Late March Shipping Update

Mon 24 Mar 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

We’ve been working (as slowly as I ever do these days) with Maple Press on getting shipping re-started on our limited edition of Kelly’s novel The Book of Love and the good news is that it should begin again next week.

We have two Character Editions available — Maryanne and Caitlyn Hightower — along with the Lettered. The final count of the Numbered edition will end up being less than 500 copies.

Otherwise we’re continuing to ship LCRW from Book Moon and most Small Beer books from our distro, Consortium/Ingram in Jackson, TN. We’re all caught up with everything there — bar one new subscription which came in this morning, ha!


Limited Edition Now Available

Fri 29 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Going to have to make a better post about this but The Book of Love limited edition is now available in Character, Lettered, and Numbered editions.

4-volume limited edition in black case


Book of Love, LCRW 49

Fri 22 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

If all goes well, we’re going to be picking up LCRW 49 from the printer next week and start shipping it out. Ever so slowly, as ever. I could not resist and spent a bit more for the color cover. There are many issues I’ve been very tempted to print in color but I am usually too stingy/aware of the economics of the zine for this but I see it as a little treat (my home culture!) for everyone concerned.

And, at last, the numbered edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love is now available on Book Moon’s site. Can’t wait for this to go out to people, too.


Breathtakingly Slow Movement

Mon 18 Nov 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

I’ve just added the somewhat breathtaking pricing on our forthcoming 4-volume limited edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love. At the end of the page I’ve pasted in how to get notified.

The Book of Love was just included in Time’s 100 Books of the Year and Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 of 2024. I’d planned on getting the book out earlier but it should be out soon. Everything Small Beer (or if it’s for me to do, then Book Moon, too) is slow now as I just run out of energy all the time. Publishing this book has been both fun and challenging. I doubt we’d have published it if I were well as we’d be too busy with other title. But this way at least we published two books this year and for this, unlike a regular trade edition, my molassesesque movements mattered less.

(We also have a few unsigned/numbered copies of the limited edition of Magic for Beginners. These are not part of the original edition and will not be signed on shipping.)

The books will be priced at $1,000 (Character), $600 (Lettered), and $225 (Numbered). The prices will rise to $1,200 (Character), $700 (Lettered), and $250 (Numbered) on January 1, 2025.

The art can be seen at the following links: Kelly’s Bluesky photos; Book Moon page.

We ship within the USA. Canadian friends recommend Shippsy.

We will open up orders in two steps. First: the Character and Limited Editions to a password protected page on this website. Second: the Numbered Edition on the Book Moon website.

The order of sending out information/access will be:

  1. Book of Love Ltd Ed Expression of Interest List
  3. Small Beer newsletter
  4. This and BKMN websites
1) The Character & Lettered Editions will be sold through smallbeerpress.com.
— This page will open up on Friday 11/22/24 at 10 a.m. ET. (See preamble if it does not.)
— The password protected page will be open for one week.
— Characters will be given to those who order them first.
— We will refund orders (not including PayPal fee) from any emails not on our email lists.
2) The Numbered Edition will be sold through bookmoonbooks.com.
— This page will open up on 11/22/24 at 10 a.m. ET.

Added Illustrations

Tue 2 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

As things move along on The Book of Love I’ve updated the description and added a page with all Wesley Allsbrook’s interior illustrations.


Approving Proofs, Short Run Printing

Tue 25 Jun 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Just like old days here: sent two books to the short run printer before breakfast — 1 box of Laurie J. Marks’s Fire Logic for Book Moon, 5 boxes for our distro; along with another 3 boxes of Geoff Ryman’s Was. Both books generally receive a small annual boost from Pride Month, which — from a publishing and personal standpoint — heartlifting.

Was is also taught in a couple of universities. If you’ve visited our table at AWP or, really, almost any bookfair, in the last 10 years I may have tried to put this book in your hands. It is a heartbreaker, an absolute unstoppable train that no matter how many times I reread it, I keep hoping the end will be different. It wasn’t ever a book I expected we would reprint but then, after we published the US edition of The King’s Last Song we were able to pick up the rights. And I keep re-reading it, and keep hoping. So many readers have found the same. Ack. What a book.

I started this meaning to write 2 lines: one about reprinting books, the other about approving printer proofs. I am not sure when I’ll next do this so there’s an odd feel to it. What used to be a run-of-the-mill task now holds an extra weight. The proofs are for the limited edition of Kelly’s novel, The Book of Love, and are for the endpapers, the signing sheet, the illustrations, the onlays, and the text, and I am not sure we’ll get them all approved today. Luckily for the two of us, this (hmm, somewhat mentally exhausting, there goes the day!) work also qualifies as fun.


Kathleen & Kelly Tomorrow

Mon 4 Mar 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

We have a unique intercontinental event coming up tomorrow at 5 p.m. Central Time with Kathleen Jennings and Kelly Link talking about their first collection, Kindling: Stories (Kathleen), and first novel, The Book of Love (Kelly).

We’ve worked with Kathleen for about 15 years. I think the first project was the striking and beautiful cover for Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes.

Before Kindling, the biggest projects we worked with her on were the 2012 edition of our Working Writer’s Daily Planner* and illustrating Kij Johnson’s Wind in the Willows follow-up, The River Bank. Both books were complicated, unusual, and extraordinarily interesting and fun to work on which meant that when she queried us on her first collection we were very familiar with her work and also her ways of working. So despite her coming to the end of her PhD program(!), we knew she’d be responsive and proactive — two things I struggle more and more with!

Anyway, all of which is to say, hope you will join this event tomorrow:

 

* I looked at the Daily Planner for the first time in years for this post and I am still charmed and entertained seeing Kathleen’s art all through it. She did monthly headers and spot illustrations — I’ve added a few screenshots below. I still really enjoy those planners. I don’t know if someone is making something like them now, hope so.

I ran out of time to do our edition — our kid was 2-3 years old and keeping the press running was enough for me. The final death knell was in waiting for the pre-orders to come in from Am*zon. The Planners were full color throughout and we printed them in the US. I had to get them to the printer quite early but Am*zon — who sold a good number of the 2011 edition — would not give our sales reps their order for the 2012 edition.

That year we published our two-volume “Best of” Ursula K. Le Guin short stories, collections by Kij Johnson, Elizabeth Hand, and Nancy Kress, a chapbook from Hal Duncan, Ayize’s first novel, and more. The friction and uncertainty of not getting the number was too much and although I loved the project I had to drop it. I printed what was needed through Lulu and that was it. I’d like to say I never regretted it but while that’s not true it’s also not a big thing. I’m glad we did it, that people enjoyed it, and it proved again that Kathleen was a great person to work with on a complicated project.

4 illustrations by Kathleen Jennings — birds holding leaves, person in mug, Alice-like woman, person walking with dog


West Coast Link

Mon 26 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kelly is off to the west coast for 3 quick readings then one in Atlanta. If you go, please mask up! Info below or here.

List of events from Kelly's site


Kelly @ Book Moon Tomorrow

Fri 16 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kelly will be at Book Moon tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 17, from 3-5 p.m. signing The Book of Love (and so on), saying hello, and passing out cookies. Drop by if you can!

More events. (Cambridge, Natick, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, online.)


Happy Publication Day to a Great Novel(ist)

Tue 13 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Tonight, weather willing, Kelly will launch her new book, her first novel, The Book of Love, at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. (All her tour dates .) It is an amazing novel, has received the kind of reviews an author might dream of and I love the framing of 20+ years of nope, no novel, nope then oh, ok, HUGE novel. What a treat for me and everyone else. I meant to write about it in the run up to publication but other things kept getting in the way.

Now here I am on publication day, lying on a couch in a hotel in NYC while Kelly has gone off to her a reading and I have run out of juice so here are a few links. Some people will have seen some of them, with luck they are wide enough scattered that they might intrigue many different readers. With Kelly away, I’ll go listen to her talk to Beth Golay on KMUW’s Marginalia.(Later: I strongly recommend this!) I enjoyed, even if I disagree about the book’s length, Michael Patrick Brady’s review on WBUR. My favorite thing that came out today was Riza Cruz’s Shelf Life piece on Elle where Kelly gets to recommend some favorite reads.

Before today, Ron Charles reviewed the novel in the Washington Post, Steve Pfarrer chatted with Kelly and reviewed the book in our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and yesterday Amal El-Mohtar’s review — such a review to bring tears to one’s eyes — arrived in the New York Times.

Kelly’s posted her Book of Love playlists — Apple; Spotify — and if you can’t get to any of the readings, there’s now an online event: Kelly & Kathleen Jennings read from and discuss their new books, The Book of Love and Kindling respectively and Moon Palace will have signed book plates to go with orders.


Kelly’s Book of Love Tour

Wed 7 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kelly’s new (first!) novel, The Book of Love (reviewed today by Ron Charles in the WaPo) comes out next Tuesday and very appropriately she will be at Books Are Magic with Hilary Leichter in Brooklyn to launch it.

Since we don’t host readings at Book Moon, she’ll do a local reading (with Yvette Lisa Ndlovu) on Thursday with our friends over at the Odyssey in South Hadley, and then will do a drop-in signing at Book Moon on Saturday. The next week she’s off to the Harvard Bookstore and the B&N in Natick before a quick jaunt over to the West Coast. One extra day in Atlanta, then home.

Here’s a link to all the events — there will be a virtual event with Kathleen Jennings open to all hosted by Moon Palace on March 5 — and if you do manage to go, please do wear a mask.


White Cat, Black Dog

Tue 28 Mar 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

We’re celebrating as today Kelly’s new collection White Cat, Black Dog comes out!

Kelly will be reading at the Brookline Booksmith tonight, followed by a q&a with Holly Black and at Greenlight Bookstore on April 4, followed by a q&a with Carmen Maria Machado. There are also a couple of online events — including one with Leigh Bardugo on Friday, March 30.

Link to Kelly's event page


Locus Reading & Panel

Wed 22 Jun 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

As part of the Locus awards readings and celebration, Kelly will do a zoom reading on Thursday June 23 with Michael Swanwick and be on a panel on Connie Willis and Gary K. Wolfe on Saturday, June 25:

Thursday, June 23 – 4 p.m. PDT/7 p.m. ET – Reading: Kelly Link and Michael Swanwick

Saturday, June 25 – 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. ET – DONUT SALON: In Conversation: Kelly Link, Connie Willis, and Gary K. Wolfe (bring your own donuts!)

Jeff Ford and Sarah Pinsker are two of the many readers and panellists. Should be fun. I’ve lifted the post from the Locus site so check here for updates.

Event links at Locus Awards Online 2022 will become live at their scheduled time. Here’s the full list of events from Locus:

LOCUS AWARDS SCHEDULE

Wednesday, June 22  –
4:00 p.m. PDT–  Reading: José Pablo Iriarte and Nnedi Okorafor
5:00 p.m. PDT–  Reading: Nalo Hopkinson and Catherynne M. Valente
6:00 p.m. PDT – Reading: Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Fran Wilde
Thursday, June 23  –
4:00 p.m. PDT – Reading: Kelly Link and Michael Swanwick
5:00 p.m. PDT – Reading: Suzanne Palmer and Wole Talabi
6:00 p.m. PDT – Reading: Jeffrey Ford and Angela Slatter
Friday, June 24 –
4:00 p.m PDT – Reading: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Cat Rambo
5:00 p.m PDT – Reading: John Wiswell and Connie Willis
6:00 p.m PDT – Online Hangout with Connie Willis and Locus folks
Saturday, June 25 –
10:00 a.m. PDT – PANEL: “Hauntings & Histories” with Akemi Dawn Bowman, TJ Klune, Darcie Little Badger, Sam J. Miller
11:00 p.m. PDT – PANEL: “Power Dynamics in New Worlds” with Daniel Abraham, C.L. Clark, Fonda Lee, Sarah Pinsker
12:00 p.m. PDT – PANEL: “Writing Rules and How to Break Them” with Charlie Jane Anders, Charles Payseur, Sheree Renée Thomas, A.C. Wise
2:00 p.m. PDT – DONUT SALON: In Conversation: Kelly Link, Connie Willis, and Gary K. Wolfe
(bring your own donuts!)
3:00 p.m. PDT – LOCUS AWARDS CEREMONY with MC Connie Willis

 

*Memberships include a set digital subscription to the magazine, from our February 2022 issue (our Year-in-Review issue with Recommended Reading List and Poll and Survey) to August 2022 (with the Locus Awards photo coverage and writeup) and everything in between. Member subscription is non-transferable and does not affect or extend existing subscriptions.

Connie Willis
MC Connie Willis

Locus Supports Inclusivity! Thinking of attending? Please do. We encourage people of color, women, people with disabilities, older people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to attend. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, size, nationality, religion, culture, education level, and self-identification. Locus associate editor Arley Sorg will serve as our PoC/LGBTQQIA Ombudsman.  Feel free to reach out to him in advance at locus@locusmag.com subject: Arley Ombudsman. Our Code of Conduct is available here: Locus Science Fiction Foundation Code of Conduct.


Tonight: Kelly Link & Kevin Brockmeier

Thu 25 Mar 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Well, maybe you know this by now but just in case you don’t why don’t you come join us on le zume tonight:

Join authors Kevin Brockmeier (The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead) and Kelly Link (Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners) online for a reading and discussion of Kevin Brockmeier’s new book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, which will be published in March by Pantheon.

**Register here**


Spring Zines & Postcards

Thu 2 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

I just added the zines Kelly and Ursula made in March to the site: Horoscope Stories, I Hear You’re Working on a Novel, Writing Rules, & Monster Land, as well as the Horoscope Postcards made from Ursula’s illustrations of Kelly’s stories. All the info is on this page:

Spring zines


AWP 2019, #8046

Mon 25 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Later this week we’ll be one of a million publishers and journals and writing programs taking part in the bookfair at the annual AWP Conference.

I’ll be at Booth 8046 most of the time; Kelly will be there sometimes (see panels below and the next item), and our kid will be with us, swimming, living in Powell’s if she can, reading under the table, or selling zines . . . !

Zines?

Due to shipping snafus on my part — ugh, everything delayed by short term sickness, all gone now, phew — some of our books won’t be on the table until Friday, darn it, so Kelly and Ursula went into overdrive and made some zines:

And here are a few things to potentially add to your sched. We will have copies of books by Kelly, Karen, Juan, and Abbey at their table signings.

Say hi if you’re there!

Thursday March 28
1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

R224A. Light is the Left Hand of Darkness: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. (,  ,  ,  ,  Kelly Link) “Truth,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, “is a matter of the imagination.” In 2018, one of America’s greatest science fiction writers passed on, leaving behind a library of literary and social achievements. Through her imaginative narratives, she scrutinized politics, gender, and the environment, creating alternate worlds and new societies as a means to convey deeper truths about our own. This panel celebrates her influential work and pays tribute to her legacy.

Friday March 29

11:00 – 11:30am
Kelly Link
Table signing, #8046

4:30 – 5:45 pm
F149, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

F310. Speculative Fiction, Genre, and World-building in the Creative Writing Classroom. (,  ,  ,  ,  ) With more and more writers interested in speculative fiction, magical realism, and genre, how can workshops, teachers, and programs embrace all these forms? Panelists who teach in the Clarion Writers Workshop, UCLA Extension Programs, MFAs, and undergraduate programs discuss specific approaches to teaching, including speculative fiction in literary fiction workshops, classes and programs tailored for genre forms, and guiding students to build sound, imaginative, and diverse worlds.

Saturday March 30

10:30 – 11:00am
Karen Joy Fowler
Table signing, #8046

11:00 – 11:30am
Juan Martinez
Table signing, #8046

1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

S219. Getting Home: Writing & Publishing Debut POC Story Collections. (,  ,  ,  ) Finding a home for a story collection is hard. It’s harder still for people of color writing about worlds bypassed by the larger reading public. This panel features debut authors whose collections explore what it means to speculate on racialized experience in the US, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. They discuss how perceptions of identity wind through issues of craft and cultural expectations: What do readers seek in their work? To what degree do authors fulfill or frustrate assumptions?

3:00pm to 3:30pm
Abbey Mei Otis
Table signing, #8046


Feb. 20: Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, & Jordy Rosenberg

Wed 13 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

(from Forbes Library’s press release)

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeThe third reading in the Forbes Library Writer in Reading Series “Our Work And Why We Do It” is Wednesday, February 20th, from 7-9pm in the Coolidge Museum at Forbes, featuring three brilliant fiction writers:

Kelly Link
author of “Get in Trouble”, “Magic for Beginners”,
“Stranger Things Happen” and more!

Abbey Mei Otis
visiting from Ohio and author of “Alien Virus Love Disaster”;
first reading from this collection in the area!

Jordy Rosenberg
author of “Confessions of the Fox”
(a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection)

~this event is FREE and Wheelchair Accessible~

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the event!

(You can read more about the writers here on the library’s website and here on Facebook!)

This series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is interested in exploring how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. The series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

I’ve been calling this reading In The Offing, an attempt to name a theme I feel captures the character these writers share. While diverse in formally adventurous ways, each carves a unique path toward futures portended in the murk and bright of the present or dredge different possibilities for histories buried in the past. They contain, in the richness of their visions and the lyricism of their articulations, a spirit that echoes Ernst Bloch in his demand for utopia: “that is why we go, why we cut new metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears…”

To learn more about the writers and their worlds, you can find a brief interview with Kelly Link from the MacArthur Foundation here, the title story from Abbey Mei Otis’ collection here (with an introduction by Dan Chaon), an interview with Jordy Rosenberg here, and an excerpt from his novel here.

Also, on February 7th, Jordy will be reading at UMASS Amherst as part of their Visiting Writers series! More info here.


Carmen Maria Machado Recommends . . .

Fri 4 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Over on Electric Lit Carmen Maria Machado, or, rather Carmen Maria Machado — yeah! — got 2019 off to a shiny bright start with some lovely lovely things she said about books by Shirley Jackson, Joanna Russ, Gloria Naylor — as well as Sofia Samatar and Kelly:

Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

When I was a baby writer, a friend recommended I check out Kelly Link’s stories, and it changed my life. I don’t mean that hyperbolically: if you are a reader who loves my work, you have Kelly Link’s mind-bending, genre-smashing, so-good-you-want-to-die fiction to thank. An entire generation of female fabulists have been profoundly influenced by her, and she was also my gateway drug into some of my other favorite authors: Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber), Kathryn Davis (Duplex), Shirley Jackson (Haunted of Hill House), and so many others.

Tender Sofia Samatar

2017 might seem like a pretty recent year for a book to have influenced me, but Sofia Samatar has been publishing these stories in magazines for ages, and they haven’t lost an ounce of their magic or eeriness. Samatar is best known for her secondary-world fantasy duology A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, but this collection of short stories occupies a different, more liminal space. Samatar’s keen and nimble mind, gorgeous sentences, and incredible imagination are on full display here; she balances beauty and horror in a way that thrills and inspires me. If you love Helen Oyeyemi (What is Not Yours is Not Yours), Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves), or Kij Johnson (At the Mouth of the River of Bees), you need this book. (Bonus: It was published by Small Beer Press, owned by Kelly Link and her husband, Gavin Grant. They publish tons of amazing fiction, much of it by women. Check them out!)

Stranger Things Happen Tender cover


Clarion

Mon 23 Jul 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Following Christopher Barzak, Holly Black, Mat Johnson, and Kij Johnson’s instructor weeks, Kelly and I are off to teach the final two weeks at the Clarion Writers Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in San Diego, CA. Clarion, like their lovely Seattle neighbor, Clarion West, is great fun and quite an intense amount of work between the critique workshops in the morning, the one-on-one conferences in the afternoon, and reading the stories for the next day’s workshops. See you in 2 weeks!

 


Clarion 2018

Mon 4 Dec 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’m delighted that Kelly and I are the final 2-week instructors at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop next summer in San Diego. This year’s full line up is Christopher Barzak, Holly Black, Mat Johnson, and Kij Johnson. It will be awesome. Applications are now open!


Humble Bundle: Super Nebula Author Showcase

Sat 13 May 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Hey, stop the presses (except for the ones printing and reprinting our books!), spread the word, the Humble Bundle is back! This time it’s the Super Nebula Author Showcase presented by SFWA. What do these books have in common? They all include at least one Nebula Award winning story:

  • For one single US dollar, you can get 8 DRM-free ebooks including Howard Waldrop’s Howard Who? (“The Ugly Chickens”) and Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (“Louise’s Ghost”).
  • For $8 or more and add another dozen books (8+12=20 ebooks for $8+!) including John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence (“Pride and Prometheus”).
  • For $15 or more and add another ten books (20+10=30 ebooks for $15+!) including Nancy Kress’s Fountain of Age (“Fountain of Age”).
  • For $20 or more and add another ten books (30+10=40 ebooks for $20+!) including Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees (“The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” “Ponies,” & “Spar”), Carol Emshwiller’s Report to the Men’s Club (“Creature”), and Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See (“Always” & “What I Didn’t See”).

As with all Humble Bundles, readers choose where the money goes – between the publishers; SFWA (or a charity of your choice), and the Humble Bundle. I’m scheduling this to post on the weekend and by Friday afternoon over 5,000 people have already picked up the bundle. Thanks for reading and spreading the word if you can. Cheers!


What’s Up?

Thu 9 Mar 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Kelly Link will be reading in Greensboro tonight — check out the picture of her midflow on the UNCG MFA program page! Here’s the info:

The MFA Writing Program at Greensboro and The Greensboro Review will host a fiction reading by Kelly Link on Thursday, March 9th at 7PM in the UNCG Faculty Center on College Avenue. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing.

And, hey if you are in that area, don’t miss the upcoming readings with Chris Abani (3/22), David Blair (4/5), and Heather Hartley (4/13).

FOGcon logo: the Golden Gate Bridge as a bookshelf, in fogThis weekend I would love to be in San Francisco for FogCon where Ayize Jama-Everett and Delia Sherman are the Guests of Honor — and Iain M. Banks (RIP) is the Honored Ghost — and the theme is “Interstitial Spaces.” I just looked at the programming and it made me want to go, darn it. It will be a weekend of great conversations!

And coming up in two weeks, on Friday 3/24, Sofia Samatar will be on a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book: “Building (and Breaking) Worlds in Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy,” Central JMRL Library, Charlottesville, VA.

 


AWP 2017, Before

Wed 8 Feb 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

We’ve arrived in DC — where democracy is taking a beating, fingers crossed it will survive — and tomorrow the whole AWP shebang begins. Our books are still in transit due to the ice storm that hit the northeast. With luck I’ll be getting them today and by tomorrow there will be a lovely table (110-T, come on by and say hello) full of books all neatly set up and ready for dispersement into the world.

There are approximately four quadrillions readings and parties going on in the next few days. Here are a few Small Beer-related or -adjacent during the conference and then on Saturday at 6 pm we have a reading with Kelly Link & Juan Martinez at Politics and Prose.

Thursday
Signing at the Small Beer Press table: 110-T (on the edge, near Tin House)
10:00am to 10:30am Juan Martinez
10:30am to 11:00am Sofia Samatar
11:00am to 11:30am Kelly Link 

Thursday, February 9, 2017

1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

Marquis Salon 7 & 8, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two

R205. The Political Woman: Historical Novelists Reimagine and Reclaim Women’s Place in Politics. (, , , , ) While rarely central and often discounted, women have always played a role in politics. In this panel, historical novelists discuss how and why they chose to unearth and reimagine the lost and untold stories of women in politics. What are the risks and rewards of using fiction to place women at the center of political narratives? What liberties are novelists compelled, or unwilling, to take with the historical record?

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Ballroom A, Washington Convention Center, Level Three

R282. Jennifer Egan, Karen Joy Fowler, and Hannah Tinti: A Reading and Conversation, Sponsored by Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau. (, , , ) This event will bring together three engaging contemporary female writers to read and discuss their craft. Jennifer Egan is the author of five books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Karen Joy Fowler is the author of nine books, including We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hannah Tinti is the author of three books, including The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, which will be published in 2017.
Saturday, February 11, 2017 View Full Schedule

12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

Liberty Salon N, O, & P, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Four

S181. Immigrants/Children of Immigrants: A Nontraditional Path to a Writing Career . (,  ,  ,  ,  ) Not only do you not have an uncle in publishing or see people from the neighborhood get MFAs, immigrants and children of immigrants are inculcated to opt for “safe,” “secure,” often well-paying jobs; a writing career may seem like an unimaginable luxury or a fantasy. This panel of working writers looks at both psychic and structural issues that add a special challenge for writers from immigrant families.

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Marquis Salon 9 & 10, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two

S271. The Short Story as Laboratory. (,  ,  ,  ,  ) What does short fiction allow? The form is beloved by science fiction writers, who use it to test out hypothetical futures; what does it offer writers who are doing other kinds of testing, related to emotional transitions, marginality, and migration? Is the short story an inherently border form? This panel considers these questions, the challenge of putting a set of experiments into a collection, and the tension between the laboratory and the completed book.

Saturday
6 pm
Kelly Link and Juan Martinez
Politics & Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008 Get Directions
Kelly Link will read with Juan Martinez (Best Worst American) at the most excellent Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse. This event is free to attend with no reservation required. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis. Click here for more information.


Northampton Book Fair

Tue 6 Dec 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

This world continues to be crap — i.e. “Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount” (great pop up on that page, btw — everyone needs an instant audio ad for viagra to start when they click on a link!).

So for a brief moment instead of that here are some photos from a couple of panels at the Northampton Book Fair this weekend. The fair was in the Smith College Campus Center which is a beautiful building just outside the center of Northampton. The events were in two lovely, airy rooms on the ground floor and there was an antiquarian book fair full of the most tempting things upstairs. Wow, so many pretty things.

I saw some of the 10 a.m. Children’s picture book panel readers: Rich Michelson gave a, wait, no, really, fascinating presentation on Fascinating: The Life of Leonard Nimoy, Leslea Newman read her new book Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed (you can listen to Ketzel’s 21-second composition here), and Mordicai Gerstein (The Sleeping Gypsy, I Am Pan) strode up and just started drawing away on the white board. That was fabulous. Here he is drawing Hera (he noted she didn’t trust Zeus) and his drawing of the god Pan:

hera pan

I missed Heidi Stemple and Jane Yolen (what a line up that panel had!) as I had to split to prepare for John Crowley’s reading of The Chemical Wedding in the next room over at 11 a.m. John is erudite and smart and very funny — and, hey, we sold books, which is always nice. He read and then answered quite a few questions, as the reading was well attended, and afterward I met some more local book and nonbook people.

Here’s one photo and perhaps a one-minute video I just tried uploading to Flickr:

john_crowley

John Crowley reading

I came back in the afternoon and — with mostly patient kid — sat in on the Ninepin Press celebration/reading where Jedediah Berry and Emily Houk read from, played with, and showed their current projects:

 

 

 

 


Stranger Things Happen + Fiasco Bundle

Fri 1 Jul 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

stranger_things_happen_bundle_coverI’m very excited to announce a completely new thing today: the Stranger Things Happen + Fiasco Bundle!

A couple of years ago Benjamin Rosenbaum proposed a Fiasco playset based on Kelly’s collection Stranger Things Happen. Fiasco is a storytelling game where players make up and tell each other stories with different playsets that allow them to bring in different elements, tropes, and tones to the stories. Ben wrote the playset and Steve Segedy of Bully Pulpit Games put the bundle together.

The bundle is $14 and exclusively available on Weightless Books and on the DriveThruRPG site, and comprises full sets of digital files (epubs, mobis, pdfs) of:

Get the Bundle.

About Fiasco

“Fiasco is one of the greatest storytelling RPGs I’ve ever played. I highly recommend it.”
— Wil Wheaton

About Stranger Things Happen

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 of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.

“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

“My favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link.”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered

About The Ant King and Other Stories

* “Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, “best first collection” for this book.”
—Booklist (Starred review)

“A terrific range of tales, showcasing an active, playful mind and a gleeful genre-blender.”
—Aimee Bender

“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

Stranger Things Happen cover - click to view full size Fiasco The Ant King and Other Stories cover - click to view full size


SBP @AWP2016

Tue 22 Mar 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Besides our groovy (sorry) reading on Wed. March 30 at 7:30 p.m. at the Last Bookstore [with Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse), Ayize Jama-Everett (The Entropy of Bones), and Sofia Samatar (The Winged Histories)] we have a few other things we’d like to share:

First: we have a table, #1331, in the huge bookfair. Come search us out!
Second: panels and stuff!

Thursday, March 31
11:00 am to 11:30 am
Table 1331, Ayize Jama-Everett (The Entropy of Bones) signing

3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Room 515 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
R265. Smooth Criminals: What’s at Stake When We Break the Rules? (Juan Martinez, Susan Hubbard, Robin Rozanski, Julie Iromuanya) What writing rule do you hate? Love? We all break a few: We switch POV halfway through a story, we use too many exclamation marks, we don’t write what we know, or we use the wrong form, the wrong genre. The panelists balance the costs and benefits of these misdemeanors. They explore how rules hinge on cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds. They provide rule-breaking exercises that have helped generate exciting material and talk about how rule-breaking has helped them publish and teach.

Friday, April 1
10:30 am to 11:45 am
Room 513, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
F161. Small Beer Press: 15th Anniversary Reading. (Sofia Samatar, Ayize Jama-Everett, Maureen F. McHugh, Juan Martinez) Fifteen years after Small Beer Press was founded to publish works that cross genre definitions, traditional bookstore shelving options, and academic course descriptions, four authors from different parts of the USA who now all live in California read from their books and then discuss the spaces their books were published into with Small Beer Press publisher and cofounder Gavin J. Grant.

2:00 pm to 2:30 pm
Table 1331, Sofia Samatar (The Winged Histories) signing

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Concourse Hall, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
F271. Kelly Link, Emily St. John Mandel, and Ruth Ozeki: A Reading and Conversation, Sponsored by Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau. (Emily St. John Mandel,  Ruth Ozeki,  Kelly Link) This event brings together three brilliant contemporary female writers—Kelly Link, Emily St. John Mandel, and Ruth Ozeki—to read and discuss their craft and experiences as genre-bending authors. Kelly Link is the recipient of an NEA grant and is the author of Get in Trouble. Emily St. John Mandel is the author of Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. Ruth Ozeki is the author of A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Saturday, April 2
10:00am to 10:30am
Table 1331, Kelly Link (Get in Trouble) signing

11:00am to 11:30am
Table 1331, Maureen F. McHugh (After the Apocalypse)

12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
AWP Bookfair Stage, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
S171. In the Realms of the Real and the Unreal. (Katharine Beutner, Sofia Samatar, Carmen Machado, Alice Sola Kim, Kelly Link) This panel explores genres of fiction that juxtapose the real and the unreal in experimental ways: historical fiction, literary fantasy/science fiction, weird fiction, and satire. Where do we draw the line between a secondary world and a distorted reflection of our own world’s beauty, violence, and diversity? Can we discern a poetics of the unreal in contemporary fiction? How have the continual debates over generic boundaries—and/or their irrelevance—affected the ways contemporary writers work?


SBP @The Last Bookstore in LA

Thu 17 Mar 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

If you’re in LA — or going there for the AWP conference — I hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, March 30, at 7:30 pm at the Last Bookstore for a reading/party with beer, snackity snacks, and most importantly, excellent short readings from four fabulous authors!

Ayize Jama-Everett, The Entropy of Bones
“. . . consistently resists easy categorization. . . . by setting the book in a weird, if recognizable, Bay Area, ­Jama-Everett captures something about the way it feels to live so close to so much money and yet so far; he traces the differences between postindustrial East Bay towns, the gray melancholy of an older city, the particular feeling of struggling while surrounded by otherworldly wealth. If the book veers among different  approaches . . .  there’s nevertheless a vitality to the voice and a weirdness that, while not always controlled or intentional, is highly appealing for just that reason.”— Charles Yu, New York Times Book Review

Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories
Time Magazine Top 10 Fiction of 2015 · NPR 2015 Great Reads · Slate Laura Miller’s 10 Favorite Books of 2015 · Buzzfeed Books We Loved in 2015 · Book Riot Best of 2015 · io9: Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2015 · Flavorwire: Best Fiction of 2015 · San Francisco Chronicle Best of 2015 · Electric Lit Best Story Collections of 2015 · Washington Post Notable Books of the Year · Kirkus Best Books of the Year · Toronto Star Top 5 Fiction of 2015 · New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice · Los Angeles Times bestseller · Locus Recommended Reading

Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse: Stories
Shirley Jackson Award winner · Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year · NPR Best Books of the Year · io9 Best SF&F Books of the Year · Tiptree Award Honor List · Philip K. Dick Award finalist · Story Prize Notable Book

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories
“A highly recommended indulgence.” — N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review · “An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” — Hello Beautiful · “Samatar has created characters that you will carry around with you for weeks (months?). If you love strong voices, world-building, and books that tell hard truths with beautiful language, these are for you.” — Jenn Northington, Book Riot · “Samatar’s use of poetic yet unpretentious language makes her one of the best writers of today. Reading her books is like sipping very rich mulled wine. The worldbuilding and characterization is exquisite. This suspenseful and elegiac book discusses the lives of fictional women in a fantasy setting who fear their histories will be lost in a way that is only too resonant with the hidden histories of women in our own age.” — Romantic Times Book Reviews (4.5/5 stars, Top Pick)

Get in Trouble 


Meanwhile

Mon 5 Oct 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015Out there in the world, the peoples they reads the books. What do they say? They like ’em! Just wait to see what’s going to be reviewed next week. Oh? Oh yeah, mmmhmm.

But I am meanwhiling here first about Sofia Samatar who has two stories in the inaugural edition of HMH’s latest addition to their Best American series: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015. Also: are there more SBP authors  in this book? Yes! See Nathan Ballingrud,  Kelly Link, and two stories (Holly Black’s and Paolo Bacigalupi) from Monstrous Affections received honorable mentions.

It’s interesting to look at the list of stories passed on to Joe Hill by series editor John Joseph Adams to see where they were first published.

You can read Joe Hill’s introduction to the book on Entertainment Weekly where he calls Sofia ” a rising star in the genre” and “a young she-can-do-anything star” and describes her two stories as “incredibly different and equally breathtaking stories.” Absolutely!

More fun Best American fun news? Yes! Owen King’s story “The Curator” from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 31 got a honorable mention nod in T.C. Boyle’s Best American Short Stories 2015.

Meanwhile over in bookland, Mary Rickert’s You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories received two lovely trade reviews from PW and Kirkus. We’re sending out our last few galleys now and fingers crossed we will have the book on hand at World Fantasy Con in Saratoga Springs in a month or so! Mary will be there and we will not be running out of books the way we did with Archivist Wasp at Readercon. Dammit! (Sorry again, Nicole!) See below for links to the reviews. Suffice to say if you’ve enjoyed collections we’ve published by Elizabeth Hand, Nathan Ballingrud, Kelly Link, etc., etc., this one is for you.

And we are working on another collection, this one for July of next year by none other than Jeffrey Ford. But, hey, enough for today. More on that manana!

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

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


Earlier Entries in Kelly Link »