Kindling is a World Fantasy Award finalist

Tue 22 Jul 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Congratulations to all the finalists for the World Fantasy Awards, especially Kathleen Jennings, whose debut collection, Kindling, is one of five finalists for Best Collection.

Kelly, the sole woman, and I — one of six men — are finalists for “Special Award – Non-Professional” for LCRW, and yay for that. However, if you’re voting this year I hope you will choose DeVaun Saunders, for Fiyah, or Steve J. Shaw, for Black Shuck Books, who are both nominated for the first time, and help keep this annual award invigorated and fresh.


Elwin Cotman Wins a Whiting Award

Thu 17 Apr 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Excellent news: Elwin Cotman is one of ten 2025 Whiting Award Winners. There’s a good story on it in Elwin’s hometown paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Elwin has a novel coming from Scribner, The Age of Ignorance, as well as four collections of stories, including Dance on Saturday.


Kathleen Jennings and Kij Johnson Redux

Wed 16 Apr 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kathleen Jennings’s Kindling: Stories has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Award — “Australia’s premier speculative fiction award” — for Best Collection.

The cover for Kathleen’s next novel, Honeyeater, dropped and it is worth clicking on the link.

Also of note, Kathleen did the cover art and half-page pen-and-ink illustrations for Kij Johnson’s forthcoming RiverBank roleplaying game which is being crowdfunded right now on Backerkit and has more than doubled the original goal.


Nebula Award finalist: Jennifer Hudak’s, The Witch Trap

Wed 26 Mar 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Sending our congratulations and sharing the joy that Jennifer Hudak’s story “The Witch Trap” from LCRW 48 is one of six fine finalists for the short story Nebula Award.


Blurred Boundaries Award Winner

Tue 3 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

OKPsyche cover Good news for Anya Johanna DeNiro whose short novel OKPsyche has been chosen as the winner of the Blurred Boundaries Award at this year’s Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards. You can read more about the awards here and here are the rest of this year’s winners:

FANTASY

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi (HarperCollins India)

SCIENCE FICTION

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chaingang All-Stars (Pantheon / Harvill Secker)

NOVELLA

Indra Das, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (Subterranean Press)

SHORT FICTION

Kristina Ten, Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)


Aurealis Convenors’ Award for Excellence for Jennings, et al.

Tue 28 May 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Kathleen Jennings, along with Helen Marshall and Jo Anderton, received the Aurealis Convenors’ Award for Excellence for their article “Science fiction for hire? Notes towards an emerging practice of creative futurism”! (read here)


Speeches Not Delivered

Tue 31 Oct 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’ve written a few acceptance speeches that didn’t have to be given — although in 2015 I did not write one when Monstrous Affections was up for the World Fantasy Award as the ballot was so strong. Ellen had won the award before, George and Gardner had won the year before, Michael Kelly happily won this year, and Long Hidden is a spectacularly good book. I didn’t even notice that Gordon Van Gelder was leading me back from a playdate for our kids to the awards in time for the announcement. Anyway, I was surprised and a little embarrassed to be the person throwing out random words instead of organized.

So this year I got ahead of things and a week before the convention I wrote this speech with Kelly and emailed it to Jeff Ford who kindly agreed to accept on our behalf. The award went to Matt Ottley, for The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness, which looks like a great book. If I have to writer one of these, it’s usually along the lines of thanks to the writers, the readers, the booksellers, and librarians.

This year’s version is here:

First, thanks to the marvelous Jeff Ford for accepting this award for us. And huge thanks to the writers we published over the years, but especially Richard Butner and Robert Freeman Wexler, whose books we published in 2022, and the contributors to 2 issues of our zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

We are sorry not to be here in person: Gavin never tested positive for Covid but after an brief illness in December 2021 he has now has something which seems to be long Covid/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This has much diminished his physical capacities. This is also why we are publishing many fewer books. We still wear masks everywhere we go.

We have mixed feelings about missing conventions, this one in particular. Missouri has passed anti-trans and anti-lgbtq laws that mean it is not a safe place for many people. Can we support these inequalities with our tourist dollars? Also, how would we have travelled here? By plane? With climate change we find it harder to justify getting on a plane for anything these days. Even so, we miss being here so a last thanks to this gathering, in person or online, for making community out of some great, very weird books.


A Butner, A Wexler, 2 LCRWs

Mon 14 Aug 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

I should have noted Kelly and I are on the World Fantasy Award ballot under “special award – professional.” Since this is for 2022, it can be taken that the jurors very much enjoyed Richard Butner’s collection The Adventurists and Robert Freeman Wexler’s novel The Silverberg Business, and maybe also the paperback reprint of John Crowley’s And Go Like This and perhaps, too, LCRW 45 & 46. For the curious, you can read an excerpt from The Silverberg Business on Lithub and Butner’s nearish title story “Adventure” on The Deadlands. Congratulations to all the finalists!

Sorry to say we won’t be at the convention, especially irritating to me as Kij Johnson is one of the guests of honor — along with Jonathan Strahan and Tananarive Due, ach — and her new collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending, will be coming out that week. Oh well! I’ll send along books for the book bag and try my best to ensure there will be copies there.

 


Ladies of Horror

Thu 30 Jun 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Yay! Congratulations Isabel Yap and Hailey Piper whose collections Never Have I Ever and Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy were jointly awarded the 2021 Ladies of Horror Award for Best Collection.


Ladies of Horror Fiction Award Nominees

Fri 10 Jun 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Frightfully happy to see Isabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever on the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Award Nominee list for Best Collection and her story “Syringe” from her collection on the Best Short Fiction list. Congratulations to all the nominees!
Never Have I Ever cover - click to view full size


Prix Bob Morane Finalist

Mon 14 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

ActuaLitté La MontureLovely to see in Locus that the French edition of Carol Emshwiller’s novel The Mount published by Argyll éditions is a Prix Bob Morane Finalist. We’ve had low stock on our edition for a while on this one — I was going to reset it at some point but got distracted so one of these Sunday afternoons I’ll get that done — but we always keep copies of the cheap, handy, and very portable Penguin Firebird mass market edition in stock at Book Moon.

Should you read it? On io9 MaryKate Jasper and Charlie Jane Anders have it on a list that says yes: 10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading.

The Mount was one of the first books we published that picked up a major award. Kelly’s stories had received awards before her collection was published in 2001 and, of course, so had some of Carol’s stories that were collected in the second of her books we published in 2002, Report to the Men’s Club — she played off Kafka’s A Report to an Academy for her collection title — what a book that is! Even if you just read the first (“Grandma”) and last (“After All”) stories, you’re going away a winner. These two books by Carol (our 3rd and 4th published titles) comprise the whole of our second year of book publishing — we also did 2 chapbooks and 2 issues of LCRW.

The Mount cover - click to view full sizeBoth Carol’s novel The Mount and her collection Report to the Men’s Club were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and The Mount was the winner. It was also a Nebula finalist, an Impac Award nominee, and included in Best of the Year lists by Locus, Village Voice, and Book Magazine. and you can Read Chapter One here. Maybe it will add the Prix Bob Morane, maybe not, as with many awards, it is an honor that the book is nominated, congratulations Argyll éditions!

I still miss Carol. She was incredibly fun to work with — even if I spent the next decade asking her if she had more work and she kept ignoring me — and while writing this I was delighted to be reminded of Matt Cheney’s 90th birthday present to Carol, the Carol Emshwiller project.


Spirits Abroad a finalist for the Bradbury Prize

Wed 23 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Spirits Abroad cover - Delighted to see that Zen Cho’s collection Spirits Abroad is one of 5 finalists for the Bradbury Prize — “The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation, honors and extends Bradbury’s literary legacy by celebrating and elevating the writers working in his field today. Bradbury always made his own rules, writing across specific genre boundaries throughout his career.”

I have been mailing copies to various LA Times prizes for years and I am happy to see the continued crossover between the Fiction and the Bradbury Prize. I’m also interested to see all the other books up for the various awards — and I’m sorry I won’t be making the trek to the LA Times Book Fest. Kelly has been and Jed once tabled there for Small Beer Press. One of these years I’d like to get footsore and hot and talk to a million people there. One of these years. As ever, congratulations to all the finalists, thanks for the judges who read all the books, and thanks for Ray, for the stories and for passing on the joy.


Good Weekend for Never Have I Ever

Mon 14 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Never Have I Ever cover Congratulations to Isabel Yap whose debut collection Never Have I Ever received a Stabby Award this weekend! That was a new award for me and I’m delighted to discover it this way.

Then I read that Never was shortlisted for the 2022 Crawford Award “presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for a first book of fantasy.” Usman T. Malik won the award for his collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan (Kitab) and E. Lily Yu’s novel On Fragile Waves (Erewhon) was the other runner-up. Congratulations all — and may all weekends be as fun!

The news comes in slightly too late to go on the cover of the second printing of the book — it is back at the printer slowly making its way through the general slowdown and will be back in stock oh in a blink of an eye (as slowed down to last weeks and weeks).


Dance on to the PKD Shortlist

Wed 20 Jan 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Dance on Saturday cover - click to view full sizeWe’re delighted to see that Elwin Cotman’s Dance on Saturday is one of the finalists for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. Here’s the press release:

The judges of the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce the six nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

FAILED STATE by Christopher Brown (Harper Voyager)
THE BOOK OF KOLI by M. R. Carey (Orbit)
DANCE ON SATURDAY by Elwin Cotman (Small Beer Press)
BONE SILENCE by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit)
ROAD OUT OF WINTER by Alison Stine (Mira)
THE DOORS OF EDEN by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 2, 2021 at Norwescon 44 which will be held virtually this year. The link to the ceremony will be posted at https://www.norwescon.org when it is available.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society.

Last year’s winner was SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA: STORIES by Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer Press) with a special citation to THE LITTLE ANIMALS by Sarah Tolmie (Aqueduct Press).

The 2021 judges are F. Brett Cox, Brendan A. DuBois, Cynthia Felice, Tim Pratt, and Jessica Reisman (Chair).


Congratulations, Kathleen!

Wed 4 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

We are so delighted that among all the crappiness of an uncertain election and millions of people somehow choosing Tr*mp despite the last 4 years there is the lovely news that Kathleen Jennings received this year’s World Fantasy Award for best artist.

Delighted, not only because last year we published Margo Lanagan’s chapbook, Stray Bats, illustrated by Kathleen and Laurie J. Marks’s Air Logic with a cover by Kathleen (which completed a fabulous piece of interlocking art she created over 5 years or so), and recently we published Kij Johnson’s The River Bank with a cover and illustrations by Kathleen as well as Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map with a cover by Kathleen, but because she is a delightful person who adds joy to any day in which you see her. So, congrats to all the winners and especially this time to Kathleen.

      


And Go Like Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award Finalists

Wed 17 Jun 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

And Go Like This coverI’m delighted to see that John Crowley’s collection And Go Like This is a finalist along with many other fine novels and collections in the$5,000 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

Award winners will be announced during the summer and the full list of finalists can be found on the Neukom Institute’s website.

 


Otherwise Award Honor List

Tue 14 Apr 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

4 Logic coversThis weekend I was thrilled to see that Laurie J. Marks’s 4-book Elemental Logic series was one of nine titles on this year’s Otherwise Award Honor List — congratulations go to Akwaeke Emezi whose novel Freshwater is this year’s winner and to all the writers whose work is on this year’s honor list.

The Otherwise Award, Formerly Known As the Tiptree Award, is one of my favorite awards. It was begun in 1991 by Pat Murphy and Karen J. Fowler and is for encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender. One of the multitude of reasons I love the award is that there is an actual monetary prize — $1,000! — some of which is raised by bake sales, mmm, but that’s not all: the winner also receives a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Laurie’s third novel in the series, Water Logic, was also on the Honor List — as was her 1993 novel Dancing Jack.

Here’s what award jury member Debbie Notkin wrote about the Elemental Logic series:

“Laurie J. Marks’ Fire Logic was published 18 years ago, followed by Earth Logic in 2004, Water Logic in 2007, and Air Logic in 2019. The four Elemental Logic books reflect the author’s growth in skill and breadth over the nearly two decades, along with an extraordinary consistency in characterization and vision. The gender aspects of the story arc largely concentrated in the depth and detail of complex same-sex relationships, though Air Logic also ventures into the realm of treating autism-spectrum mindsets as a gender of their own. More subtly, while Marks does include heterosexual relationships in her story, she never centers the dynamics of those relationships, concentrating all of her relationship writing on same-sex couples. One crucial thing these books offer the contemporary reader is a vision of undermining and destabilizing polarized societies, focused on the long hard work of bringing factions that hate each other back into tenuous but respectful relationship – and perhaps that too is a form of exploring and expanding gender.”


Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award

Mon 13 Apr 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea cover - click to view full sizeWe were delighted to see that Sarah Pinsker’s first collection of short stories, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is this year’s winner of the Philip K. Dick Award.

Congratulations, Sarah! Here’s one of the stories from the book which if you have not read it should keep you happily entertained for a little while: And Then There Were (N-One), originally published in Uncanny Magazine.

Sarah is having a (relatively) good month: her story “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye,” — also originally published in Uncanny, is a finalist for the Hugo Award. So congrats to all the nominees and fingers crossed for Sarah in August.


Happy New PKD Award Finalist

Fri 17 Jan 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea cover - click to view full sizeWe are delighted to note that Sarah Pinsker’s collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award — and the book also appeared on a couple of year-end lists (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Books of 2019; Booklist: Top 10 Debut SF&F). You can try a couple of the stories out here:

And We Were Left Darkling
In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind
No Lonely Seafarer
And Then There Were (N-One)


Nuekom Award Shortlists

Thu 9 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

These are words to brighten the day: there are two Small Beer titles on the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Debut Award Shortlist:

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full size  Terra Nullius cover - click to view full size

Last year, the inaugural year for the awards, Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American and Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map were both finalists for the award with Best Worst American being one of the winners.

Here’s the full press release with all of the finalists, congratulations, one and all!

These 10 Books May Be Telling Us the Future

HANOVER, N.H – May 9, 2019 – Ten books that dare to imagine how society collides with the future have been named to the shortlist of the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

From the challenges of life on a floating Arctic city, to epidemics of forgetfulness and zombification, to an Earth occupied by amphibious aliens, the Neukom shortlist forces readers to grapple with uncomfortable twists to familiar storylines of climate change, social justice and technological innovation.

The second annual speculative fiction awards program will be judged by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Awards will be presented for a debut book and for a book in the open category.

“Artists and writers continue to take on the important role of challenging us with their visions of ‘what if,’ often picking up where scientists and technologists either neglect to or forget to go,” said Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute. “This year’s entries are testament to the extraordinary creativity and thoughtfulness that is finding its means of expression in speculative fiction.”

2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Shortlist of Books:

Open Category

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (Ecco, 2018)

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax (Soho Press, 2018)

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas (Little Brown, 2018)

The Night Market by Jonathan Moore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman (Europa, 2018)

Debut Category

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press, 2018)

Infomocracy by Malka Older (Tor, 2016)

Severance by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Small Beer Press, 2018)

The Book of M by Peng Shepard (William Morrow, 2018)

“It’s been gratifying to play a part in reading and selecting such unique and strong fiction from so many different points of view. We’ve particularly enjoyed encountering writers we had not read before—and it’s especially gratifying to find so many new voices, who we believe readers will be encountering for decades to come. The Dartmouth prize is a much-needed addition to the current slate of science fiction awards,” said spec fic writer and co-judge Jeff VanderMeer.

The winning books will be selected from the shortlist in late May.

Each award winner will receive a $5,000 honorarium that will be presented during a Dartmouth-hosted panel to discuss the genre and their work.

“We’re looking forward to selecting the winners. This is such a strong list and a difficult choice for us but a very good problem to have! It’s wonderful to see so many writers taking chances and showing us other ways to view the world we live in today and what our tomorrows could be,” said spec fic editor and co-judge Ann VanderMeer.

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science is dedicated to supporting and inspiring computational work. The Literary Arts Awards is part of the Neukom Institute’s initiative to explore the ways in which computational ideas impact society.

###

About the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards

The Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards is an annual awards program to honor and support creative works around speculative fiction. Established in 2017, the awards program is an open, international competition sponsored by the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College. The awards aspire to raise general awareness of the speculative fiction genre, as well as the interconnectivity between the sciences and the arts. The awards serve as part of the Neukom Institute’s initiative to explore the ways in which computational ideas impact society.


Meet a PKD Finalist

Mon 14 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Ambiguity Machines cover - click to view full sizeI’m paperback-sf-delighted to see that both Abbey Mei Otis’s Alien Virus Love Disaster and Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines are finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award, yay! — and congratulations to all the finalists!

Where’s your chance to meet a finalist?

Vandana Singh will be the Hal Clement Science Speaker at the Boskone convention which runs from Feb. 15-17 at the Westin Boston Waterfront, in Boston, MA. We’ll be there with her book in the dealers room.

And in the meantime, here’s the whole PKD Award nominee announcement, Cheers!

2019 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced

The judges of the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce the six nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

TIME WAS by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)
THE BODY LIBRARY by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot)
84K by Claire North (Orbit)
ALIEN VIRUS LOVE DISASTER: STORIES by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press)
THEORY OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions)
AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 19, 2019 at Norwescon 42 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeThe Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society. Last year’s winner was BANNERLESS by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) with a special citation to AFTER THE FLARE by Deji Bryce Olukotun (The Unnamed Press). The 2018 judges are Madeline Ashby, Brian Attebery, Christopher Brown, Rosemary Edghill, and Jason Hough (chair).


Tender a WFA Finalist!

Thu 26 Jul 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Tender cover - click to view full sizeI am delighted to see that among all the happy finalists for this year’s World Fantasy Awards is Sofia Samatar’s debut collection Tender. 

If you’re curious and would like to read a few of the stories from this wide-ranging collection, here are just a few:

How to Get Back to the Forest

An Account of the Land of Witches

Meet Me in Iram


British Fantasy Awards

Fri 6 Jul 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Tender coverI’m delighted to see Sofia Samatar’s collection Tender is one of five very strong finalists for the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It is always an honor to have a book in the running for an award, so yay, and thanks British Fantasy Awards for some good news!

Best Collection
· Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman (Bloomsbury)
· Strange Weather, by Joe Hill (Gollancz)
· Tanith by Choice, by Tanith Lee (Newcon Press)
· Tender: Stories, by Sofia Samatar (Small Beer Press)
· You Will Grow Into Them, by Malcolm Devlin (Unsung Stories)


Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Winner: Best Worst American by Juan Martinez

Wed 16 May 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Best Worst American cover The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College has announced that Best Worst American by Juan Martinez has been named the recipient of the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction.

The awards will is presented for a debut work in the genre of speculative fiction. Martinez will receive a $5,000 honorarium that will be presented during a Dartmouth-hosted panel to discuss the genre and their work.

The judging was spearheaded by New York Times-bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley, whose wide-ranging work includes speculative fiction for both adult and young readers. Her soon-to-be-released novel The Mere Wife (MCD × Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a contemporary retelling of the classic “Beowulf.”


Words Are My Matter wins a Hugo!

Sat 12 Aug 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Words Are My Matter cover - click to view full sizeWe are delighted to hear that Ursula K. Le Guin’s nonfiction collection Words Are My Matter won the “Best Related Work” Hugo Award last night at the Worldcon in Finland!

This year’s Hugo sits “on a base designed and produced for Worldcon 75 by local Helsinki artist and Science Fiction fan, Eeva Jokinen” and we will post a picture of it if we can at some point later. In the meantime, congratulations to the fabulous list of winners and nominees!


It was never the Lovecraft award

Thu 12 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Dear H.P. Lovecraft fan who are upset that the World Fantasy Award statuette will no longer be Gahan Wilson’s bust of HPL: you have my sympathies. It’s hard to see the cultural assessment of someone you love and respect change as time passes.

But: being rude and insulting writers? That can stop now, thanks.

Winners returning the award seems a bit over the top to me — I just got one and I’m not giving it back! — especially as the HPL publishing biz seems to grow and grow and no one is saying don’t read his books. He’s taught all over the country and there are so many of his books out there that even if all his titles were . . .  by some eldritch and unspeakable pact . . . (sorry) taken out of print right now there are so many copies in used book stores there is no way people would stop reading him.

I’m curious what the new design will be, although I don’t envy the board the choice. But this was never the Lovecraft award, it’s the World Fantasy Award. Who knows: from now on it may change every year, every 40 years.

I’m proud of — and grateful to — everyone in the writing, reading, and publishing community who worked towards this change and for the World Fantasy Convention Board for recognizing the need for change.

Peace in our time!

Screen Shot 2015-11-12 at 12.29.40 PM

 


Quick thoughts on WFC 2015

Mon 9 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Buy this from Powell's!Holy bananas, that ended surprisingly well!

  • This is why I never write these things. There’s too much I’ll miss and that’s an hour I should have been napping after the weekend working working!
  • The book room was a huge, great well-lit space with tons of space for the crowds of eager readers ready to snap up hot hot books. Sadly said readers seemed to be seduced by Saratoga Springs’s lovely streets and great restaurants and mostly did not appear. Or they couldn’t get memberships or something. Darn it.
  • That said, Ninepin Press sold tons of copies of The Family Arcana from our table. People love Jed’s story-as-pack-of-cards.
  • Lovely restaurants: Karavalli (Indian, wow); Hattie’s (all the sides = dinner for this happy vegetarian); Four Seasons (very handy for a box lunch for still happy parent and child); Cantina (Mexican: can you sit 10 people with no reservation for Sunday lunch? No problem — nice, thank you!).
  • Out-of-con experiences: taking a 6-year-old to a con immediately changes everything. There are too many people, it’s chaotic, it’s an unfamiliar space — and, yes, that’s just me. But she made half a dozen books and met some friends so it was not all bad. And: hotel swimming pool, of course! Kid’s museum: high five for pre-arranged play dates! Another of course: the park. Hooray for finding the Triton’s pool and the statues of Pan, Dionysus, and the Maenads as well as leaves, man, leaves. You can do a lot with leaves and a bit of Greek mythology goes a long way.
  • Meanwhile: Gary K. Wolfe reviewed Mary Rickert’s new book You Have Never Been Here in the Chicago Tribune. All right!

The Three Ps:

  • Panels: they were epic! I suppose as I did not go to any, see out-of-con-experiences above, previously mentioned (and sometimes coldly abandoned) table in book room, and the theme was Epic Fantasy. There were some people I’d have loved to see on panels but I did not. C’est la vie.
  • People: it is great to see friends and meet people only known online or . . . once-were complete strangers. I had one meeting at the con with Ron Eckel of Cooke International who does a fab job of selling our books abroad (dammit, that reminds me I have a list of things I have to send him) and otherwise “relied” on happenstance, which worked out mostly ok but for everyone I did not actually see. Oops.
  • Parties: I got to two (er, I think), Kickstarter and Ellen Kushner et al’s Tremontaine, and they were both busy and well supplied, yay! The latter was such a happening that I ended up sitting on the floor outside chatting for a long, long while with many good people.

Also:

  • The art show was great! We got a tiny skull with crown papercut by Kathleen Jennings and a fantastic painting we’ve admired for years by Derek Ford.
  • I sneaked a galley of Sofia Samatar’s forthcoming novel The Winged Histories to one of the happiest people I know, Amal El-Mohtar. Yay!
  • Chatted with Jeffrey Ford and Christopher Rowe. Why pick those two out of the hundreds? Because we like to transmute art into commerce and 2016 will see Jeff’s new collection A Natural History of Hell coming out and 2017 will see Christopher’s debut collection for which you should put in an extra pair of socks because it will knock them right off you and fortunately he is a much better writer than me so his book is actually good while my blog posts are, well, here we are, it never will end, will it?

Happily:

  • The bust of H.P. Lovecraft is done and gone as the World Fantasy Award. Well done Gahan Wilson for making it in the first place and the board for making the decision. The world changes and we change with it and everyone I know is happy about this change.

Goofy story:

  • On Sunday we went out to lunch with friends rather than taking the kid to the banquet. At 1:30 or so I got a phone call from Gordon Van Gelder (one of the award administrators) who asked if we’d be at the award ceremony later as he was wondering if our kids could have another play date while the adults droned on about awards. I thought this was a great idea so we made a play date.
    Which made sure we were back at the hotel.
    In time for the awards ceremony.
    In which we received an award.
    Ha!
    I swear I am not usually this dense (um, honestly . . .) but since the kids had had such a good time on Friday I figured this was legit. Ha again! I’ve even been party to wrangling unknowing award winners in the past. If anything I thought, hey, maybe Kelly’s story . . . ? but I really thought, ooh, playdate = happy kid. Hats off to Gordon, nicely done.

And the awards!

Congratulations to all the winners — and the nominees — especially Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory at ChiZine whose work ethic and determination to push great, dark books into the world is unequaled. It was fantastic to see the collection award shared between Angela Slatter and Helen Marshall. I hate awards because it is silly that not everything gets the prize. I was happy to remember Kathleen Addison’s The Goblin Emperor had won the Locus Award and I cannot wait until Kai Ashante Wilson starts racking them up. I wish Life Achievement award winner Sherri S. Tepper had been there because some of her books blew me away and I’d have liked to thank her.

It is an honor to have been nominated and a surprise to win. I did not have a speech — not hubris, I just thought the jury would go for something else as these awards tend towards the darker side of fantasy and as ever it was a very strong category. But afterwards I realized how silly I was: the book had a decent chance: it is called Monstrous Affections, the stories are bleak, amazing, dark, scary, fantastic. Of course I think it should win all the awards (hello Mr. Nobel Prize, do you do YA anthologies? Have you read Alice Sola Kim’s story that ends the book? Dare you to read it all alone late at night . . .) but still. And. Also. Anyway.

Thanks to the writers and artists in the book — this award is obviously really all about their stories. Thanks to Deborah Noyes our editor at Candlewick Press as well as Nathan Pyritz the designer and everyone at Candlewick who have made working on this book (and Steampunk!) such a joy. Thanks also to cover artist Yuko Shimizu and as always to Kelly’s fabulous and steadfast agent Renée Zuckerbrot. We’re grateful to the judges for their hard work and to the readers everywhere who have allowed us to keep living the dream.


Congratulations to Sofia Samatar!

Sun 9 Nov 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

A Stranger in Olondria cover - click to view full sizeWe are so, so happy to celebrate Sofia Samatar’s novel A Stranger in Olondria receiving the World Fantasy Award. Congratulations and all joy to Sofia whose debut novel has been so widely recognized as a strong, inventive, and fabulous addition to the field. Besides the World Fantasy Award, Olondria has also received the British Fantasy and Crawford awards and was a Nebula and Locus finalist and Sofia won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Congratulations are due to all the nominees and the winners:

Life Achievement: Ellen Datlow and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Novel: A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
Novella: “Wakulla Springs”, Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages (Tor.com 10/2/13)
Short Fiction: “The Prayer of Ninety Cats”, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean Spring ’13)
Anthology: Dangerous Women, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Tor; Voyager)
Collection: The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
Artist: Charles Vess
Special Award – Professional: (tie) Irene Gallo, for art direction of Tor.com and William K. Schafer, for Subterranean Press
Special Award – Nonprofessional: Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, & Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld

We spent the weekend in Arlington, VA, at the World Fantasy Convention catching up with many friends and meeting many new people. Our book haul was impressive! We came down from Massachusetts on the train with Kathleen Jennings whose illustration graces the cover of Olondria and throughout the weekend I was lucky enough to spend time with both Sofia and Kathleen. Part of the joy of the time was knowing that Sofia and Kathleen were comparing notes and that they were both looking forward to working on the cover of Sofia’s next novel, The Winged Histories, which, along with a short story collection, Small Beer Press will publish.

Once they’ve arrived back from Virginia, we’ll have a few signed copies of A Stranger in Olondria in stock (the hardcover will be out of print soon) as well as a few signed copies each of books from Ysabeau S. Wilce, Eileen Gunn, Nathan Ballingrud, Ted Chiang.


Earlier Entries in Awards »