Brisbane!

Fri 28 Aug 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., arrival, Australia, Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, travel| Posted by: Gavin

Lede not buried! See: Kelly will be doing these things and I will be doing these things.

Brissy: is where we are headed. Near the Great Barrier Reef is where we were. (Photos: um, maybe when my camera and laptop start talking again.) Melbourne: where we are for Kelly to do Melbourne Writers Fest stuff. Also: Melbourne has a Burmese restaurant and a zine store.

Here’s Kelly’s sched. in Brisbane:

and mine:

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10 years on

Thu 2 Jul 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Apparently it’s been 10 years since we first publisher Kelly’s second collection, Magic for Beginners. Which had a different working title for a while (as I think all of her books except Stranger Things Happen have had) but you know which one Kelly went with in the end. Even if the actual story “Magic for Beginners” wasn’t actually finished so it wasn’t in the first set of advance galleys we sent out.

The official-ish bibliography is pasted in below — such a lovely cover painting by Shelley Jackson! so many lovely covers! so many trips abroad that book brought! — and I’ve posted some covers in a tiny video. Random House recently published lovely new paperback and ebook editions with an added bonus of a chat between Kelly and Joe Hill, and Laura I. Miller has written the book up on Lithub today. They’ve also put up the first story, “The Faery Handbag.”

If you have everything else, may I direct you to these — which I don’t have yet, but am awful tempted by!

Salon, Village Voice, Onion, HTML Giant Book of the Decade
Time Magazine, Salon, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year
Locus Award Winner
Young Lions, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Finalist

1. Small Beer Press, Northampton, MA. July 2005.
   Harcourt/Harvest, USA pb. September 2006.
   Random House, USA pb/ebook, July 2014
2. Gayatari Publishing, Russia. March 2007.
3. Hayakawa, Japan. August 2007.
4. Harper Collins, UK.
5. Argo, Czech Republic.
6. Grup Editorial Tritonic, Romania.
7. Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Germany. February 2008.
8. Editions Denoel, France*. May 2008.
9. Wydawnictwo Dolnoslaskie, Poland.
10. Woongjin Think Big Co., Korea. 2008.
11. Grupo Leya, Brazil.
12. Donzelli Editore, Italy. Forthcoming.
13. Babel, Israel

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AWP Reading/Party: Thu April 9, 7 pm

Wed 1 Apr 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., A. DeNiro, Amalia Gladhart, conferences, Kelly Link, parties, readings| Posted by: Gavin

In less a week or so we will be in the Twin Cities (where our distro, Consortium is based, woohoo!) at the AWP Conference and Bookfair. To celebrate 1 million poets, writers, editors, publishers, readers, teachers, students, preachers, itinerant educators and professional argumentors getting together we are hosting a party with a few readings in it. Here are the salient details!

When: Thursday, April 9, 7 -9 pm
Where: Peterson Milla Hooks, 1315 Harmon Pl, Minneapolis, MN 55403 (4 minutes by car from l’hotel, says Google Maps)
What: Party — with short readings from . . .
Who:
Amalia Gladhart (translator of Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar)
A. DeNiro (Tyrannia)
Kelly Link (Get in Trouble)

We’ll also have a table in the Bookfair, #324, and will be there be most of the time (multiple snack breaks will be taken) while the Bookfair is open:

4/9     Thu. 9 am – 5 pm
4/10   Fri. 9 am – 5 pm
4/11    Sat. 9 am – 5 pm

and at said table on Friday morning we are very happy to announce that we will have those lovely writers in for signings!

Friday, April 10, 30-minute signings:
10 am  Kelly Link
10:30 am  Amalia Gladhart
11 am  A. DeNiro

This post will be updated with panel info and anything else that seems appropriate. Can’t wait to be standing there in the bookroom with 1000 (sounds about right, yes?) other indie presses. I am going to go and buy me some books, chapbooks, and journals. And maybe a T-shirt if I am lucky. Whomsoever brings the pink T-shirt, I am your buyer!

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Locus Recommended Reading

Fri 13 Feb 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alice Sola Kim, Delia Sherman, Eileen Gunn, Holly Black, Kelly Link, Locus, Monstrous Affections, Nalo Hopkinson, Ysabeau S. Wilce| Posted by: Gavin

This month’s issue of Locus (handily available on Weightless) is a humdinger of a read — not just for this here publisher, although our books do get many great shout outs. For which, Yay!

I always find the year in review columns interesting to see the range of books covered, what I’ve read, and what I’ve missed. This year I thought they were even more enjoyable than ever because they were even more personalized than ever. There is still the authoritative Recommended Reading List, but there are so many books and magazines mentioned and highlighted throughout the whole issue (ok, I haven’t read the whole thing yet) that I found it made for immersive reading. I love how widely the editors look for books and how fresh their eyes are. It’s easy to get tired of the unending stream of books, magazines, anthologies, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, etc., but what I got from this issue was that it was put together by a group of people who are enthusiastic about books and their jobs and are happy to share their enjoyment.

This year three of our 2014 books and one story from LCRW were included in the list. (We published 3 new collections and 1 new novel, and reprinted 2 novels and 4 ebooks to make a total of 10 books, plus 1 chapbook and 2 issues of LCRW):

Questionable Practices, Eileen Gunn
Young Woman in a Garden, Delia Sherman
Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories of Califa, Ysabeau S. Wilce
“Skull and Hyssop”, Kathleen Jennings (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet no. 31, Dec. 2014)

I’m very happy to see that Monstrous Affections, the YA all-monster-all-the-time anthology that Kelly and I edited for Candlewick was on the list, received some fabulous mentions, and had 5 stories included. Me, I’d have included all 15 stories, but, hey, I co-edited the beast:

Monstrous Affections, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, ed (Candlewick)
“Moriabe’s Children”, Paolo Bacigalupi
“Left Foot, Right”, Nalo Hopkinson
“Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)”, Holly Black
“Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying”, Alice Sola Kim
“The New Boyfriend”, Kelly Link

And it is also pretty fabby to see Kelly’s three stories included, one from Monstrous Affections and one story from the anthology My True Love Gave to Me which is not included in her new collection, Get in Trouble (also reviewed in this issue by Gary K. Wolfe):

“I Can See Right Through You”, Kelly Link (McSweeney’s #48)
“The Lady and the Fox”, Kelly Link (My True Love Gave to Me)

Happily for us, there were also a couple of reviews of our books. Gardner Dozois reviewed Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams:

. . . lyrical, whimsical, eccentric, baroquely ornamented, and often very funny. . . . but what really makes these stories shine is the voice they’re told in – one using flamboyant, over-the-top verbal pyrotechnics that somehow almost always pay off. . . .

and Eileen Gunn’s Questionable Practices:

Nobody sees the world quite like Gunn does, who puts her own unique spin on everything, transforming even the mundane into something rich and wonderful . . . [including] two stories published in this collection for the first time, “Phantom Pain” and the richly textured variant on the Golem story, “Chop Wood, Carry Water”.

and even a review of Monstrous Affections by Rich Horton.

And, if you do go check out the Recommended Reading list, don’t forget you too can go vote in the poll. I like voting in almost any context so of course I recommend it here. In the meantime, thanks to Locus for all the work that goes into that corker of a February issue and to everyone who reads and votes for our books.

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Got the snacks, cupcakes, beer, just need the reader

Fri 13 Feb 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, readings| Posted by: Gavin

and Kelly will be on a train back from New York City soon. She also did a radio interview and read at Word Jersey City and chatted with Lev Grossman. I saw a photo on twitter, weird.

Tonight! Books! Eats from King Street Eats! Cupcakes! Berkshire Brewing beer!

Odyssey Bookshop, 7 pm!

Location: 9 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075 (get directions)

Poet A. B. Robinson will read followed by Kelly reading, doing a Q&A, and enjoying being in Western Mass for a couple of days before heading oot scoot off to the West Coast. Hope to see you there!

Monday: Brookline Booksmith!
Tuesday: Elliott Bay, Seattle!
Wednesday: Powell’s, Portland!
Thursday: Booksmith, San Francisco!
Friday: Literati, Ann Arbor!
More!

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Slipstream Fiction Goes Mainstream

Wed 4 Feb 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin

Names? Genres?

Hey, we just know what we love and when we can we publish it.

Great article in the Wall Street Journal by Anna Russell and Jennifer Maloney with shout outs to many favorite authors. Our new LCRW blurb:

“a ’zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.” — The Wall Street Journal

And this is all tied in to Kelly’s new book, Get in Trouble, which, despite a houseful of colds and days of sick or snow days we are celebrating and getting Kelly ready to head out to a ton a great bookstores. Love the picture of Kelly, too!

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Kelly’s new collection is out on Tuesday

Sat 31 Jan 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

(Sign up for our email newsletter.)

Taking a break from the nonstop LCRW action (new issue in the works, bonus issue for summer!) I wanted to take a moment and celebrate Get in Trouble, the first new collection for adult readers in a decade from Kelly Link (my lovely spouse!), Small Beer cofounder, editor, art director, LCRW co-editor, etc., etc.! It has nine stories in it and it is a cracker.

Get in Trouble comes out on Tuesday February 3, 2015, in print, ebook, and audio from Random House. Excited does not begin to parse the feels, the oceanwide feels of seeing a new book from Kelly in print. The reviews have begun to appear, here are a few:

“The trick, of course, is that we can’t stop reading, that we — like she, like so many of the characters in this collection — are hopelessly engaged.” — David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“A new Link collection is therefore more than just a good excuse for a trip to the bookstore. It’s a zero-gravity vacation in a dust jacket.”— Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune

“Utterly addictive, finely wrought concoctions of fantasy and science fiction and literary realism and horror and young adult and old adult.” — Isaac Fitzgerald, The Millions

“If you’ve ever lost something, if you’ve ever had to live without something you really and truly love, Link will break your heart with her stories, and you’ll be glad.” — Rebecca Vipond Brink, The Frisky

“[Link’s] stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust.” — Erin Morgenstern

“Utterly astonishing.” — Peter Straub

“Get in Trouble offers further proof that she belongs on every reader’s book shelf.” — Karen Russell

“A combination of George Saunders’s eerie near-reality mixed with Amy Hempel’s badda-boom timing, plus a dose of Karen Russell’s otherworldly tropical sensibility.” — Library Journal

You can read two of the stories now: “The Summer People” and “I Can See Right Through You.” If you enjoy it, order a copy wherever books are sold.

Kelly is about to go out on a book tour — if you miss these you might hear her on the radio. The one on Feb. 13th in Western Mass. should be a party, come by if you can!

Feb. 5, 7:30 pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St.
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Feb. 9 – 11
ABA Winter Institute
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, NC
Indie Bookstores, FTW!

11 Feb, 7 pm
Barnes & Noble – Upper West Side (with Emma Straub)
2289 BROADWAY
NEW YORK, NY 10024
Kelly Link in Conversation with Emma Straub Audience Q&A, Signing

12 Feb, 7:30 pm
Word Jersey City (with Lev Grossman)

123 Newark Avenue
Jersey City NJ 07302
Master of magic realism and “sorceress to be reckoned with” Kelly Link stops by to celebrate the release of her latest collection of short stories, Get in Trouble, with a signing and reading. She will be in conversation with fellow author and New York Times bestseller Lev Grossman (The Magician King).

13 Feb, 7 pm
Odyssey Bookshop (with A. B. Robinson)
9 College St.
South Hadley, MA 01075

After the reading everyone is invited to stay and have cupcakes and other treats. A. B. Robinson’s poetry has appeared in TINGE as well as Industrial Lunch, which she currently co-edits. Her […]

16 Feb, 7 pm
BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH
279 HARVARD ST.
BROOKLINE, MA 02446

17 Feb, 7 pm
ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY
1521 10TH AVE
SEATTLE, WA 98122
“We’ve been waiting for this night to happen: Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters, makes this welcome Elliott Bay return for her dazzling new book of stories, Get in Trouble.”

18 Feb, 7:30 pm
POWELL’S BOOKS
1005 W BURNSIDE ST
PORTLAND, OR 97209
— where the book is already #11 on the bestseller list: Go Portland!

19 Feb, 7:30 pm
The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
“Kelly Link’s newest short story collection Get in Trouble is fiction in its finest. Half realistic, half fantastical, each story does just what the title promises: it gets into trouble. Beloved by writers and readers alike, Link is an expert at creating brilliantly detailed, layered worlds pulsing with their own energy and life.”

20 Feb, 7 pm
LITERATI BOOKSTORE
124 E WASHINGTON ST.
ANN ARBOR, MI 48104

Even moar events here.

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Where we are in the actual world

Tue 18 Nov 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Dickinson, Thoreau| Posted by: Gavin

Kelly is off to Santa Cruz, California, where she’ll be on a panel on Thursday, November 20 at 4 p.m. with Karen Joy Fowler and Kim Stanley Robinson as part of Living Writers Series (free, open to the  public from 4:00-5:45pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206.)

Which reminded me of a thought provoking essay Robinson published on Slate recently, “The Actual World: “Mount Thoreau” and the naming of things in the wilderness.” Robinson reminded me that people are out there in the world (offline, really? Yes!) climbing, doing show and tell with Thoreauean objects on mountain tops, and getting out into the world. Slate — despite all the stickystickycruft on their site included many great photos which made the essay come alive as well as links (ah, the internet) throughout. The one I clicked and then left open as a tab for a week or so was this “Webtext on the Ktaadn passage from The Maine Woods.” I haven’t read The Maine Woods and am not sure I ever shall but this passage challenged me more to think about humanity and the world more than anything else I’ve read in a while:

I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them.

In other Small Beer book news, Peter Dickinson’s A Summer in the Twenties received a lovely review from the Historical Novels Review. Here’s a sample:

Dickinson shows us 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.

Fascinating to see that the book is categorized as “Jazz Age” — since it is set in the 1920s. Given the subject of the book, it would be fun to come up with other names for the time, “Age of Labor,” something like that? Also, given that the LA Times just cut all their sick leave and vacation time, I figure it’s about time to enter another age of labor. He said, optimistically.

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Limiteds limitations reached

Thu 28 Aug 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Hal Duncan, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Just marked the limited editions of Hal Duncan’s An A-Z of the Fantastic City and Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners as out of print. Yay! This might have something to do with updating the LCRW subscription page.

There are a few unsigned, unnumbered hardcovers of the former for sale and it is still available in the saddle stitched chapbook edition and ebook. The interior illustrations by Eric Schaller are so great and fit the book so well that we only ever made a pdf ebook — perfect for your big phone, water proof (really?) tablet, computational device — see for example the frontispiece below.

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In which we go to Readercon!

Tue 8 Jul 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Chris Brown, Cons, Delia Sherman, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Kushner, Greer Gilman, Kelly Link, Readercon, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, are you going to Readercon this weekend? We are! Well . . . Kelly will be there Friday and then she is flying off at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday for beautiful Portland, Oregon, where she’ll be one of the fab faculty at the Tin House Writers Workshop. OK, Tin House first: it’s held at Reed College, Oregon, and Kelly is doing a seminar:

Wednesday July 16th, 3pm, Vollum Lecture Hall
Nighttime Logic: Ghost Stories, Fairy Tales, Dreams, and the Uncanny, with Kelly Link
The writer Howard Waldrop distinguishes between the kinds of stories that rely upon daytime logic and stories that use nighttime logic. What does he mean by this? We’ll examine writers, stories, and techniques that dislocate the reader and make the world strange. 

and a reading:

Thursday, July 17th, 8pm
Reading and signing with Kelly Link, Mary Ruefle, Antonya Nelson

Kelly is not on programming at Readercon. But, many, many Small Beer authors are! Some of them may be familiar, some will have travelled many miles to be there. Check out the program here to see where these fine folks will be:

All the way from Seattle: Eileen Gunn!
All the way from Austin! Chris Brown
Shirley Jackson Award nominee Greer Gilman [fingers crossed for both that and for an appearance by Exit, Pursued by a Bear]
Up from NYC: Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman
Down the coast from Maine: Elizabeth Hand
Al the way from California, Crawford Award winner Sofia Samatar

— which all means we will have signed copies to go out from next Monday onward. (Want a personalized book? Leave a note with your order!)

I (Gavin) have two things scheduled:

Friday
4:00 PM    CL    Kaffeeklatsch. Gavin Grant, Yoon Ha Lee.

Saturday
10:00 AM    G    Books That Deserve to Remain Unspoiled. Jonathan Crowe, Gavin Grant, Kate Nepveu, Graham Sleight, Gayle Surrette (moderator). In a 2013 review of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed, Stephen King stated, “While I consider the Internet-fueled concern with ‘spoilers’ rather infantile, the true secrets of well-made fiction deserve to be kept.” How does spoiler-acquired knowledge change our reading of fiction? Are some books more “deserving” of going unspoiled than others? If so, what criteria do we apply to determine those works?

If you have big opinions about spoilers, tell me! Wait, don’t spoil the panel! Wait! Do!

We will have two tables in the book room, where, besides our own best-in-the-world-books we will also help DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION, yay! We will have copies of the limited print edition of one of the most interesting (and huge, it is $30, has color illustrations, plus an additional story) anthologies of recent days: Women Destroy Science Fiction edited by Christie Yant and with a pretty incredible Table of Contents.

Come by and say hi!

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Bookslinger: The Specialist’s Hat

Fri 27 Dec 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bookslinger, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Available today on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is Kelly Link’s World Fantasy Award winning story “The Specialist’s Hat.”

Previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger:

Bernardo Fernandez, “Lions” (translated by Chris N. Brown)

John Kessel, “Pride and Prometheus”

Kij Johnson’s “At the Mouth of the River of Bees”

Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s “Delauney the Broker” (translated by Edward Gauvin)

Ray Vukcevich, “Whisper”

Maureen F. McHugh, “The Naturalist”

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Pelican Bar”

Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”

Benjamin Rosenbaum, “Start the Clock”

Maureen F. McHugh, “Ancestor Money”

Download the app in the iTunes store.

And watch a video on it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySL1bvyuNUE

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Susan and Kelly, tonight, Cambridge, Mass.

Mon 18 Nov 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

Are you curious about how a manuscript becomes a book? Get ye to the Porter Square Bookstore tonight! Susan Stinson and Kelly Link read and talk about the writing and editing of Susan’s novel Spider in a Tree. 

Here’s the info from the bookstore website:

Our Next Event

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Indies First!

Fri 8 Nov 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Nathan Ballingrud, Sofia Samatar, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

Since Sherman Alexie first threw the Indies First idea out into the world, more than 375 authors have signed up to try their skills at handselling books at 300 bookstores.

Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria, will be Borderlands Books in San Francisco from 1-4 pm and Kelly Link will be at the Harvard Book Shop in Cambridge (where you can get Three Zombie Stories).

Some companies want to be your always and everything, these shops want to find you a good book. Ok, maybe sell you a mug, too!

Why are we posting this? Because we love the indie bookshops!

More here.

ETA: And Nathan Ballingrud will be at the excellent Malaprop’s in Asheville!

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East Ghost lunch interviews

Thu 31 Oct 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Nathan Ballingrud, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin

We hear there’s an excellent review of Nathan Ballingrud’s book coming up in Locus which reminded me that a great interview (and a story) with Nathan just went up. Which reminded me about two more good interviews. Luckily it’s lunchtime here on the East Coast (today aka the East Ghost), a great time to sit down and enjoy an interview with your brains/candy/sweets/actual lunch:

Nathan Ballingrud at the Weird Fiction Review:

I think of horror as the literature of antagonism, and this is why it’s so valuable to us. For me – and of course I speak entirely of my own preferences – a good horror story is upsetting. It does not reinforce the status quo. It’s an act of hostility to some cherished assumption, whether it’s the durability of familial bonds, the presumed benevolence of God, or even the basic decency of our own hearts. Horror fiction should harshly interrogate everything that makes us feel content. It’s the devil’s advocate of literature. We absolutely need that, and that’s why it abides, whether we call it horror, or Gothic, or strange, or weird. It’s all an interrogation.

Kelly Link at Gigantic:

I think I’ve hit a point with TV shows, maybe less so with books, where as soon as I have an idea of where the show is going, I would rather be doing something else. I’m not really so interested in shows that are realistic, or what passes for realistic depictions of how men are figuring out to be men, if the women are secondary characters: which rules out Mad Men, Breaking Bad.

Susan Stinson at Lambda Literary:

All of the characters in the book are outside of my time. As a white woman writing across lines of racial identity, I know that I have built-in biases that I’ve acquired from the culture. I think we all do, and that’s one of the legacies of slavery. I didn’t know when I started writing the book that Jonathan Edwards was a slave owner. Once I knew that, it became clear that I needed to enter as deeply as I could into the minds and lives of the characters who were slaves in the household. Anything else would be a terrible omission based on fear. Several characters in the book are slaves. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves, a historical fact that Edwards enthusiasts sometimes ignore. So, I did my best.

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Kelly @ Random

Wed 9 Oct 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

So, the big news around here is that Kelly sold her next couple of books—and reprint rights to Magic for Beginners—to Noah Eaker at Random House. Yay!!

The first of the books is Get in Trouble*, Kelly’s first new collection of stories since Pretty Monsters (2008). Get in Trouble should be out in early 2015. It will be followed at some point by the second book, Novel As Yet Unwritten**.

Thanks as ever to Kelly’s fabby agent Renee Zuckerbrot of the Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency and to Kelly’s new foreign rights agent Taryn Fagerness who has already sold Get in Trouble to Francis Bickmore at Canongate Books—who did such a great job with Pretty Monsters.

Here is the proper and official announcement as reported in Publishers Marketplace:

Author of Magic for Beginners, which was a Time Best Book of the Year and on Best of the Decade lists from the Village Voice, Salon, and The Onion and Stranger Things Happen Kelly Link’s GET IN TROUBLE, another collection of short stories, and her first novel, to Noah Eaker at Random House, byRenee Zuckerbrot of Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency (NA).
Foreign rights: taryn.fagerness@gmail.com

* Kelly assures me the cover design will not feature the word “Get” in tiny letters inside a huge “Trouble.” I say wait and see.

** Not final title.

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Monday: MFB CC no more

Fri 27 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Creative Commons, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Just a note to say that due to an upcoming change in the rights status, as of Monday, September 30th, we will be taking down the creative commons versions of Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners.

First I’d like to thank all the publishers who went along with this: Harcourt, HarperCollins UK, and also the ten other international publishers, thank you for your bigheartedopenmindedness! Because two stories from MFB also appeared in Pretty Monsters, the CC-version of MFB has always been 2 (er, somewhat circumventable) stories short of the published edition. (The ebook, which is available on Weightless and all the other usual spots, of course includes all the stories.)

Second, in the 5 years MFB has been available under the CC license there have been at least 125,000 downloads which is amazing! and we’d like to once again thank everyone for their CC-conversions . . . and also for CC-inspired work!

Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen, is still available under the CC-license (145,000 downloads and counting!) and we are still committed to the ideas behind it. All our ebooks are available DRM-free on Weightless and we are always open to the idea of releasing further titles under the CC-license in the future.

In the meantime if you’d like to download Magic for Beginners before we take it down on Monday: all the DRM-free versions are of course here.

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Small Beer Podcast 18: Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” & Cider

Tue 24 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Dusty Buchinski, Geoff Noble, Jennifer Abeles, Julie C. Day, Julie Day, Kelly Link, Podcastery, small beer podcast, Stone Animals| Posted by: Julie

Old friends never go out of style. Yet, somehow, too often they manage to slip into the dusty corners of our lives. Each time one pops up and disrupts my helter skelter schedule, I feel a frisson of rediscovery. “Yes, this is why we remember each other. This really is how it used to be.”

This latest Small Beer podcast is exactly such an old friend. Recorded a while back, I got nervous about the time involved in editing it down, then distracted by a number of non-podcast related deadlines, and finally let the recording slip into some forgotten crack. Dear, Lord, what was I thinking?!  The discussion is opinionated, amusing and thoughtful in just the right measure. Months later it makes me want to go back and reread “Stone Animals” all over again.

Spoiler Alert: The details of the story are discussed at length. If you have not yet read “Stone Animals” consider this your excuse to do so now. Not. One Wasted. Moment. I promise.  You can purchase the beautifully illustrated chapbook from Madras Press, knowing all proceeds go to the Fistula Foundation, or you can read it for free (under a Creative Commons license) as part of Kelly’s Magic for Beginners collection.

Episode 18: In which Julie C. Day, Jennifer Abeles, Dusty Buchins, & Geoff Noble discuss Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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Some goings on, reviews, &c.

Fri 6 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Kelly Link, Maureen F. McHugh, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 29 is out. Must write a prop’r post about that soon. Phew. It is a goody.

Things on the to-be-read pile: Duplex by Kathryn Davis. Alice Kim gave it a thumbs up which is good enough for me. Also, picked it up at Odyssey Books the other night after Holly Black’s reading.

Just came across this great review of Travel Light by Paul Kincaid from 2007 on SF Site.

“The enchantments of Travel Light contain more truth, more straight talking, a grittier, harder-edged view of the world than any of the mundane descriptions of daily life you will find in … science fiction stories.”

Sounds about right to me. We reprinted this book because I found myself buying more and more copies to give to people and now I am very glad we did as now readers have told me they pick up multiple copies to press on friends. Thus a good book is read!

Nerds of a Feather reviewed Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Unreal and the Real: Where on Earth: “You’ve probably guessed that I really liked this volume of short stories . . . ” (There’s an earlier review of Outer Space, Inner Lands here.) Nerds of a Feather is a great name.

If you subscribe to F&SF, you may already know this: Angélica Gorodischer’s “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon” appeared in the May/June edition of F&SF.

A while ago Kelly did a podcast interview and reading with Hold That Thought with Rebecca King. Kelly in turn interviewed Readercon guest of honor Maureen F. McHugh and Scott Edelman posted it in two parts. And! Game reviewer VocTer posted a reading of “Magic for Beginners” on YouTube. This is part 1 and is an hour long!

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Bookslinger

Fri 17 May 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Rosenbaum, Bookslinger, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, Maureen F. McHugh, Ray Vukcevich| Posted by: Gavin

Darn it, haven’t kept up with the Consortium Bookslinger app! Every week they post a new story from one of the Consortium publishers and since we publish a fair number of short story collections, a fair number of those stories are from our books. We’ve got new stories scheduled to go out just about monthly.

Checkkkk it out:

Ray Vukcevich, “Whisper“

Maureen F. McHugh, “The Naturalist”

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Pelican Bar”

Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”

Benjamin Rosenbaum, “Start the Clock”

Maureen F. McHugh, “Ancestor Money”

Download the app in the iTunes store.

And watch a video on it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySL1bvyuNUE

 

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Kelly reading April 9, 7 pm, @ Pen Parentis, NYC

Tue 2 Apr 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, readings| Posted by: Gavin

Kelly will be in NYC reading with Leigh Newman and Sarah Gerkensmeyer next Tuesday night as part of the Pen Parentis reading series. Here’s all the info:

DATE:  Tuesday, April 9, 2012

TIME: 7-9, with 3 readers (5-8 minute readings) and a Q & A session focused on writing and parenting to follow. Please plan on arriving at least 10 minutes before the event.

PLACE:  The Andaz, Wall Street 75 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005   212-590-1234

DIRECTIONS: 2,3,4,5,J,Z to 75 Wall Street. Corner of Wall & Water

Kelly Link is the author of three collections, Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen. 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 lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press. They have a three-year-old daughter, Ursula.

Leigh Newman returns to the Pen Parentis Salon as deputy editor ofOprah.com, where she writes about books and life and editor-at-large for the indie press Black Balloon Publishing. Premiered while still in manuscript format at one of the earliest Pen Parentis events, her hilarious memoir about her Alaskan childhood, Still Points North, is forthcoming from Dial in 2013. Her essays and short stories have appeared a variety of magazines and newspapers, including One Story, Tin House, Fiction, the New York Times, Modern Love. She believes in making her own popcorn, embarrassing her kids by writing I LOVE YOU in red frosting on their lunch sandwiches, and owning dogs that are just way too big to fit in the bed. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two boys and many, many light sabers. Her work can be found at leigh-newman.com    Read more of her work.

Sarah Gerkensmeyer‘s short story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, was selected by Stewart O’Nan as winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Sarah has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, Grub Street, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, The New Guard Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Cream City Review, among others. Sarah, a mother of two little ones, is the 2012-13 Pen Parentis Fellow. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University and now teaches creative writing at State University of New York at Fredonia.

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That AWP thing

Mon 4 Mar 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., AWP, conventions, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Hey, Thursday through Saturday of this week we will be participating in the annual literary scrum commonly known as AWP. This year it’s in Boston where the weather should be a comfy 40 degrees (or 5 centigrade) with maybe rain and snow TK. Yay! Bring your boots!

Before I forget: on Saturday the book fair is OPEN TO EVERYONE! Come on by! It’s in Exhibit Halls A, B, & D,  Plaza & Level 2. Phew.

We haven’t been to AWP since 2009 and it will be awesome and overwhelming to catch up with everyone and see  all the new flashy things that people are up to. Woohoo! Kelly is teaching at UMass Amherst on Wednesday afternoon, so we drive to Boston in the evening—already missing out on the early parties! Oh well. Thursday or Friday early in the evening she is part of a UNCG alumni reading somewhere in Cambridge (details TK). Other than that, not sure how many things we’ll be doing. Would love to see Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott in conversation . . . But there may have to be strategic withdrawals as we are old, and, of course, parents!

The best thing about the whole bedazzling thing: it’s being held at the Hynes Convention Center. Ok, that’s not soooo fab, but it is within a quick T/bus/taxi/car ride to Yoma Burmese restaurant and Pho Saigon (both in Allston), the latter of which is in the Super 88 Hong Kong Supermarket food court  and they have the best banh mi sandwichs. Otherwise, sure there are plenty of restaurants around the convention center. The worst thing: the Other Side Cafe closed last year. Oh I am so sad.

Anyway, the conference is expected to be brutal. Woohoo! We will be at table L26 in the book fair—no doubt behind a pillar, under the a/c, so far from where it’s all happening, man, that when we look around we are actually in New Hampshire. But, hey, we will have books on sale! Or, books for sale at discount prices? Something like that. Also, we like trades, so bring them on!

Kelly is on one panel at 9 am on Thursday morning with two local-to-us writers, John Crowley and Jane Yolen, one used-to-be-local writer, Kate Bernheimer, and one new-to-me writer, Anjali Sachdeva:

Room 107, Plaza Level

R108. Modern Fairy Tales and Retellings. (Anjali Sachdeva, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, Kelly Link, Kate Bernheimer) Many of us grew up reading the same stories our grandparents read when they were children. But contemporary writers are also creating their own fairy tales or crafting surprising variations on traditional stories, for both children and adults. In this panel, authors who have written modern retellings of old tales will discuss the need for fables in modern society and the literary marketplace, as well as the writing process they use to go beyond archetype and tradition to create new tales.

(Here’s the schedule. Note, that’s just Thursday. AWP is a just little huge.)

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Stranger Things Happen Limited Edition is here!

Tue 11 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions| Posted by: Gavin

Guess what just arrived in the office? The Subterranean Press signed and numbered limited hardcover edition of Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen. What a treat this book is. Someone asked me once why Small Beer didn’t publish it ourselves and I have the answer right here in these two books in my hands.

You can now get STH (as it goes by around the office) in a 6″x9″ hardcover with a fantastic wraparound jacket by Kathleen Jennings. I may have to sacrifice one of the dustjackets to my wall—although Kelly bought some of the art from Kathleen, so maybe that will be good enough. I’ve included two of the title-page illustrations Kathleen did for each of the stories in the book, “Shoe and Marriage” and “The Specialist’s Hat.”

As Carolyn Kellogg noted in the Los Angeles Times, “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.”

Kelly isn’t in the office today but she will be later this week and then we will ship out the personalized copies asap.

Of course the book is still available in our paperback edition—now in its seventh printing with that iconic Shelley Jackson cover—and as an ebook, although neither of those editions include the two-story hardcover chapbook (Origin Stories: “Origin Stories” and “Secret Identity”) that comes with the Sub Press edition. Those are some crazy, beautiful books and here are some photos to prove it:

              

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Ted Chiang, movie(!), and Lightspeed

Tue 4 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, Lightspeed, Ted Chiang, the movies| Posted by: Gavin

The new issue of Lightspeed Magazine just went out and besides all that new and shiny stuff it includes Kelly’s story “Catskin” and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Kelly’s story will go live on December 18th but Ted’s is exclusive to the ebook—which of course you can get on Weightless.

The other big news for Ted Chiang fans was last week’s announcement that “Story of Your Life” has been optioned for film. The source material is about as good as it gets, so fingers crossed that it will be made and be great.

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Stranger Things … & Magic for Beginners on the Humble Bundle

Fri 19 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., DRM-free, ebooks, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Now with 5 extra books!

Please welcome the debut of a new kind of offering: the Humble eBook Bundle!

Here’s a brief primer on this sensational deal: for two weeks, you can pay whatever you want to get these six digital, DRM-free books: Pirate Cinema, Pump Six and Other Stories, Zoo City, Invasion: The Secret World Chronicle, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners. If you choose to pay more than the average, you will also receive Old Man’s War and graphic novel Signal to Noise!

This is the first Humble ebook offering and is only available for two weeks,
so head over to the site and pick up your Humble eBook Bundle right now!

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The Humble Bundle

Thu 11 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

I am guessing that by now you’ve heard about the new ebook Humble Bundle which contains the full DRM-free ebooks of Kelly’s first two books, yes? I’m going to put up a sticky post with the HB counter on so on that will be nice and obvious for the next two weeks.

If you don’t know what I am on about, below the cut I have cut-n-pasted the intro from their blog. Basically you can pay what you want for a rather awesome ebook bundle. The monies get split between the authors, the charities, and the Humble Bundle people. If you pay more than the average (currently $12.43 and which, interestingly, has risen over the last two days) you get two extra books. The HB people usually do ebooks, although they did a cool music one earlier this year which I bought for the OK GO extras—addicted to those videos. Cory Doctorow put the ebook edition together and I think tapped a bunch of people who have released their books under Creative Commons licenses and/or as DRM-free books. (There being really no point in buying DRM’d books if you ever expect to read them again.) It really is the simplest, neat, and lovely idea and it is awesome to have Kelly’s books involved.

Introducing the Humble eBook Bundle!

Get ready to feast your eyes on this new bundle! Please welcome the debut of a new kind of offering: the Humble eBook Bundle! Read more

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Sweden and being offline

Mon 1 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Cons, Kelly Link, travel| Posted by: Gavin

Tomorrow we’re off to Uppsala in Sweden to Kontrast where Kelly’s one of the guests of honor along with Joe Abercrombie and Peter Watts. Can’t wait! Kelly’s collection, Pretty Monsters, has just come out there (in two volumes, sort of the same way it was done in Australia) and we are going to get to meet her translator, Ia Lind, as well as the lovely folks at X Publishing . . . and then there is the con: so far, so good on that front. They’ve been wonderfully communicative and helpful with our odd requests (beer! chocolate! carseats!). Besides the Glasgow Worldcon in 2005 it will be our first Eurocon.

You can check out programming here and I’ve pasted our schedule below. I’m mostly on childcare but I do get to talk about the Death of Science Fiction (ok, “Science fiction and the future”) on Saturday. Ideas for that panel are most welcome! Kelly will probably do a workshop (always her first love), too.

After Sweden we’re going to visit family in Den Haag (yay!) so we will be mostly offline for a bit. Although that doesn’t ever really work anymore, does it?

KELLY LINK

Friday
19:00 Short opening ceremony followed by signing

Saturday
13:00 The short story and the ideas panel
17:00 Writing and research panel
19:00 What has steampunk got to say about us? panel

Sunday
13:00 GoH interview
16:00 Closing ceremony

GAVIN J. GRANT

Saturday
11:00 Science fiction and the future

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In the mails recently

Tue 25 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Joan Aiken, Kelly Link, Kij Johnson, Peter Dickinson, Sofia Samatar, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Here are pics of a few things that have arrived at the office recently:

1. Galleys of A Stranger in Olondria — booksellers, meet Sofia and get your copy at the Heartland Fall Forum.
2. Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s The Indigo Pheasant (read his guest post here).
3. J. Boyett’s novel Brothel, which arrived with a nice note.
4. Bike cards from the fabulous artists at Cricket Press in Lexington, Kentucky
5. Galleys of the two volume Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin.
6. The first issue of One Teen Story: “The Deadline” by Gayle Forman (subscribe!)
7. A stack! Made up of . . .
   1. Donny Smith’s new translation of Wenceslao Maldonado’s If Cutting Off the Gorgon’s Head.
   2. A galley of the Subterranean Press edition of Kelly’s Stranger Things Happen with the lovely cover and interior illos by Kathleen Jennings.
   3. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23, edited by Stephen Jones, which includes Joan Aiken’s story “Hair”
   4. Fantasy & Science Fiction‘s September/October issue featuring Peter Dickinson’s “Troll Blood” as well as stories by Andy Duncan and Richard Butner.
   5. Finished and actual copies of Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees.

And!

Finished and actual copies of Lydia Millet’s new middle grade novel, The Shimmers in the Night, whose publication day is TODAY!

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Tonight, Kelly & Victor LaValle, Brooklyn

Wed 22 Aug 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookstores, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin

Tonight at 7:30 PM you can catch Victor LaValle and Kelly Link in conversation about LaValle’s latest book The Devil in Silver at Greenlight Books, 686 Fulton Street 
(at South Portland)
, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Click here for a map.

In other Kelly news, I might be reading this wrong but it looks like you could pick up the Sub Press limited edition of Stranger Things Happen 1/2-price in this sale(!). I’ve got a photo of a galley to post soon. So near actuality!

And two more quickly nearing events:

Kelly will join Karen Joy Fowler &c at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, Lexington, KY, on September 21 – 22. And, we get to see Gwenda and Christopher wherein we will get to toast the talk of the town, Gwenda’s debut novel Blackwood!

And on  the 5th – 7th of October Kelly is one of the guests (along with Peter Watts,  Joe Abercrombie, Sara Bergmark Elfgren & Mats Strandberg, and Niels Dalgaard) at Kontrast in Uppsala, Sweden. Can’t wait to go! Afterward we are visiting family—and going to see museeeuuummmss in the Hague.

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