novel of idealists taking charge. It is the rise and fall of a micronation within a city. It is a love story, a war story, a grand social experiment, a treatise on hacking and remaking government, on freedom and necessity, on individualism and community.
Reviews
“Rich with haunting descriptions of a place once wild and now starved and poignant human dilemmas of basic survival, Sherwood Nation is a manifesto on how communities can work together to improve the greater good that does not shy from, sugarcoat, or exaggerate the corruptions of power and outcomes of rebellion. For a political treatise set in an imaginable apocalypse, Parzybok’s second novel is refreshing in its lack of heavy-handed allegory or pedantic utopian preaching. Maid Marian reaches beyond herself to create peace and solidarity in hopeless times. Threatened, others desire her demise and position. It is a clever, if cautionary tale.”
— Electric Literature
“Set in Portland Oregon after a massive drought has crippled American society west of the Mississippi, Sherwood Nation is a different kind of dystopian novel. No magic. No zombies. No tyrannical overlords ruling with iron fists and tournaments. It brings a fascinating realism to the genre, creating a uniquely human and tangible version of the apocalypse story. Sherwood Nation is about real people grappling with an all too real catastrophe in ways that reveal aspects of our culture today, while exploring the best, worst, and, most importantly, the vague middle between the two ideals, of what we could be.”—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (interview)
“Parzybok’s achievements are manifold here. First, he tells a gripping story whose lineaments are never predictable. There are great suspenseful set pieces, like the theft of a water truck and a shootout in Sherwood. The entire action is compressed into about two weeks or so, but feels like a whole saga: birth, maturity, and death of a kingdom.”
—Locus
“A group of idealists, led by a charismatic young woman, struggle to remake society in postapocalyptic Portland, Ore.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Sherwood Nation has left me with memorable images that will, no doubt, be triggered over time. There’s something heavy real in its imaginings—something that almost compels me to pray for rain.”
—NW Book Lovers
“The gritty world in Sherwood Nation and the circumstances that changed a former barista into a figure of hope is a story that focuses more on the consequences of disaster rather than the disaster itself.”
— Geeky Library
“I finished Parzybok’s book not really feeling as though I’d read a work of fiction but more like a finely orchestrated prophecy with believable characters and likely scenarios. I certainly haven’t looked at water the same way and probably won’t ever again. Read Parzybok’s novel and prepare for battle. We have been duly notified.”
— New Pages
“With climate change and ever-increasing consumption, running out of water is a danger we don’t readily acknowledge, yet Benjamin Parzybok’s Sherwood Nation makes that danger vividly real. . . . Here we see how people behave in crisis—some better and some worse—and how idealism, self-concerned realism, and the personal hang in a balance; friends, alliances, and enemies are made, and, most effectively, Renee’s boyfriend, Zach, and Renee herself grow (and glow) as things get tough. Ben, who’s Portland-based, is the creator or co-creator of numerous projects, including Gumball Poetry and the Black Magic Insurance Agency, a city-wide, one night alternate reality game, so he knows about building community. He’s done a great job here, but let’s hope the richly detailed “Sherwood Nation” never really has to come to be.”
—Library Journal
“Parzybok is riffing on the Robin Hood story, to be sure, but he also layers on some astute social and political commentary, and he’s built a fully functioning and believable future world. Give this one to fans of Adam Sternbergh’s Shovel Ready (2014).”
—Booklist
“Benjamin Parzybok is one of our most imaginative literary inventors. In Sherwood Nation he gives us a vision of Portland’s rebellious indie spirit that goes deeper than the usual caricatures, revealing a city alive with conflict and possibility. This is playful, serious, and profoundly humanizing art.” — Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife)
“Benjamin Parzybok has reached into the post-collapse era for a story vital to our here and now. Sherwood Nation is part political thriller, part social fable, and part manifesto, its every page brimming with gonzo exuberance.”—Jedediah Berry (The Manual of Detection)
“Parzybok does this thing where you think, ‘this is fun!’ and then you are charmed, saddened, and finally changed by what you have read. It’s like jujitsu storytelling.”—Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse)
“Portland is a rare outpost, with a semi-functional municipality, but the burdens of relentless rationing and an increasingly apparent division between those who go thirsty and those who do not, make for prime tinder. It takes just one minor act of symbolic monkey wrenching to set this tale ablaze.
“Couch has remained in my consciousness because it goes “out there” to find its core (think Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, Gabriel Garcia Marquez). What makes Sherwood so compelling and, frankly, often terrifying, is how close to home it lives.
“This Portland is totally familiar, invoking the attitudes and spirit of today’s residents and details from the recent political landscape. It feels like the place we know — until a nightly power blackout or parade of National Guard water distribution tankers jars us with a reminder that this is, thankfully, a work of very good fiction.”
— Register Guard
Praise for Benjamin Parzybok’s first novel, Indie Next Pick, Couch
“Beyond the good old-fashioned story, Couch meditates on heroism and history, but above all, it’s an argument for shifting your life around every now and then, for getting off the couch and making something happen.”—The L Magazine
Author photo: Jodi Darby.
Cover illustration: Andi Watson.
Benjamin Parzybok is the author of the novel Couch and has been the creator/co-creator of many other projects, including Gumball Poetry, The Black Magic Insurance Agency (city-wide, one night alternate reality game), and Project Hamad. He lives in Portland with the artist Laura Moulton and their two kids.
Follow him on twitter: @sparkwatson
A Summer in the Twenties
Tue 15 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin
paper · $16 · 9781618730848 | ebook · 9781618730855
A young man has to choose who to love, who to leave in the 1926 General Strike in Britain.
“Small Beer Press, a small publishing company in Massachusetts, is reprinting … Peter Dickinson’s books, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift to mystery readers who are yearning for that kind of old-fashioned British mystery where it doesn’t move quickly, you get engrossed in the time period.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR
In 1926 the British government was worried about revolution. Two million people are about to go on strike and class warfare is about to erupt. Tom Hankey is caught between his love for Judy, a bright young thing, and Kate, a fireball agitator. Brought home from Oxford by his father, Tom volunteers to drive a train in the General Strike. When the train is ambushed, Tom is thrust into the darkest and most threatening regions of English politics. Gritty yet sparkling and full of unexpected turnarounds, A Summer in the Twenties resonates and captivates.
“In A Summer in the Twenties, Mr. Dickinson, who is best known in the United States for his mystery thrillers and in England for his award-winning children’s books, tells a story of confrontation between the rich rich and the poor worker, set against the background of 1926, the year of the General Strike. The very rich are facing the rise of a force they can barely understand. Politics, here, is everything. . . . A Summer in the Twenties shows the body politic balanced at a precarious moment of tension.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Dickinson shows us the daily lives of both the upper crust, with their carpeted manor houses and petty intrigues, as well as the working poor, who live in noisy, crowded conditions. Intergenerational strife abounds, as children of all classes disappoint their elders by not becoming what they were brought up to be; the exchanges are witty yet full of meaning, illuminating the shift of power away from the old class system toward something new and unproven. Dickinson conveys a lot of excellent historical material in a thoroughly engaging narrative with enough suspense to keep readers entertained on multiple levels.”
— Historical Novel Review
“Imagine if Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse had been called in to doctor a “Downton Abbey” script . . . . There’s sharp dialogue, wonderfully grotesque characters, a love story or three. (Judy or Kate? What shall our hero do?) The wit is droll and British.”—Wilmington StarNews
“A lovely smooth read.”—The Washington Post
“A witty, affectionately nostalgic masterpiece.”—The Columbus Dispatch
“As absorbingly readable, as well-written as anything Peter Dickinson has written.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“Dickinson (author of engagingly offbeat thrillers and children’s books) does splendidly here with atmosphere, with the eccentric supporting characters, with the occasionally bizarre comic touches.”
—Kirkus Reviews
From the jacket:
Peter Dickinson . . .
“has an unusual kind of mind.” — New York Times Book Review
“is the best thing that has happened to serious, sophisticated, witty
crime fiction since Michael Innes.” — Sunday Times
“defies categorisation and summary.” — Morning Star
“is a delight to read.” — Times Literary Supplement
“goes in a bit for the high fantastical.” — Evening Standard
“is the best crime writer we have, always absorbingly original.” — Marghanita Laski
“is now the best writer of crime-stories working in this country.” — Birmingham Post
“What makes reading Dickinson a pleasure is that the characters are well drawn and above all human. They make mistakes, have prejudices on both sides of the question, and manage to change, grow, and rise to the occasion as needed. . . . He is also the brightest of writers, capable of real humor and rare intelligence. . . . As a portrait of a unique time and a picture of good people trying to resolve the differences that divide them, coming together for a common good, and facing the very real class divisions that separate them A Summer in the Twenties is a solid smart read.”—Mystery File
Praise for Peter Dickinson’s mysteries:
“The works of British Mystery Writer Peter Dickinson are like caviar-an acquired taste that can easily lead to addiction. Dickinson . . . does not make much of the process of detection, nor does he specialize in suspense. Instead, he neatly packs his books with such old-fashioned virtues as mood, character, and research.”—Time
“Dickinson (author of engagingly offbeat thrillers and children’s books) does splendidly here with atmosphere, with the eccentric supporting characters, with the occasionally bizarre comic touches.”—Kirkus Reviews
Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger. He is the author of more than fifty books, including many books for children and young adults such as Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures, The Dancing Bear, and Emma Tupper’s Diary. His crime novels include Death of a Unicorn, The Poison Oracle, and many more. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.
Questionable Practices
Tue 11 Mar 2014 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
March 11, 2014 · paper · 9781618730756 · $16.00 | ebook · 9781618730763 · $9.95
Light fuse and get away!
Locus Award finalist
io9 Best of the Year:“Gunn’s talent for the surreal and bizarre is pressed into the service of exploring how our own subjectivity, and the ways we construct our selves, help to imprison us.”
Interviews: Eileen on the Coode Street Podcast · SFWA.
Nonfiction: How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future, Smithsonian Magazine
Good intentions aren’t everything. Sometimes things don’t quite go the way you planned. And sometimes you don’t plan. . . . This collection of sixteen stories (and one lonely poem) wittily chart the ways trouble can ensue. No actual human beings were harmed in the creation of this book.
Stories from Eileen Gunn are always a cause for celebration. Where will she lead us? “Up the Fire Road” to a slightly alternate world. Four stories into steampunk’s heart. Into the golem’s heart. Yet never where we might expect.
Reviews for Questionable Practices
“The best of the stories in Eileen Gunn’s collection Questionable Practices also subvert expectations, taking tropes of fantasy and science fiction and turning them on their head. Elves emerge at the start of one story, only to bring violence rather than enchantment with them; two campers’ encounter with a sasquatch moves from the uncanny and into the romantic. Certain stories riff on existing stories and settings, from Star Trek to Bas-Lag, and these didn’t click quite as much for me. But when this book does click, it does so impressively, bringing with it an impressive sense of wonder.”
—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1, Brooklyn
“True to form, Gunn’s new book, Questionable Practices, contains a number of sardonically weird looks at the future and the strangeness of corporate culture. But her insatiable eye for weirdness branches out this time around, featuring a number of different takes on the fantastical.
There is also a good deal of silliness in Questionable Practices, which should be welcomed by anyone who’s gotten tired of the pervasive stiff upper lip in SF and fantasy of late. From outright spoofs to metafictional pranks to sarcastic mischief, Gunn is constantly winking at the reader, while also packing tons of clever ideas. And just when you least expect it, she drops a serious truth bomb.”
— Charlie Jane Anders, io9
“This is an excellent collection. The stories each feel fresh and different, both from one another and from anything else being written today. Sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always meticulously crafted and brilliantly written, this collection is excellent work from a master of the short story. — SF Revu
“It’s always good news to get a new Gunn collection, and it’s always bad news that they come so infrequently.”
—Locus
“Gunn’s stories spin ideas done up with sharp edges; they hijack pop-culture favorites and redirect the actors within; they draw for us a series of what-ifs that carry reader and characters away into the dark, there, perhaps, to breed more ideas.”
— NYRSF
“Nebula-winner Gunn combines humor and compassion in 17 short, intricate gems that showcase her many talents. Of particular note among these outstanding works are the poem “To the Moon Alice,” in which a bombastic threat provides escape from comedic domestic violence, and “Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005,” an affectionate fable-like tribute to two legendary authors. “Up the Fire Road” provides dueling accounts of triadic romance and problematic parentage. “Phantom Pain” is a kaleidoscopic examination of a wounded soldier’s life. Though Gunn first saw print in the 1970s, this short collection contains a surprisingly large portion of her stories; her rate of publication has recently been increasing, giving fans reason to hope for many more delights to come.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The overwhelming mood is darkly comic science fiction—like a strange blend of Terry Gilliam and Margo Lanagan. Teen fans of either or both of those geniuses would do well to turn to Gunn for a similarly unique ride. Her prose is vividly off-kilter, her plots memorable and usually hilarious, and her characters recognizable even when they are tropes. And even though nothing is quite what it seems in these stories, the author’s firm grip on dream logic makes everything feel meaningful, even when it doesn’t quite make sense.”
—School Library Journal, Adult Books for Teens
“’Phantom Pain’ is short and terrible and breathtaking in its ambition and its achievement. It takes the idea of a phantom limb, the way the nerves continue to sense an arm or leg that has been amputated, and expands the notion just a little bit. It tells of a man wounded in war who continues to relive the pain of that vivid moment throughout the rest of his life, so that the jungle track where he was shot and the library where he works or the marital home or the hospital where he ends up become indistinguishable. Pain and memory take away the shape of a life. It is a story that owes nothing to anyone else, it opens up entirely new perspectives for the reader, and if an entire collection made up of such stories might be unendurable, still it shows how much Eileen Gunn can achieve when she lets herself go in new directions.”
— Paul Kincaid, Los Angeles Review of Books
Table of Contents
Up the Fire Road
Chop Wood, Carry Water
No Place to Raise Kids
The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree
To the Moon Alice
Speak, Geek
Hive Mind Man
Thought Experiment
Shed That Guilt!
The Steampunk Quartet:
A Different Engine
Day After the Cooters
The Perdido Street Project
Internal Devices
The Armies of Elfland
Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005
Zeppelin City
Phantom Pain
Interviews
i09 interview by Annalee Newitz · “Ain’t I a Woman?” Eileen Gunn in conversation with Nisi Shawl · Lightspeed, Eileen Gunn interviewed by Andrew Liptak · Friends of Seattle Public Library blog, interview by Susan Forhan · Festivale Online, interview by Ali Kayn
Reviews for Eileen Gunn’s stories
“Without Eileen Gunn, life as we know it would be so dull we wouldn’t recognize it. Among the five or six North Americans currently able to write short stories, she has not written anywhere near enough.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
“From the first sentence of an Eileen Gunn story, you know you’re in the hands of a master. She brings you good, knotty characters every time, and sends them on trajectories you can’t help but care about. She roams the world and lets you appreciate its depth, variety and complications. She does humour and seriousness with equal aplomb; she can write to any length and know exactly what’ll fit. Above all she’s a sharp and a deep thinker; it’s a privilege to watch her mind at work. Read these stories and there’s no question you’ll feel like a smarter, more attentive human being.”
—Margo Lanagan
“Reading this book is like getting to wear the eyeballs of a madwoman in your own sockets for a day. Nothing’s going to look the same.”
—Warren Ellis
“Eileen Gunn can’t make herself write enough fiction. Encourage her by reading this right away.”
—Bruce Sterling
“Fresh, unusual perspectives on ordinary life.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Corporate satire and Kafkaesque metamorphoses gleefully collide.”—Seattle Times
“Gunn’s stories are like perfect little bullets, or maybe firecrackers. When you read Gunn, you remember that short fiction can be spare, beautiful, and deadly.”
—Kelly Link
Cover and interior design by John D. Berry.
Cover illustration © Fu Wenchao/Xinhua Press/Corbis
About the Author
Eileen Gunn is a writer and editor. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the United States and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy awards, and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. award. She was the editor/publisher of the edgy and influential Infinite Matrix webzine (2001-2008). She also edited, with L. Timmel Duchamp, The WisCon Chronicles 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future. Originally from the Boston area, she has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and now makes her home in Seattle, with her husband, typographer and book designer John D. Berry. She has an extensive background in technology advertising, and was Director of Advertising and Sales Promotion at Microsoft in the mid-1980s; her stories sometimes draw on her understanding of the Byzantine dynamics of the corporate workplace. Gunn recently retired from the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop after twenty-two years of service, and is presently at work on a novel.
Emma Tupper’s Diary
Tue 25 Feb 2014 - Filed under: Big Mouth House, Books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin
paper · $12 · 9781618730633 | ebook · $9.95 · 9781618730640
A Big Mouth House book.
A girl helps her Scottish cousins dig up their Victorian-era minisubmarine and they pretend to be a monster in a Scottish loch. There are complications!
Emma is spending the summer with her Scottish cousins—who are wonderful material for her attempt to win the School Prize for most interesting holiday diary. The cousins, lofty Andy, reserved Fiona, and fierce Roddy, and “some sort of looker-after person called Miss Newcombe” are experimenting with their grandfather’s dilapidated old mini-submarine to see if they can find a monster in the family loch.
Emma Tupper’s Diary is a sometimes terrifying, sometimes broadly hilarious (Chapter 3: “I am beginning to understand about the Scots,” wrote Emma. “And why they murdered each other so much.”) adventure novel in the spirit of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and I Capture the Castle.
Praise for Emma Tupper’s Diary:
“Emma Tupper of Botswana goes to spend the summer in Scotland with her bizarre and hilarious, cantankerous, feuding cousins and writes about it in her journal. They launch a plan to create a loch ness hoax in order to make some money to keep the family going. This involves an ancient submarine and leads to a fascinating discovery when the feud goes too far. Great adventure, for fans of Swallows and Amazons.”
— Jenny Craig, Seattle Public Library
“Loch Ness’s claims pale beside the super-exciting discovery made by Emma . . Expert mystification, the tender conscience and burning courage of the young, tantalising details, make this a compelling tall story.”
—Sunday Times
“Narration par excellence … The characters and dialogue are yeasty with fun and Emma is a quiet foil for the sometimes mad exuberance of her cousins.”—Saturday Review
“One of the most enthralling books for older children that I have ever read. Peter Dickinson is master of suspense.”—Evening Standard
“Fish out of water Emma must spend the summer in Scotland with cousins she’s never met. They’re somewhat older and get along fine with minimal adult supervision. Even when they plot to take an old submarine out on the nearby loch for a spin, adding a Nessy-like monster head to the top for fun, there’s no one around to urge caution. It’s the sort of family where everyone is whip-smart, conversations are fast and fascinating, and statements of fact are rarely truthful. All of which makes for one extremely suspenseful and surprisingly thought-provoking adventure.”
—Gwenyth Swain (author of Chig and the Second Spread)
“One of my favorite childhood books. . . . Its themes and plot have come around again, and a smart production company should scoop it up for a film adaptation.”
—Atomic Librarian
“An enthralling book, with fascinating characters, told with humor and wit, and with a story that just might, barely, be possible.”
—Book Loons
“Comedy of manners? Ecological allegory? Adventure? Farce?”—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Peter Dickinson’s children’s books:
“One of the real masters of children’s literature.”—Philip Pullman
“Peter Dickinson is a national treasure.”—The Guardian
“Magnificent. Peter Dickinson is the past-master story-teller of our day.”—The Times Literary Supplement
Peter Dickinson is the author of over fifty books including Eva, Earth and Air, and the Michael L. Printz honor book The Ropemaker. He has twice received the Whitbread Prize as well as the Phoenix and Guardian awards, among other awards. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.
Tyrannia and Other Renditions
Tue 19 Nov 2013 - Filed under: Alan DeNiro, Books| Posted by: Gavin
November 2013 | trade paper · 9781618730718 | ebook: 9781618730725 | Out of print.
In these 11 stories—and the weird spaces in between—people of all kinds struggle to free themselves from conventions and constraints both personal and political. Places ranging from the farthest reaches of outer space to the creepy abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere become battlegrounds for change and growth—sometimes at a massive cost.
Tyranny takes many forms, some more subtle than others, and it is up to the reader to travel along with the characters, who improvise and create their own renditions of freedom.
Poet and fiction writer DeNiro uses language like no other. This second collection of stories explores our relationship to art, history, and looks at how everyday events, personal and political, never cease to leave us off balance.
Listen
KMSU Audio interview
Reviews
“This collection is slim but never slight, and just when you think DeNiro must have run out of renditions, they tilt the idea of tyranny just enough that each story feels new, unique, and important.”
—Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com
“The pitch-dark yet often comic stories in Tyrannia, the second collection and third book by Twin Cities writer DeNiro, throw the reader headfirst into strange, menacing worlds whose contours only gradually become clear (or, perhaps, more complexly mysterious). We sometimes seem to be in a dystopian, totalitarian future, sometimes in a brutal present, sometimes in eerie borderlands.”
—Dylan Hicks, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Minnesotan DeNiro gives us large hunks of riveting weirdness in these 11 stories.”
—Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Most of Tyrannia‘s rambunctious, immensely entertaining stories — seven of them science fiction — blend bizarre speculations with intermittent humor. When there isn’t humor, there’s weirdness — often extreme weirdness, funny in its own right. Fair warning: what I’m about to describe might not always make sense. That’s in the nature of this highly unconventional collection.”
—Will George, Bookslut
“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
“There’s no other writer like DeNiro working today.”
— Tim Pratt, Locus
“DeNiro has already garnered a reputation as a genre-bending experimental author with an indescribably quirky but captivating prose style.”—Carl Hays, Booklist
“DeNiro (Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead) has crafted the rare work whose setting is the realm of pure imagination.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Quirky, unconventional and outlandish short fiction, bordering on the surreal—and sometimes crossing the border.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Table of Contents
Tyrannia
A Rendition
Cudgel Springs
(*_*?)~~~~(-_-):TheWarpandtheWoof
Plight of the Sycophant
Dancing in a House
Highly Responsive to Prayers
Walking Stick Fires [excerpt on tor.com | audio version from StarShipSofa]
The Flowering Ape
Moonlight Is Bulletproof
The Wildfires of Antartica [Theodore Sturgeon award finalist]
Tyrannia (II)
The Philip Sidney Game
Cover by Kevin Huizenga.
About the Author
Anya Johanna DeNiro lives and writes in Minnesota. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, One Story, Strange Horizons, Persistent Visions and elsewhere, and she’s been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. She currently writes YA novels about the adventures of trans women. She can be found online on Twitter, usually, at @adeniro.
Praise for DeNiro’s books:
“There aren’t many writers who take weirdness as seriously as DeNiro does, and fewer still who can extract so much grounded emotion, gut-dropping humor, and rousing adventure from it. A dizzying display of often brilliant, always strange, and definitely unique storytelling”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Macy’s adventure is engaging and absorbing, but it doesn’t make much sense. For those conditioned to the logic of classic science fiction, “Total Oblivion’s” rule-breaking can be frustrating. But readers who are willing to let go will be swept away.”
—Los Angeles Times
“DeNiro’s novel moves the reader along at a lively and crazy pace, engaging interest in Macy and her fate while making subtle references to the sad past and giving frightening glimpses of a scarier future.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Unsettling and never boring, ‘Total Oblivion’ should interest older teens who are hooked on vampires and other dark fantasies. They’ll cheer for Macy, whose courage increases as she does dangerous things she never dreamed of when she was in her safe high school in St. Paul—before everything collapsed.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Macy narrates this story in a delightful, lighthearted voice that stiffens only a little as she realizes that she will never have a senior year.”
—Denver Post
“Chock-a-block with adventure, suspense, and surprise. Apocalyptic family values, too! Recommended to all.”
—Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)
“DeNiro’s excellent debut novel . . . is the very rare novel that satisfies on a multiple of levels.”
—Bookpage
“Wow! This is a wonderfully weird, fun, touching, heartfelt and memorable novel. Imagine if Huck Finn had been living in post-apocalypse America, and Terry Pratchett had been promoted to God, with George Saunders as his avenging angel. The world of this book is a little like that. In this case, the role of Huck is played by a sixteen-year-old-girl named Macy, whose smart, mordant, utterly convincing voice grounds our journey through this crazy landscape. Macy reminds us that no matter how surreal things get, there is still resilience and hope in the human spirit. DeNiro has created a hilarious and terrifying dream world.”
—Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply)
“DeNiro lifts the modern family drama and sets it down in the middle of a wildly inventive post apocalyptic landscape. The insulated life of Middle America may be a thing of the past, but DeNiro finds a way to lead readers into a future full of humor, imagination, and hope.”
—Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief)
“Deeply weird, sometimes challenging, but always smart and affecting.”
—Locus (Notable Books)
“Endlessly imaginative.”
—Venus
“DeNiro’s greatest gifts are those of a poet.”
—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
“Maybe the future of sf. . . . The title story here, set in twenty-third-century Pennsylvania, is its nameless-till-the-last-sentence narrator’s university-application essay, numbered footnotes and all, which explains why not to expect him on campus anytime soon; he is in love and considering getting gills. Maybe DeNiro is the future of alternate history: in “Our Byzantium,” a college town is invaded by horse-and-chariot-led soldiers who demolish cars, wheelchairs, and other machines; reestablish Greek as the lingua franca; and otherwise conquer. . . . The long closer, “Home of the,” about Erie, Pennsylvania, now and then, is as laconic and associative as its title is elliptic. Refreshing, imaginative, funny-scary stuff.”
—Ray Olson, Booklist
“A commitment to experimental structure and oddball elements provides this debut collection’s consistency…. The collection argues for DeNiro as a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Many of these stories unfold like dreams, startling in their detail but elusive in their meaning. Yet, the prosaic as well as the poetic features in these stories as characters attempt to create a detailed but incomplete record, like a dream book of their own histories. Objects such as a college entrance essay, maps, postcards, outdated computer disks, the provenance of a chess set, all become documents which convey the fragility of histories”
—Greenman Review
“I’m not ordinarily an editor, so finding stories for the first six issues of Fence magazine was a guilty pleasure, and the subsequent work by formerly unknown Fence writers like Kelly Link and Julia Slavin has made me look like a prognosticator, or maybe an annoying drunk guy on a streak. Now here’s DeNiro, whose Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead was always my favorite. I’m thrilled to see him in bookstores at last.”
—Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude)
“Reading DeNiro’s new collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, made me feel like a dog that twists its head a bit to the side on hearing a whistle too high for humans to hear. The dog is perplexed and intrigued by the sound — it knows where it’s coming from but not really. Familiar enough, but maybe not. So too with these strong, out of kilter stories. DeNiro blows his own distinctly different sounding whistle and once you’ve heard it, you can’t help but stop and take real notice.”
—Jonathan Carroll (Glass Soup)
“The wholly original, carefully crafted tales that comprise Deniro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are like colorful pinatas full of live scorpions — playful, unexpected, and deadly serious.”
—Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)
Horse of a Different Color
Tue 12 Nov 2013 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
November 12, 2013 · $24 · trade cloth (9781618730732) · ebook (9781618730749)
Austin Chronicle profile: Howard Waldrop, Upright & Writing
“What’s most rewarding in Mr. Waldrop’s best work is how he both shocks and entertains the reader. He likes to take the familiar — old films, fairy tales, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas — then give it an out-of-left-field twist. At least half the 10 tales in his new collection are prime eccentric Waldrop . . . as he mashes genres, kinks and knots timelines, alchemizing history into alternate history. In “The Wolf-man of Alcatraz,” the B prison movie rubs fur with the Wolf-man; “Kindermarchen” takes the tale of Hansel and Gretel and transforms it into a haunting fable of the Holocaust; and “The King of Where-I-Go” is a moving riff on time travel, the polio epidemic and sibling love.
“Among the most successful stories is “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On),” an improbable confluence of vaudeville (two of the main characters perform in a horse suit) and the Arthurian Grail legend that manages to name-check Señor Wences, Thomas Pynchon, “King Kong” and more as Mr. Waldrop tells of the Ham Nag — “the best goddamned horse-suit act there ever was.” It’s certainly the best horse-suit-act story I’ve ever read.”
—New York Times
Howard Waldrop’s stories are keys to the secret world of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps stories between the known stories. From “The Wolfman of Alcatraz” to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew” to the Vancean richness of a “Frogskin Cap,” this new collection is a wunderkammer of strangeness.
The title story, “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)” is a masterpiece that crashes together aged-vaudevillian Manny Marks (who changed his name from Marx so that his brothers couldn’t ride to success on his coattails), “the best goddammed horse-suit act there ever was,” and the story of two men and their hunt for the holy grail. It’s a uniquely American take on the Arthurian legend that Waldrop takes to places (theaters, diners, resthomes) that he could do.
Howard Waldrop also provides an introduction to the book in his inimitable manner as well as Afterwords to most of the stories.
Reviews
Locus Recommended Reading
“Waldrop combines erudition with authentic folksiness, optimism with a cold clear vision of life’s pitfalls and false paths.”
—BN Review Best of the Year
“Filled with the same joie-de-vivre, sense of wonder, ingenious invention and eternally youthful appreciation for the weird and magical rollercoaster ride that is existence.”
—Paul Di Filippo, Locus Online
“I didn’t quite know what to expect going into this collection, and in a way I still don’t. Waldrop’s writing is impossible to characterize, and almost as difficult to describe. He is a unique voice, and I regret that I didn’t discover him sooner–I certainly intend to seek out more of his work now that I have tried it. I highly recommend this book, and I hope it’s publication will win Waldrop new fans.”
— SF Revu
Table of Contents
Introduction: Old Guys With Busted Gaskets
Why Then Ile Fit You
The Wolfman of Alcatraz [excerpt on tor.com]
“The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew…”
Kindermarchen
Ninieslando
Frogskin Cap
Avast, Abaft!
Thin, On the Ground
The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)
The King of Where-I-Go
About Howard Waldrop’s books
“The most startling, original, and entertaining short story writer in science fiction today.”
—George R. R. Martin
“”If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino…. Calvino once said that he was ‘known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.’ Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he’ll come up with next, but somehow it’s always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art—and to fishing.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre.”
—The Houston Post/Sun
“You want funny? Howard’s got funny. You want weird? Howard’s got weird. You want mind-bending? You’re about to get it.”
—Cory Doctorow
“It always feels like Christmas when a new Howard Waldrop collection arrives.”
—Connie Willis
“There’s no better writer alive than Howard Waldrop.”
—Tim Powers
“Three Ways of Looking at Howard Waldrop (and Then Some)”
Jed Hartman (et alia)
About Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and Readercon Award-winner A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Locus Award-winner Night of the Cooters, Other Worlds, Better Lives, and Things Will Never Be the Same. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.” In 2021 Waldrop was awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.
Spider in a Tree
Tue 1 Oct 2013 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
October 2013 · 9781618730695 · trade paper · 336pp | 9781618730701 · ebook
Jonathan Edwards is considered America’s most brilliant theologian. He was also a slave owner. This is the story of the years he spent preaching in eighteenth century Northampton, Massachusetts.
In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Mr. Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards’s young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards’ wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale.
Reviews and Notices
“Edwards sees evidence of divine grace everywhere, but in a world “haunted by work and sin,” the characters fight to sublimate their bodies and the natural environment, and their culture is shaped by a belief in the uselessness of earthly pleasure and inevitability of mortality and judgement. This combination of “absence, presence, and consolation” motivates the complicated inner lives of these well-realized characters, whose psyches Stinson explores in empathetic and satisfying depth.”
— Rain Taxi Review
“The book is billed as “a novel of the First Great Awakening,” and Stinson tries to do just that, presenting us with a host of viewpoints from colonists to slaves and even insects. She gives an honest imagining of everyday people caught up in extraordinary times, where ecstatic faith, town politics and human nature make contentious bedfellows. Although the novel was slow to pull me in, by the end I felt I had an intimate glance into the disparate lives of these 18th-century residents of Northampton, Massachusetts.”
—Historical Novel Review
Rick Kleffel interviews Susan Stinson (mp3 link).
“Ultimately, ‘Spider in a Tree’ is a lesson in what not to expect. Stinson eludes the clichés usually associated with religious extremism to peel away the humans underneath. We speak of a loving God, who asks us to embark upon a deadly war. We most easily see the sins in others that we are ourselves guilty of. Every ambition to perfect ourselves has a very human cost. As we reach for what we decide is the divine, we reveal our most fragile human frailties. Words cannot capture us; but we in all our human hubris, are quite inclined to capture words.”
—The Agony Column
The Mindful Reader: A wonderful read about Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening—Concord Monitor
Awakening Edwards: Jonathan Edwards in the hands of a Northampton novelist—Valley Advocate
Local author’s novel imagines life in Jonathan Edwards’ Northampton—Daily Hampshire Gazette
“As a Puritan preacher who suspends listeners above the sulfurous fires of hell, Jonathan Edwards commands center stage in this compelling historical novel. With mesmerizing narrative gifts, Stinson exposes readers to the full force of Edwards’ brimstone sermonizing. But she also lets readers hear Edwards’ voice in other registers, giving compassionate reassurance to his troubled wife, extending tender forgiveness to a despairing sinner, reflecting pensively on how God manifests his wisdom in a lowly spider. But the Edwards voice that most readers will find most irresistible is his inner voice, laden with grief at a young daughter’s death, perplexed at his spiritual status as master of a household slave. . . . An impressive chronicle conveying the intense spiritual yearnings that illuminate a colonial world of mud, disease, and fear.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
Interviews
New: Bookslut, Religion Dispatches
Lambda Literary, Writer’s Voice, Book Connection, Plum Journal, “How to Fall”
9/26/13 Springfield Republican: “Writer Susan Stinson of Northampton honors theologian with Bridge Street Cemetery tours”
Errantry: Strange Stories
Wed 14 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Books, Elizabeth Hand| Posted by: Gavin
November 2012 · trade paper · 9781618730305 / ebook · 9781618730312
Second printing: January 2019
Shirley Jackson Award finalist.
“Near Zennor” is a Shirley Jackson Award winner.
Listen to Liz reading “Hungerford Bridge.”
No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand’s new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.
“At her best, Hand does just this: We find ourselves wrapped in an evocation without knowing fully how she got us there, shivering with fear at an image of lights or blinking with awe at the modest beauty of a small, rare creature living its life, seen from a distance.”
—Aimee Bender, Washington Post
“With grand feeling and inventiveness, Hand writes of modern life edging just into the impossible. Her ragged modern characters, often lost or stoned or just unfixed in their lives, set out over moors or into hidden parks in search of realities less dispiriting than our own.”
—Village Voice
“As I was reading Errantry: Strange Stories, the phone rang. I answered it and whispered ‘Hello?’
“‘Why are you whispering?’ asked my friend.
“‘I’m reading this really bizarre book of short stories,’ I said. That was my short answer. But the long answer is this: I’m whispering because as I was reading Hand’s stories in my quiet house on a cold December day, the threads of my reality frayed a bit along the edges and it would take more than a telephone’s ring for me to pull myself back together. I’m whispering because I’m scared to disturb the intricate and delicate worlds that Hand has created in this collection of stories that alternately draw me in and scare me away.”
—Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
I thought of this tendency a lot when reading Elizabeth Hand’s collection Errantry: Strange Stories. Though I know that Hand’s background is in work that’s less overtly realistic, I know her best through her kinda-mystery Generation Loss, which is as much a meditation on art and the passage of time, and an evocative description of an isolated coastal town in Maine, as it is a book in which someone must solve something. What makes Hand’s collection notable are those moments where the fantastical (or at least the surreal) briefly collides with the mundane, but doesn’t necessarily lead to transcendence. A couple of the stories involve brief encounters with the strange, but it’s less about the existence of the supernatural than it is on the effects of having one’s worldview fundamentally altered. In the two stories that open the collection, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” and “Near Zennor,” strange things occur, but they’re within the larger contexts of memory and grief, and they’re as difficult for their characters to put together as more earthly mysteries.”
— Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Hand’s strangeness is redolent of the sort of disturbing, uncanny children’s books that gave you nightmares at the age of nine (for me, Alan Garner): books with malevolent forces lurking under sunny hillsides, where adults aren’t going to save our heroes, and whose endings are staggeringly bleak.”
— Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons
“Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky.”
—Helen McCrory, Pank
“The stories confound yet delight, blurt unanswerable questions yet hold their tongue. Each will leave you scratching your head and asking, “Well, what if . . . ?” Overcoming the constraints of genre, Errantry is strange fiction at its finest.”
—Rain Taxi
“No writer has cornered the market on darkly beautiful, unsettling stories. But it’s a niche that Elizabeth Hand inhabits with uncanny ease.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram
“Talented Hand has won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Tiptree Award and the Nebula Award, among many others. The reason for this lies less in her imaginative worlds, as impressive as they can be, and more in her skill at crafting words, each phrase and each sentence carefully shaped and laid in place to create the singular diadem that is a Hand story. The tales here are all recent, and are all evidence of Hand’s prolific, fertile imagination. Hand enthusiasts should, of course, have already pre-ordered this collection; those new to her work should acquire it as soon as possible.”
—Romantic Times Book Review
“Explores the odd and impossible dreams that can motivate and dishearten people in everyday life.”
—Bangor Daily News
Omnivoracious: The Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Collections of 2012
“Just more evidence of the self-assurance and complexity Hand has brought to fiction in the middle part of her career.”
“When novelist and short story author Hand (“Available Dark; Generation Loss”) subtitled this collection “Strange Stories,” she gave readers a hint about what to expect. Lord Byron said “what a strange thing man is…” and it is true, everyone is a little strange, life is a little strange. This original, varied, collection of stories is not strictly fantasy, and certainly not horror, for Hand is more subtle than that. The stories are so different from each other it is hard to find a common theme or thread, but whether reading about ordinary people sharing peculiar experiences, people undergoing fantastic transformations, a young woman with supernatural powers, or a pair of witches, each story leaves the reader curious, thinking about what they read, but disquieted, with a lingering, though not necessarily unpleasant, sense of unease. VERDICT An enjoyable trip to the dark side, certainly worth a try for those who enjoy short stories but not necessarily elements of fantasy, and a must for fans of Hand’s previous work.–Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
—Library Journal
“Ten evocative novellas and stories whisper of hidden mysteries carved on the bruised consciousness of victims and victimizers. Memories and love are as dangerous as the supernatural, and Hand often denies readers neat conclusions, preferring disturbing ambiguity. The Hugo-nominated “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” marries science fiction and magical realism as three men recreate a legendary aircraft’s doomed flight for a dying woman. A grieving widow in “Near Zennor” unearths a secret of spectral kidnapping in an ancient countryside. “Hungerford Bridge,” a lesser piece, shares a secret that can only be enjoyed twice in one’s life. Celtic myth and human frailty entangle in the darkly romantic “The Far Shore.” The vicious nature of romantic love is dissected with expressionistic abandon in the dreamlike “Summerteeth.” Hand’s outsiders haunt themselves, the forces of darkness answering to the calls of their battered souls. Yet strange hope clings to these surreal elegies, insisting on the power of human emotion even in the shadow of despair. Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”
—Publishers Weekly
Table of Contents
The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Near Zennor
Hungerford Bridge [audio]
The Far Shore
Winter’s Wife
Cruel Up North
Summerteeth
The Return of the Fire Witch
Uncle Lou
Errantry
Cover image “The Hunt in the Forest” by Paolo Uccello by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Earth and Air
Mon 22 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Big Mouth House, Books, Peter Dickinson| Posted by: Gavin
October 2012 · 208pp · 9781618730589 · trade cloth · $17.95 | 9781618730381 · trade paper · $14.95 | 9781618730398 · ebook · $9.95
Tales of Elemental Creatures
A Junior Library Guild Selection
Wall Street Journal: The Best Fiction of 2012
“Much modern fantasy draws upon myth and folklore, but not many authors can enter wholly into the surprising and novel logic of myth. In this brilliant collection of stories, Peter Dickinson recasts Beowulf and Orpheus, investigates tales of earth-spirits, explains the footwear of Mercury and accounts for the survival of Athena’s owls in Christian Byzantium. These beautiful stories, our reviewer believed, ‘deserve to become classics of the genre.'”
“Enjoyable surprises await those who pick up this latest and last addition to the Tales of Elemental Creatures series. Peter Dickinson, working alone (he co-authored the first two collections, Water and Fire with wife Robin McKinley), once again proves his expertise in fantasy and short story writing…. The pleasure of reading a short story by this author stems from his complete control over the essentials of fiction writing…. A true delight, this engrossing collection will lead many readers back for second and third readings.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”
—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal
Peter Dickinson has long been one of our favorite authors and we are very proud and happy to announce that we are publishing a new collection of stories by Dickinson—and we will go on from here to reprint many of his novels for both children and adults.
In this collection, you will find stories that range from the mythic to contemporary fantasy to science fiction. You will find a troll, gryphons, a beloved dog, the Land of the Dead, an owl, a minotaur, and a very alien Cat. Earth and Air is the third and final book in a trilogy of shared collections connected by the four classical elements. It follows previous volumes Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits and Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits, written by both Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley.
Ridiki is Steff’s beloved dog, named after Eurydice, whom the poet Orpheus tried to bring back from the dead. When, like her namesake, Ridiki is bitten by a snake and dies, Steff decides that he too should journey to the Underworld to ask the King of the Land of the Dead for his dog back.
Mari is the seventh child of a family in which troll blood still runs. When her husband goes missing in a Scottish loch, she must draw upon the power of her blood to rescue him. Sophie, a young girl, fashions a witch’s broomstick out of an ash sapling, and gets more than she bargained for. An escaped slave, Varro, must kill a gryphon, in order to survive. A boy named Yanni allies himself with an owl and a goddess in order to fight an ancient evil. A group of mind-bonded space travelers must face an unknown threat and solve the murder of a companion before time runs out.
All of these stories are about, in one way or another, the contrary and magical pull of two elements, Earth and Air. Each story showcases the manifold talents of a master storyteller and craftsman who has twice won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award, as well as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.
A short interview on F&SF about “Troll Blood.”
Reviews
“I particularly enjoyed “Ridiki”, a version of the Eurydice story substituting a boy’s beloved dog Ridiki for Eurydice, and “Wizand”, which cleverly portrays the unusual lifecycle of the wizand, which confers power on witches, including, in this story, a 20th-century girl named Sophie. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the final story, “The Fifth Element”, which doesn’t as obviously deal with an “elemental creature” as the other stories. Instead, it’s an odd science fiction horror story, that reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub”, and Robert Sheckley’s “Specialist”, in telling of the multispecies crew of a sort of tramp starship, and what happens when their “ship’s Cat” dies.”
—Rich Horton, Locus
The prevailing spirit of Earth and Air seems to be Mercury, the sardonic trickster. Read it with your mind open, senses alert… and prepare for a marvelously bumpy ride.
–Faren Miller, Locus
“Dickinson completes the series of “elemental” tales he began with his wife Robin McKinley (Water, rev. 7/02; Fire, rev. 11/09). Though links to the theme can be tenuous, these six new stories are provocative in both variety and ideas. . . .and with Dickinson’s usual command of imaginative imagery and beautifully tooled language, this is a fitting capstone to the series.”
—Horn Book
“The prevailing tone of all six is somewhat dark, even saturnine, though not without flashes of hope. In content and style, they are sophisticated and challenging to the extent that the volume might have been published as an adult book. Certainly it has strong crossover appeal. Older teens and Dickinson fans of all ages will find the stories rewarding despite the investment of effort in the reading experience.”
—Booklist
“Noted fantasist Dickinson concludes the cycle of elemental stories he began with Robin McKinley in Fire (BCCB 11/09) and Water (BCCB 7/02) in a solo outing with tales of earth and air spirits. Aside from the sci-fi influenced final story, “The Fifth Element,” the five preceding tales evoke an old-world flavor of magic, incorporating pieces of Greek mythology and European folklore, sometimes placing archetypal beings in the modern world of cars and email. Appropriately, the two tales focusing on earth creatures, “Troll Blood” and “Wizand” (yes, that is the right spelling), are characterized by densely loaded prose and deal with themes of love, lust, and possession. Without McKinley’s more adolescent-focused contributions, the stories lean more toward a new adult audience, though the two animal-centered stories, “Ridiki” and “Scops,” will appeal to pet-friendly readers, particularly dog lovers. These stories are nonetheless thoughtful and provocative, and they will find an audience among Dickinson’s usual fans.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“This is ultimately a wonderfully hopeful work, with glimpses at some of the best of human nature: compassion, love, a sense of right and fairness, and a correspondingly humane response from the supernatural powers.”
—School Library Journal
“These unusual, memorable tales from a much-admired writer should appeal both to teens and Dickinson’s adult fans.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Strange, sometimes beautiful tales.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“They are beautifully told and move so effortlessly that I was startled to discover I’d read the book in one sitting.”
—Don D’Ammassa
Reviews of “Troll Blood”
“Another story which will stay with me is Peter Dickinson’s “Troll Blood.” Mari is a young researcher of Old Norse, with a curious family history. She develops a friendship with her professor, marries the love of her life, and through these relationships she explores her ancestral connections. This is a heart-warming fantasy story of love, trust and honour, held together by lush, sophisticated prose. My one criticism is it jumps about geographically, making is a bit hard to follow at times, but overall this is a beautiful story.”
—Barbara Melville, Tangent
“If some crafty Tilton-hunter were setting a snare, there could be no better bait than a piece like this. Old manuscripts. Old Norse. Beowulf. Even for those readers not so predisposed to love manuscript neep, the story of the troll and the bargain works well, for a story of a troll. I’m not quite so smitten by the biology and the verse, but it’s still another win for this issue.
—Lois Tilton, Locus
Table of Contents
Foreword
Troll Blood
Ridiki
Wizand
Talaria
Scops
The Fifth Element
Praise for Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits
World Fantasy Award finalist
“There is plenty here to excite, enthrall, and move even the pickiest readers.”—School Library Journal
“… a collection of enchanting tales.”—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits
“This collection of beautifully crafted tales will find a warm welcome.”—School Library Journal
“Dickinson’s offerings are notable for their sophisticated magical thinking and subtlety of expression.”—The Horn Book
“Dickinson’s stories are told with a storyteller’s cadence.”—Booklist
“This collection … offers something for every fantasy fan.”—Library Media Connection
The Shimmers in The Night
Tue 25 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Big Mouth House, Books, Lydia Millet| Posted by: Gavin
September 2012 | 256pp · 978-1-931520-78-2 · trade cloth · $16.95 | 978-1-931520-79-9 · ebook · $9.95
This might be the worst weekend of Cara’s life. Her mother is still missing and her brother Jax is off at “smart kid boot camp” in Boston. When he texts Cara asking to be rescued, she and her two best friends, Hayley and Jaye, go into action. The so-called boot camp is actually a front for Cara’s mother’s organization, which is fighting a force which brooks no dissent against its wish to make the planet over in its own image—to “clean it up,” leaving no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human.
And human doesn’t really mean what everyone thinks it does. . . .
The three girls have to escape a new elemental threat, “Burners,” and learn about the enemy’s horrifying plan to “hollow out” people and use them as weapons.
Tension ratchets up as Cara and her friends learn more about the threat their mother is fighting, about how unusual Cara’s mother really is, about how some of the people they’ve known all their lives might be their enemies, about what it means to be human, and most strange and wonderful of all, about the mysterious band of rebels they have suddenly joined.
The Shimmers in the Night is the second thrilling novel in the Dissenters series following The Fires Beneath the Sea.
Lydia Millet on “Where I Write”
Lydia Millet interviewed by William Blake on The Nervous Breakdown.
“It is the week before Halloween and Cara’s younger brother, Jax, is off to Cambridge for a two-week stint at a “genius-kid” camp. He has special abilities that allow him to read minds (or in other words, “ping” them). Cara is busy herself, leaving to go out of town for a competitive swim meet with her friends. She is there when Jax texts her for help, “SCARED TELL NO 1 PLZ COME!” She finds a way to secretly leave, going unnoticed by her coach and Mrs. M. Cara soon enters a world of men with fire in their mouth; people with angel wings; and a brother that has been hollowed to be used as a weapon. Fortunately, Cara recruits her friends and they all work together in fighting the dark forces. This second book in this new fantasy series will not disappoint. Characters are given enough dimension that the fantasy elements are believable. Readers will identify with Cara’s strong ties to her family and friends, who find out that people they might have known for most of their lives are closer to being their enemies. 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
“The seemingly three-tiered conflict that emerged in The Fires Beneath the Sea (2011) coalesces into a single war. . . . Cara and her brothers (though not their oblivious dad) know their mom’s involved in a confrontation that connects murderous mythical creatures with global warming. Cara leaves Cape Cod for a Boston swim meet, but a frightened text from Jax (a classic genius-younger-brother archetype–think Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time) says he’s endangered at his Cambridge genius-kid camp. She sneaks off to fetch him, and a man with flames inside his mouth accosts her on the subway. He’s a Burner, an elemental who belongs to the army of the Cold. The Cold steals people’s consciousnesses (including Jax’s) and uses their bodies as “hollows” to serve his Carbon War, which is acidifying oceans and extinguishing species. . . . Nicely serious eco-fantasy. . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews
Lydia Millet is the author of many novels, including My Happy Life (PEN-USA Award winner), Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), and Ghost Lights. Her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She works at an endangered-species protection group and has just been named a Guggenheim fellow. The Shimmers in the Night is the second book in the Dissenters series. The first book, The Fires Beneath the Sea has just come out in paperback.
Cover by Sharon McGill.
Author photo by Ivory Orchid Photography.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Millet, Lydia, 1968-
The shimmers in the night : a novel / Lydia Millet. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “Cara’s mother is still missing. When her brother Jax texts her from “smart kid’s boot camp” in Boston, Cara and her two best friends go to the rescue. But the camp is a front for Cara’s mother’s organization who are fighting against a force who wants to make the planet over in its own image, which will leave no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human”– Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-931520-78-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-931520-79-9 (ebook)
[1. Supernatural–Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters–Fiction. 3. Psychic ability–Fiction. 4. Missing persons–Fiction. 5. Family life–Massachusetts–Fiction. 6. Cape Cod (Mass.)–Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M5998Shi 2012
[Fic]–dc23
2012022742
The Fires Beneath the Sea
Mon 30 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Big Mouth House, Books, Lydia Millet| Posted by: Gavin
July 2011 · 256 pp · hardcover (out of print) · 9781931520713 | ebook · 9781931520416
April 2012 · 280 pp · trade paperback · 9781931520478
— Includes a sneak preview of the second book in the Dissenters series, The Shimmers in the Night
Start reading now on Wattpad.
A Junior Library Guild Pick
Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011
Selected for the ABC Best Books for Children Catalog
Locus Notable Books
Turkish rights sold to Ithaki.
Cara’s mother has disappeared. Her father isn’t talking about it. Her big brother Max is hiding behind his iPod, and her genius little brother Jackson is busy studying the creatures he collects from the beach. But when a watery specter begins to haunt the family’s Cape Cod home, Cara and her brothers realize that their scientist mother may not be who they thought she was—and that the world has much stranger, much older inhabitants than they had imagined.
With help from Cara’s best friend Hayley, the three embark on a quest that will lead them from the Cape’s hidden, ancient places to a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. They’re soon on the front lines of an ancient battle between good and evil, with the terrifying “pouring man” close on their heels.
Packed with memorable characters and thrilling imagery, Lydia Millet weaves a page-turning adventure even as she brings the seaside world of Cape Cod to magical life. The first in a series of books about the Sykes children, The Fires Beneath the Sea is a rip-cracking middle-grade novel that will make perfect beach reading—for readers of any age!
* “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) Read more
Fountain of Age
Tue 24 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
April 2012 · trade paper / ebook · 978-1-931520-45-4 · 303 pp.
Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Nine new stories from a long-time star of the science fiction field including the Hugo Award winner “The Erdmann Nexus” and the caper-inspired Nebula Award winning title story “Fountain of Age.”
Kress unpacks the future the way DNA investigators unravelled the double helix: one gene at a time. In many of these stories gene sculpting is illegal yet commonplace and the effects range between slow catastrophe (“End Game”), cosmic (“First Rites”), and tragic (“Safeguard”). Then there’s the morning when Rochester disappears and Jenny has to rely on “The Kindness of Strangers.” There’s Jill, who is kidnapped by aliens and trying to learn the “Laws of Survival.” And there’s Hope, whose Grandma is regretting the world built “By Fools Like Me.”
* Read an interview with Nancy in The Stranger.
“What stands out is that Ms. Kress’s characters have developed interior lives. . . . she is a wise woman.”
—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal
“Well-written hard sf, peopled with strong and vivid characters, and articulating a subtle and highly nuanced vision of the moral quandaries inherent in genetic engineering, global warming, and other intentional and accidental manipulations of our biosphere. The nine stories in this collection include the Hugo Award Winning novella, ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ and the Nebula Award-winning short story, ‘Fountain of Age.’ Other highlights are ‘Images of Anna,’ in which a routine photo shoot morphs into an alchemical romance about the relationship between selflessness (or perhaps more accurately “self-loss”) and self-discovery; and the post-apocalypse, harsh to the point of brutality, global warming parable, ‘By Fools Like Me.'”
— Chris Moriarty, F&SF
“What makes her fiction distinctive, apart from the elegance of her craft and the clarity of her prose, is the manner in which she recombines [conventional SF] elements into complex structures that reveal their hidden dimensions, and invariably concern their impact on fully realized characters. She’s as good as anyone at imaginary gardens with real toads, only we’re the toads.”
—Locus Magazine
“This is an extraordinary collection of stories by one of our best writers. Kress has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for her work and justifiably so. Her focus tends to be on biology and genetics (though not always), but her real heart lies in how humans behave…. There are nine stories in this collection and all of them are keepers. I did find “The Erdmann Nexus,” the longest story here, to be the better story, if only because of its length. Kress really does excel in the short form. . . . This is a collection that absolutely belongs on your shelves.”
—Paul Cook, Galaxy’s Edge
“The nine stories in this collection are all excellent examples of Kress’s writing for the past decade. Fountain Of Age should be a ‘must buy’ both for fans of Kress’s work and for those readers who are just discovering her writing. Highly recommended.”
—SF Revu
“Quality oozes from every page. A master class in the art of short-story writing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Passions are magnified by age and the world only becomes more unpredictable in Kress’s new collection, anchored by the Nebula-winning title novella. The nine stories, published over the course of just two years, wrestle with themes of love, death, and transformation. . . . Kress’s depiction of science is much like her characters’ experiences with love: by turns glorious and terrible, and always a little disturbing, even in triumph.”
—Publishers Weekly
“End Game” & “The Kindness of Strangers” are available as podcasts and many of these stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Best of the Web.
Table of Contents
The Erdmann Nexus
The Kindness of Strangers
By Fools Like Me
First Rites
End Game
Images of Anna
Laws of Survival
Safeguard
Fountain of Age
Cover by fonografiks.com.
Praise for Nancy Kress’s previous books:
“Nancy Kress Has the true storyteller’s Gift–the ability to make her characters and what happens to them so vital that the reader’s heart aches.” —Stephen R. Donaldson
“Nancy Kress comprehends the grimy relationships among bioscience, technology, and politics; and soon we will too, if only enough of us read her. Too soon it cannot be.” —Gene Wolfe
“Nancy Kress has written a novel that graphically disects the roots of human violence while affirming the invincibility of the human spirit. An Alien Light is both provocative and insightful.” —Julian May
“Kress’s villains are not diabolical conspirators but willfully ignorant hypocrites, shortsighted and greedy dunderheads, the well-intentioned half-baked—in short, us. But we are also the heroes whose generosity, honesty and energy could turn our lemming tribe away from the polluted waters ahead.” —Washington Post
“The plotting is fast-paced, the characterization is good, and science explained in easily digestible portions.” —New Scientist
“The kind of thriller that continually makes you want to turn the pages faster than you can read them.” —SF Site
“That Kress remains a master is everywhere evident.” —Booklist
“The keeness of vision to. . . see the possibilities for the future very clearly, and they are both fascinating and frightening.” —San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle
Nancy Kress is the author of thirty books, including four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. For sixteen years she was the fiction columnist for Writers Digest magazine. She is perhaps best known for the “Sleepless” trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Award. Most recent books are a collection an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky; a YA fantasy written under the name Anna Kendall, Crossing Over; and a short novel of eco-terror, Before the Fall, During the Fall, After the Fall. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, SF writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
The Liminal People
Tue 10 Jan 2012 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
January 2012 · 9781931520331 / 9781931520362 · $16 · 204pp · trade paper/ebook
2nd printing: April 2022
The Liminal People · The Entropy of Bones · The Liminal War · Heroes of an Unknown World
Membership in the razor neck crew is for life. But when Taggert, who can heal and hurt with just a touch, receives a call from the past he is honor bound to try and help the woman he once loved try to find her daughter. Taggert realizes the girl has more power than even he can imagine and has to wrestle with the nature of his own skills, not to mention risking the wrath of his enigmatic master and perhaps even the gods, in order keep the girl safe. In the end, Taggert will have to delve into the depths of his heart and soul to survive.
After all, what really matters is family.
* * * Read the first three chapters.
Ayize interviewed on The Rumpus:
Like all good genre stories, The Liminal People sneakily explores some deep questions. In between cool fight sequences and imaginative depictions of the not-quite or perhaps more-than-human, it makes you wonder about what it means to belong and who gets past the gates of that exclusive country club called “normal.”
It’s little wonder Jama-Everett would be interested in these kinds of subjects. Like his work, he’s hard to categorize. And he’s quite familiar with the experience of liminality. He grew up as a kind of real-life Oscar Wao—a bespectacled, comic book-reading punk rock fan in 1980s Harlem.
Read: Ayize’s excellent and hilarious Book Brahmin piece for Shelf Awareness.
Listen:
- Ayize Jama-Everett reads from The Liminal People backed by Fenyang Smith.
- The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith.
- MP3 of the January 28, 2012 SF in SF panel discussion with Terry Bisson moderating Ayize Jama-Everett and Ryan Boudinot.
- Ayize is featured on the first episode of the podcast: The Black Porch with Brotha Subjek.
Reviews
“The first of an excellent three-book series!” — Liberty Hardy, Book Riot
“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
“A refreshing burst of the real world. It is the first truly global Spec/Fic book of the 21st century.”
— Shawn Taylor, Nerds of Color
“Compact but creative, and filled with good ideas and elements of classic sci-fi, noir, and superhero stories. Really well-paced and compelling.”
—Peter, Brookline Booksmith
“Taggert walks uncomfortably with the likes of Tracker, gives Frodo a powerful shove and tells him to human-up, and asks Spiderman to consider exactly to whom that great responsibility is owed. Beautifully wrapped inside a page-turning sci- fi adventure mystery are the questions of great literature: what happens to the children our world abuses and discards? What kinds of damage can damaged people enact? What happens when the wisp of family ties wraps those on the edge into embrace? Now what happens if these people have powers? Welcome to the world of Liminal People! Now we just need an in conversation with Marlon James and Ayize. Now THAT would be awesome!”
— Linda Sherman-Nurick, Cellar Door Books, Riverside, CA
“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 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
“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
“Fresh and entertaining.”
— Strange Horizons
“An astounding first novel.”
—Elitist Book Reviews
“For all the grit, character and poetry on display here, Everett’s own super power appears to be plotting and set-pieces. Readers will find a quick immersion in the opening scene, and then some secret world-building. Once the plot kicks in, readers had best be prepared to finish the book in one sitting, while experiencing better special effects than you will find in any movie. Indeed, Everett’s prose is cinematic in the best sense; when he puts us in a scene of action, his descriptions take on a hyper-clarity that is better than telepathy. The plot arc is cunning and enjoyably surprising, and the revelations have the shock of the new but the old-school satisfaction of well-woven espionage plots. ‘The Liminal People’ is seriously well-written, but also seriously fun to read. It’s a secret world that deserves the elegant exposition of this engaging novel — and a sequel, sooner rather than later.”
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column
“Every once in awhile, a first novel catches you by surprise. Sometimes it’s the style and sometimes it’s the pure originality or unique mixing of influences. In the case of Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People (Small Beer Press), the pleasure comes from all of the above.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, Omnivoracious
“Razor. Plush. Fast.”
—Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books
“From within “The Golden Ghetto” Jama-Everett has created a book that resists classification, joining the Afrosurreal Pantheon of writers exploring this new-found freedom. He calls the gifted ones Liminal People, people “Always on the borderland, the threshold, the in-between.” He has Taggert explain. “I learned what I know by walking the liminal lands.” I trust that many people will relate, or will want to.”
—D. Scot Miller, City Lights Blog
“The Liminal People is an excellent first novel full of insightful characters – however gradually they may gain that insight – engaged in a battle that seems to have only just begun. I’m hoping that this novel is the first in a series, as Jama-Everett has built a world and peopled it with characters about which and whom I wish to know more.”
—Fantasy Literature
“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
“The Liminal People has the pleasures of classic sf while being astonishingly contemporary and savvy.”
—Maureen F. McHugh
“Fast and sleek and powerful—a skillful and unique mix of supernatural adventure and lived-in, persuasive, often moving noir.”
—Felix Gilman, author of The Half-Made World
“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
Cover by Adam S. Doyle.
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.
A Slepyng Hound to Wake
Tue 19 Jul 2011 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
9781931520263 · 288 pp · July 19, 2011 · trade cloth/ebook
In his second bibliomystery, Boston bookhound Henry Sullivan has a new girlfriend, a new apartment, and a shelfload of troubles.
Chaucer said “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.” Henry Sullivan, bookhound, is ready to be that sleeping dog: to settle down in his new apartment and enjoy life with his new girlfriend.
But the underside of the literary world won’t let him go. A bookscout sells Henry a book—and is murdered later that night. An old friend asks him to investigate a case of possible plagiarism involving a local bestselling author. To make matters worse, his violinist neighbor seems to have a stalker. And wherever Henry goes, there’s a cop watching him.
Henry can read the signs: to save those he loves he has to save himself.
“In 22 years of bookselling I find that readers remain endlessly fascinated with an insider look at the book business—an oxymoron right there.
Vincent McCaffrey offers a real insider’s view in A Slepyng Hound to Wake—a quote from Chaucer—the sequel to the splendid hit, Hound. I’d call them “biblio-noirs” rather than bibliomysteries: the deeds are dark even though bookhound Henry Sullivan becomes involved in what first seem academic rather than criminal matters. How likely is it that the possible ripping-off (OK, plagiarism) of a bestselling author could lead to murder? Dark, too, is Henry’s outlook on his professional world where centuries of tradition are daily eroded by digital publishing and internet bookselling. This gloom carries over into his relationships, freighting them in a classic noir fashion. Still, Henry is a character cut from Raymond Chandler: a modern knight on a mission to save those, and what, he loves.”
—Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen
“McCaffrey makes good use of his Boston setting. . . . Slepyng Hound provides an easy, intelligent read.”
—Gumshoe Reviews
“In McCaffrey’s compelling second mystery to feature Boston book dealer Henry Sullivan (after 2009’s Hound), Henry is unsettled by the murder of a fellow “book hound” down on his luck, Eddy Perry, who just sold Henry a rare volume of Lovecraft horror stories. Later, former girlfriend Barbara Krause, the owner of Alcott & Poe, an independent bookstore, asks Henry’s help in investigating a plagiarism case. Sharon Greene, one of Barbara’s employees, has accused a local literary heavyweight, George Duggan, of stealing from the work of the late James Frankowski, a little-known writer with whom Sharon lived for years. Meanwhile, Barbara struggles to keep Alcott & Poe afloat in an era of recession and e-commerce. A longtime bookstore owner himself, McCaffrey places less emphasis on crime solving than on the larger question of the printed word’s place in today’s world. Evocative prose and characterizations will remind many of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels.”
—Publishers Weekly
“There’s a Woody Allen tone to this one, and you’ll enjoy sharing it with bibliophiles or anyone who appreciates quirky characters. The plotting and weaving of story lines hide a clever puzzle, but most readers will forget they’re reading a mystery until all the pieces fall into place at the very end. Lisa Lutz fans could like this.”
—Library Journal
“Henry’s second (Hound, 2009) is not for those who require a fast and furious story line. The strong mystery is woven into a slow-paced, philosophical discussion of the painful demise of those special bookstores whose nooks and crannies once yielded fabulous finds.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Start reading:
Chapter One
The books were like corpses, the ink of lost dreams dried in their veins. On a bad day, Henry Sullivan felt like a mortician salvaging the moldering flesh of small decaying bodies to be preserved for a proper burial. But, on a good day, though there seemed to be fewer of those of late, he might save something which left him giddy.
Henry pulled the second box free from a mat of cat hair and dust beneath the bed, and peeked beneath the lid.
“Yes!”
The foul odor of the mattress too close to his face, made him swallow the word along with the impulse to gag.
A month before, after lifting the spoiled leaves of disbound volumes abandoned in a basement beneath the seep of a ruined foundation, he had uncovered loose pages sheltered by a collapsed box of empty Croft Ale bottles. Separating the layers until the fetor of mold had made him dizzy, he had salvaged a bundle six inches thick of cream colored rag paper broadsides, announcements, and advertisements, all in French. They had been discarded by a print collector interested only in the engravings originally meant to illustrate the words. And in the heart of that, Henry had found a first printing of ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.’
Those rare sheets were sold now to the highest bidder, but they were a part of the romance Henry imagined about himself. It was still his belief that long before Foucault and Derrida, when words still offered a common meaning, the world could be changed by the content of a few fragile pages. And this was why Henry Sullivan loved his job.
And this happened every once in awhile, more often to him than others he thought, because he had a nose for it.
Henry pushed a broom hand into the depths of the crevice below the bed frame. Again he heard the hollow strike on a box. . . .
Praise for Hound:
“There’s something charismatic and timeless about the way the story builds and McCaffrey opens Henry’s life to the reader . . . McCaffrey is . . . just telling a compelling, old-school yarn, the kind of story a man who knows his literature tells.”
—Time Out Chicago
“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love.”
—The Hippo
Cover by Tom Canty.
Vincent McCaffrey’s novel Hound was chosen as a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. He has owned the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years. He has been paid to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. A Slepying Hound to Wake is his second novel and he is hard at work on the next novel featuring Henry Sullivan.
Solitaire: a novel
Tue 11 Jan 2011 - Filed under: Books, Kelley Eskridge| Posted by: Gavin
9781931520102 · paperback/ebook · January 2011
Adapted as a motion picture: OtherLife.
A New York Times Notable Book, Borders Original Voices selection, and Nebula, Endeavour, and Spectrum Award finalist.
“A stylistic and psychological tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Suspenseful and inspiring.”—School Library Journal
Jackal Segura is a Hope: born to responsibility and privilege as a symbol of a fledgling world government. Soon she’ll become part of the global administration, sponsored by the huge corporation that houses, feeds, employs, and protects her and everyone she loves. Then, just as she discovers that everything she knows is a lie, she becomes a pariah, a murderer: a person with no community and no future. Grief-stricken and alone, she is put into an experimental program designed to inflict the experience of years of solitary confinement in a few short months: virtual confinement in a sealed cell within her own mind. Afterward, branded and despised, she returns to a world she no longer knows.
Struggling to make her way, she has a chance to rediscover her life, her love, and her soul—in a strange place of shattered hopes and new beginnings called Solitaire.
Reviews
“Solitaire brilliantly explores . . . the dubious boundary between ‘virtual reality’ and the act of imagination — all in the ageless story of a bright, risky kid trying to find out who she is and where her freedom lies.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)
“Kelley Eskridge uses all the best stuff — passion and deception, devotion and betrayal — to deliver a knock-out first novel.”
—Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
“Solitaire is a novel of our time: a story of dashed expectations and corporate manipulations. Eskridge explores what it means to really see ourselves, and what we are ultimately capable of. Jackal, a slight adolescent, matures into an adult capable of living well, no matter what her circumstances. She is a worthy role model for any reader.”
—BookPage
“Vivid and provocative.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“As with Eskridge’s short fiction, the vividness of the characters is what makes this book so memorable.”
—Locus
“Psychological insights that would warm the heart of Alice Hoffman.”
—The Seattle Times
“Teen readers who are fond of the genre will embrace Solitaire with ease while fans of YA dystopian titles will find a character who possesses all the cool and quiet power of the best girl hero in a story that is light years beyond the standard fare. Jackal is no wimp or whiner, nor is she a born “chosen one.” In every way that matters she is the product of the corporate culture (both personally and professionally) that embraced her from birth; she is certainly a twenty-first century construct we can all recognize. The struggles she goes through are always tempered with very personal loss, both as a result of the accident that finds her imprisoned and the distance from the love of her life who remains back on Ko. What rocks so much about Solitaire is that Eskridge has put as much time and attention into her character building as the plot and that means that while we marvel at the world she created, we also respond on a fundamental level with Jackal and the girl she loves who never stops loving her back. This book is a treasure; a true jewel for readers longing for big ideas and intimate story.”
—Colleen Mondor, Bookslut
“Takes the reader down to the bone . . . Eskridge’s skillful use of detail, her strong characters and evocative settings, and her ability to take her readers on a spiral path to the innermost depths of an individual mind, and then back out again, make this a fascinating read.”
—Strange Horizons
“The people of our time are recognizable in the people of Jackal’s, and though their technology is fiction to us, inner human strength triumphs over hardship, and good comes out of even the depths of madness. Jackal’s story resounds with more faith in character than is usual in future-noir.”
—Booklist
“Eskridge’s first novel offers a dystopic vision of a near future in which virtual technology becomes a tool for societal control. Featuring a resourceful and engaging protagonist, this novel belongs in most sf collections and should appeal to readers of high-tech sf intrigue.”
— Library Journal
More
Kelley’s Big Idea: “I wrote Solitaire to explore the complicated landscape of alone. I found a character named Jackal who defines herself foremost in terms of her community and her connection to others; then I took all that away, and trapped her in the most alone place any of us can go – inside our own heads. Jackal ends up in virtual solitary confinement facing an utterly realistic experience of being locked in a cell for eight years. What happens to her there – her journey through alone – changes everything.”
Solitaire received a lovely thoughtful review on Eve’s Alexandria in response to “a very long discussion thread over at Torque Control — sparked by an interview with Tricia Sullivan — about why so little of the science fiction published in the UK these days is written by women.”
And John Mesjak says: “When I first read the manuscript of this reissue edition, I was just blown away. There are three distinct sections to the book, and each one has its own flavor and energy – all adding up to a dark but wonderfully described future. It was absolutely one of my favorite novels from the Fall 2010 Consortium catalog.”
“In a certain way, Solitaire is ahead of its time. It’s a title that old, conventional marketing will tell you won’t sell: it features a multicultural, non-white, female protagonist who happens to be a lesbian; the author is telling us the details rather than showing us; it’s a science fiction concept within a science fiction concept. Yet it is for these reasons that the book succeeds.”
—Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker
Read Chapter One
So here she was, framed in the open double doors like a photograph: Jackal Segura on the worst day of her life, preparing to join the party. The room splayed wide before her, swollen with voices, music, human heat, and she thought perhaps this was a bad idea after all. But she was conscious of the picture she made, backlit in gold by the autumn afternoon sun, standing square, taking up space. A good entrance, casually dramatic. People were already noticing, smiling; there’s our Jackal being herself. There’s our Hope. It shamed her, now that she knew it was a lie.
Kelley Eskridge is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan, won the Astraea Award and been finalists for the Nebula and James Tiptree awards. Her collection Dangerous Space was published by Aqueduct Press. Her story “Alien Jane” was adapted for television and a film adaptation of Solitaire titled OtherLife is in production by Cherry Road Films. She lives in Seattle with her partner, novelist Nicola Griffith.
Cover photos: iStockphoto.com.
Cover design: Frances Lassor.
Author photo: Jennifer Durham.
Hound
Tue 8 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Michael
September 8, 2009 · 280pp · 9781931520591 · trade cloth · $24 | ebook · $9.95
June 7, 2011, trade paper 9781931520256 · $16 · New cover by Tom Canty.
“Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.”
“Henry Sullivan, book dealer & bibliophile, has his life thrown into turmoil when his Beacon Hill landlady dies and a former lover is found murdered. A debut novel by the owner of Boston’s beloved Victor Hugo Bookshop.”
—A Must-Read Book from the Massachusetts Book Awards (pdf link)
“A hell of a tale. A murder and the trail to catching him leads through the world of book collectors (Bookhounds) and the things they love. Fans of Dunning will enjoy this.”
—Crimespree Magazine
“If bibliophilia is an illness, then Henry Sullivan is terminal! Books are his work, his life and his love. . . . Filled with anecdotes and asides on bookselling and the love of reading, Vincent McCaffrey’s love for books absolutely drips from the pages. If you share that obsession, then you will be touched and moved by his words. Vincent McCaffrey is obviously a man so well read that he seems to have gleaned a deep understanding of human nature from his studies. His characters are appealing and sympathetic and his story well plotted. I look forward to his next novel after what was a most enjoyable debut.”
—Gumshoe Review
A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He’s in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband’s books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results.
Hound is the first of a series of novels featuring Henry Sullivan, and the debut novel of a long-time Boston bookseller, Vincent McCaffrey. It is a paean to books, bookselling, and the transformative power of the printed word. Even as it evolves into a gripping murder mystery, it is also a reminder that there are still quiet corners of the world where the rhythms of life are calmer, where there’s still time for reading, time for getting out for a beer with friends, time to investigate the odd details of lives lived on the edges of the book world.
As the true story unfolds, its mysteries are also of the everyday sort: love found and love lost, life given and life taken away. At the center is Henry himself, with his troubled relationships and his love of old books. There’s his landlady Mrs. Prowder whose death unsettles Henry’s life and begins the sequence of events that overturns it. There’s the secret room his friend Albert discovers while doing refuse removal, a room that reveals the story of a woman who lived and loved a century ago.
And throughout the novel are those of us whose lives revolve around books: the readers, writers, bookstore people, and agents—as well as Henry, the bookhound, always searching for the great find, but usually just getting by, happy enough to be in the pursuit.
Read the first two chapters of Hound.
Hound was chosen for two First Mystery Bookclubs and was on the Select 70 at Harvard Book Store. Vincent McCaffrey read in Boston, Amherst, Portsmouth, New York City, and more.
On the web:
- Vincent McCaffrey
- ISFDB | Wikipedia | Library Thing | Goodreads
- Find Hound in a library near you.
“Ingenious and refreshingly irreverent, Hound is not only a mystery on many levels, but also an intelligent—and often funny—tour-de-force of the perils and follies of human relationships. McCaffrey has a gift for crafting quirky characters and original dialogue, and the path of our hero, Henry, is always wonderfully unpredictable. I came away from this ‘book noir’ with a sense of catharsis, but also with a sudden desire to reread and rethink all the great classics to which McCaffrey alludes in his terrific novel.”
—Anne Fortier, Juliet
“McCaffrey, the owner of Boston’s legendary Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, succeeds in conveying his love of books in his intriguing debut.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hound is billed as a mystery, and it’s a good one, but its fuse is long and its pace befitting an old bookshop. That’s a good thing. There’s something charismatic and timeless about the way the story builds and McCaffrey opens Henry’s life to the reader. It wasn’t until the action started to heat up about 100 or so pages in that we remembered we were reading a mystery at all. And while we’re a little tired of books about books and the people who love them—which often come off more as marketing initiatives—McCaffrey is never cloying or playing to demographic. He’s just telling a compelling, old-school yarn, the kind of story a man who knows his literature tells.”
—Time Out Chicago
Early Reader Reaction:
“Vincent McCaffrey’s debut mystery is crammed with stories, with likable, eccentric characters, much like his marvelous Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop—of all the bookstores in the world, the one I still miss most of all. Like all good mysteries, Hound concerns more than murder: it’s rich in detail and knowledgeable asides about bookselling, the world of publishing, and life lived in the pubs, shabby apartments, penthouses, and strange corners of the city of Boston.”
—Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters
“McCaffrey’s bookseller, Henry Sullivan, is as endearing, frustrating, and compelling a character I’ve come across in some time. Hound is more than Henry’s show, however. It’s a slow burn murder mystery, a sharp character study, a detailed exploration of Boston, and a mediation on the secrets of history—both personal and universal. But I’m wasting our precious time trying to pigeonhole his wonderful first novel. Hound is, quite simply, a great book.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep.
Catalog
HOUND, by Vincent McCaffrey. 2009, Small Beer Press, Northampton, MA.
Octavo, 8 ½” tall, 285 pages, green quarter-cloth over tan boards. A fine, clean, neat hard cover first edition with little shelf wear, hinges and binding tight, paper cream white. In a fine, lightly worn dust jacket with the original price.
Henry Sullivan, by himself. 1963, Boston.
6’ tall, 170 pounds, brown hair and pale skin. A clean, neat, hard-headed book hound, released in a single edition, in very good condition overall, with minor wear, hinges cracked but secure. In blue jeans and a brown flannel shirt.
Credits
Cover photo: David Fokos.
Download cover for print.
Author photo courtesy of Thais Coburn.
Vincent McCaffrey has owned and operated the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years, first in Boston, and now online from Abington, Massachusetts. He has been paid by others to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has since chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. He can still remember the first time he sold books for money in 1963—and what most of those books were. Hound is his first novel.
Follow him on Twitter.
The Ant King and Other Stories
Tue 5 Aug 2008 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
Hardcover | trade paperback (9781931520539) | ebook (9781618730138)
A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting.
“Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, “best first collection” for this book.”
—Booklist (Starred review)
“Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with “Biographical Notes,” a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and “A Siege of Cranes,” a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents…. Perhaps none of the tales is odder than “Orphans,” in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Table of Contents
The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale
The Valley of Giants
The Orange
Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Start the Clock
The Blow
Embracing-the-New
Falling
Orphans
On the Cliff by the River
Fig
The Book of Jashar
The House Beyond Your Sky
Red Leather Tassels
Other Cities
Sense and Sensibility
A Siege of Cranes
“But among our most interesting writers today one finds a growing number—Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, Aimee Bender, Jonathan Lethem, Benjamin Rosenbaum—working the boundary: “sometimes drawing the line,” as Hyde writes of Trickster, “sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there,” in the borderlands among regions on the map of fiction.”
—Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
“A terrific range of tales, showcasing an active, playful mind and a gleeful genre-blender.”
—Aimee Bender
“Imagine Borges and Dali hanging out at Pee Wee Herman’s playhouse, and you have a brief inkling of what Rosenbaum’s fiction is like. The Ant King and Other Stories is Rosenbaum’s debut collection of short fiction, which features pieces have been that have nominated for genre awards, and have appeared in a slew of venues, from Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and McSweeney’s. The content ranges from postmodern fables, flash fiction, pulp fiction, all told in precise and distinctive, if not exactly poetic, prose. The imagery—which is what propels the stories as much as plot—is always startling and surrealistic. Rosenbaum mixes literary forms and narrative styles like a DJ.”
—Fantasy Book Spot
“Ben Rosenbaum is one of the freshest and finest voices to appear in science fiction in many years. The stories collected in The Ant King demonstrate his astonishing versatility, his marvelous imagination, and his ready wit.”
—Jack Womack
Benjamin Rosenbaum grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and received degrees in computer science and religious studies from Brown University. His work has been published in Harper’s, Nature, McSweeney’s, F&SF, Asimov’s, Interzone, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and Strange Horizons. Small Beer Press published his chapbook Other Cities and The Present Group published his collaboration,Anthroptic, with artist Ethan Ham. His stories have been translated into fourteen languages, listed in Best American Short Stories: 2006, and shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Rosenbaum lives near Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and two small, rambunctious children. There are cows, steeples, double-decker trains, and traffic lights for bicycles in his neighborhood.
On Other Cities
“Rosenbaum’s fertile sense of invention and his sly humor (“Ponge, as its inhabitants will tell you, is a thoroughly unattractive city. ‘Well,’ they always say at the mention of any horrible news, ‘we do live in Ponge.'”) make these parables a real treat.”
— Asimov’s
“Throughout Other Cities, compressed insight and wonder are compressed into but a handful of words. This small book’s crisp design and illustrations mirror the elegance of the writing: recommended.”
— Xerography Debt
“And though the stories are tiny, they do not disappoint as a result of their brevity. When you leave one fantastic destination behind, there is another city right around the corner.”
— Tangent
“A collection of fourteen gems, expertly cut and highly polished. Each contains, within its myriad facets, a metropolis, brimming with mystery, insight and wonder.”
— Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)
On the web:
- SF Signal interview
- Benjamin Rosenbaum | Our Bio
- Other Cities
- ISFDB | Scifipedia | Wikipedia | Library Thing
- Find The Ant King in a library near you.
Credits
Cover art © Brad Holland.
Photo credit: Photo by Jessica Wallach/PortraitPlaytime.com
Water Logic
Fri 1 Jun 2007 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 9781931520232 | ebook · 9781618730121 · Edelweiss
Elemental Logic: Book 3
Tiptree Honor List
Now shipping with the new cover by Kathleen Jennings.
Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic
Laurie J. Marks’s third novel in her ground-breaking and award-winning Elemental Logic series (following Fire Logic and Earth Logic ) is a triumph of politics, fantasy, world-building, and intelligent design: of character, world, and magic.
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. Before memory, before recorded history, something happened that now must be remembered. Zanja na’Tarwein, the crosser of boundaries, born in fire and wedded to earth, has fallen under the ice. Now, by water logic, the logic of patterns repeated, of laughter and music, the lost must be found—or the found may forever be lost.
By water logic, a cow doctor becomes a politician. A soldier becomes a flower farmer. A lost book contains a lost future. The patterns of history are made and unmade.
Read the first chapter.
Listen to the author read Chapter 1: part 1 · part 2
“Frankly, it’s mind-bending stuff, and refreshing.”
—James Schellenberg, The Cultural Gutter
* “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
“Marks plays the fantasy of her unfolding epic more subtly here than in previous volumes, and the resulting depiction of intransigent cultures in conflict, rich with insight into human nature and motives, will resonate for modern readers.”—Publishers Weekly
Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll:
- See full map.
On the web:
Credits
- Cover image © Corbis.
- 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.
Howard Who?
Tue 1 Aug 2006 - Filed under: Books, Peapod Classics| Posted by: Gavin
2006 · trade paper · 9781931520188 / ebook
2nd printing May 2021
Read the award-winning The Ugly Chickens. Watch the trailer.
“Italo Calvino once said that he was ‘known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.’ Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he’ll come up with next, but somehow it’s always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art—and to fishing.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Introduction by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire): “If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you. Bet you can’t read just one.”
The third entry in our Peapod Classics reprint line is a twentieth-anniversary celebration edition of Howard Waldrop’s erudite, gonzo, wistful, funny, and beautifully written debut collection of short stories.
Waldrop has a capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, Mexican wrestlers, world wars, long-dead film stars, oddball television shows, pulp serials, radio plays, fairy tales, scientific expeditions, extinct species, and knock-knock jokes.
- What if the dodo wasn’t extinct after all?
- What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind?
- What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond?
Acclaimed cult author Waldrop’s stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo.
Never published in paperback, long out of print, and extremely collectible, Howard Who? was Waldrop’s amazing debut collection. If you haven’t read Waldrop before, you’re in for a treat.
Table of Contents
Introduction by George R. R. Martin.
The Ugly Chickens
Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen
Ike at the Mike
Dr. Hudson’s Secret Gorilla
. . . the World, as we Know’t
Green Brother
Mary Margaret Road-Grader
Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me
Horror, We Got
Man-Mountain Gentian
God’s Hooks
Heirs of the Perisphere
“Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop.”
— Metrobeat
Links
- Three Ways of Looking at Howard Waldrop (and Then Some) By Jed Hartman, et alia.
- Other books: Dream Factories And Radio Pictures; Heart of Whitenesse; Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations.
- The Howard Waldrop Bibliography — a current listing of first publication for Howard Waldrop’s short fiction kept by Jonathan Strahan.
- Partial Bibliography for Howard Who?
Praise for Howard Waldrop:
“Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy.”
— Library Journal
“Wise and funny.”
— Publishers Weekly
“An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy.”
— Booklist
“Erudite and gonzo.”
— Science Fiction Weekly
“Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre.”
— The Houston Post/Sun
” The man’s a national treasure!”
— Locus
“The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honkytonk angel.”
— Washington Post Book World
About the Author:
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”
George R.R. Martin is the author of the bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. His fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award, Stoker, and Locus Awards. He worked on the TV shows The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Credits
- Cover art by Kevin Huizenga
Publication history
First published as Howard Who? Twelve Outstanding Stories of Speculative Fiction by Doubleday in 1986.
Also by Howard Waldrop:
Novels
The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 with Jake Saunders (1974)
Them Bones (1984)
Collections
Howard Who? (1986, 2006)
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories (1987)
Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories (1990)
Going Home Again (1997)
Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations (2003)
Heart of Whitenesse (2005)
Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005 (2007)
Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003 (2008)
Horse of a Different Color (2013)
Chapbooks
A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989)
A Better World’s in Birth (2003)
Nonfiction
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (2003)
Forthcoming
I, John Mandeville
The Moon World
Moving Waters
Carmen Dog
Mon 1 Nov 2004 - Filed under: Books, Peapod Classics| Posted by: Gavin
ISBN: 9781931520089 · trade paperback · ebook available
The debut title in our Peapod Classics reprint line.
“A rollicking outre satire…. full of comic leaps and absurdist genius.”
—Bitch magazine
In this dangerous and sharp-eyed look at men, women, and the world we live in, everything is changing: women are turning into animals, and animals are turning into women. Pooch, a golden setter, is turning into a beautiful woman — although she still has some of her canine traits: she just can’t shuck that loyalty thing — and her former owner has turned into a snapping turtle. When the turtle tries to take a bite of her own baby, Pooch snatches the baby and runs. Meanwhile, there’s a dangerous wolverine on the loose, men are desperately trying to figure out what’s going on, and Pooch discovers what she really wants: to sing Carmen.
Carmen Dog is the funny feminist classic that inspired writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler to create the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. We are very pleased to publish it as the debut title in our new Peapod Press reprint line.
“The beast changes to a woman or the woman changes to a beast,” the doctor says. “In her case it is certainly the latter since she has been, on the whole, quite passable as a human being up to the present moment. There may be hundreds of these creatures already among us. No way to tell for sure how many.”
Reviews
A first novel that combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical panache of Animal Farm. . . . There has not been such a singy combination of imaginative energy, feminist outrage, and sheer literary muscle since Joanna Russ’s classic The Female Man.
—Entertainment Weekly
Carol is the most unappreciated great writer we’ve got. Carmen Dog ought to be a classic in the colleges by now . . . It’s so funny, and it’s so keen.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Changing Planes
Pure essence of Emshwiller. Only she could have taken the women’s movement, opera, and a wolverine and come up with such enchantment.
— Connie Willis, author of Passage
One of my favorite books! Funny, ironic, and wonderfully true in its consideration of women and other animals.
— Pat Murphy, author of There and Back Again
With Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller takes her place beside Mikhail Bulgakov and his great social satire, Heart of a Dog. She is one of the premiere fantasists working today, and her fiction is always more than the sum of the parts.
— Gregory Frost, author of Fitcher’s Brides
The novel asks, in the most humorous way imaginable, where we might be as a civilization without our pets and sacrificial caretakers. The humor helps disguise the horrific implications, but never is the bite taken from the dog.
— Strange Horizons
This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinoceros and The Handmaid’s Tale…. Imagination and absurdist humor mark [Carmen Dog] throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about male-female relationships.
— Booklist
Her fantastic premise allows Emshwiller canny and frequently hilarious insights into the damaging sex-role stereotypes both men and women perpetuate.
— Publishers Weekly
An inspired feminist fable…. A wise and funny book.
— The New York Times
“A fable, chock full of heroes and villains, tragedy and triumph, all complex in the way a Dali canvas is complex, and funny in the very same way.”
—Spectrum Circus
— Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association
— Strange Horizons
About this book
Copyright 1990 by Carol Emshwiller. All rights reserved. First published in the USA by Mercury House 1990. This edition printed on 52.5# Enviro Edition recycled paper in Canada by Transcontinental Printing. Text set in Centaur MT. Titles set in Friz Quadrata.
Cover art by Kevin Huizenga.
About the author
Carol Emshwiller‘s stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, Crank!, Confrontation,and many other anthologies and magazines.
Emshwiller is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has been awarded an NEA grant, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant, the ACCENT/ASCENT fiction prize, and the World Fantasy, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Gallun, and Icon awards.
She is the author of six novels including Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, Mister Boots, The Secret City, and Leaping Man Hill, as well as collections of short fiction: Joy in Our Cause, Verging on the Pertinent, The Start of the End of It All, Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, I Live with You, Master of the Road to Nowhere, and two volumes of Collected Stories. She grew up in Michigan and France and lives in New York City.
Stranger Things Happen
Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
9781931520003 · pb · $18 | 9781931520997 · ebook
July 2001
December 2022: 10th printing with new interior illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice‘s 25 Favorite Books, and was a Firecracker Award finalist.
Cover painting by Shelley Jackson.
Reviews
“Pity the poor librarians who have to slap a sticker on Kelly Link’s genre-bending, mind-blowing masterpiece of the imagination, Stranger Things Happen.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia, for NPR’s You Must Read This
“Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
“My favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
Contents
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Water Off a Black Dog’s Back
The Specialist’s Hat
Flying Lessons
Travels with the Snow Queen
Vanishing Act
Survivor’s Ball, or, The Donner Party
Shoe and Marriage
Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water
Louise’s Ghost
The Girl Detective
Kelly Link is the author of four collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her short stories have won the Tiptree, Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (”Because you can’t go through it.”)
Link and her family live in Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Candlewick published their YA anthologies Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales.
Fifth Printing Note
We are very sorry to say some copies of the fifth printing have page 118 reprinted instead of 188. You can either download the pdf of page 188 here or you can email us. We hope the replacement page (or the book, below) will satisfy readers. However, if you’d rather, we will replace your book. Please email us if this is the case. Sorry.
Identifying the fifth printing: on the copyright page it states “First Edition 5 6 7 8 9 0”
Publication History [bibliography]
“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” Fence, 1998
“Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” Century, 1995
“The Specialist’s Hat,” Event Horizon, 1998
“Flying Lessons,” Asimov’s, 1995
“Travels with the Snow Queen,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, winter 1996/7
“Vanishing Act,” Realms of Fantasy, 1996
“Survivor’s Ball, or, The Donner Party,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 1998
“Shoe and Marriage,” 4 Stories, 2000
“The Girl Detective,” Event Horizon, 1999
“Louise’s Ghost” and “Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water” are published here for the first time.
Eleven years after first publication, Stranger Things Happen was published in a 500-copy limited hardcover edition by Subterranean Press. One of Kelly’s favorite artists, Kathleen Jennings, provided the cover illustration as well as story headers for each of the eleven stories.
This special signed limited edition of Stranger Things Happen was accompanied by a exclusive chapbook, Origin Stories, which contains two stories, “Origin Stories” and “Secret Identity.”
It is now out of print.
“This is one of the ways that publishers can distinguish the print work they do from the e-books they issue, focusing on creating an object that’s worth having. And Link’s work seems a great place to start.”
—Los Angeles Times
July 1, 2005
Kelly Link’s debut collection Stranger Things Happen is now available for as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner. The book is provided below in these formats: Text file, HTML, rtf, and lo-res PDF. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We’ll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below. Please abide by these few rules for file-conversions:
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Send us a link to the reader for your conversion so that we can include it on the downloads page.
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No DRM. If your format of choice has a means of restricting copying, use or playback, please do not use it.
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Downloads: To get your Free Download of Stranger Things Happen go to this page of all our Creative Commons offerings.
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