Bookslinger: Lions
Fri 22 Nov 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bernardo Fernandez, Bookslinger, Three Messages and a Warning| Posted by: Gavin
New this week on Consortium’s Bookslinger app is Bernardo Fernandez’s “Lions” (translated by co-editor Chris N. Brown) from Three Messages and a Warning.
Previous Small Beer stories on Bookslinger:
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
Translation games
Thu 17 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alberto Chimal, Chris N. Brown, Skynet, Three Messages and a Warning, translation| Posted by: Gavin
When Three Messages and a Warning came out one of the things we meant to do was play with Google Translate. Hold that thought, let a few months pass, find a quiet Thursday afternoon and here we are.
So:
- here’s the story in the English translation
- then the same story run through Google from English to Spanish (enjoy, Hispanophones!),
- and, lastly the machine Spanish translation retranslated by Google from Spanish to English—using a different browser so that it did not just return the original text.
I used one of the shorter stories in the book, “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge” by Alberto Chimal [video of author reading], translated by co-editor Chris N.Brown so that you can buzz through it and easily compare: Read more
Small Beer Podcast 5: Three Messages and a Warning
Thu 2 Feb 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Julie Day, Michael J DeLuca, podcast, Podcastery, Small Beer on Beer, small beer podcast, Three Messages and a Warning| Posted by: Julie
It turns out the gestation period for this podcast is somewhere between that of a lion and a wolf. At the beginning of November, Michael J. DeLuca, Gavin and I recorded the first ever Small Beer beer tasting. Then we recorded two, yes two, stories from our latest anthology Three Messages and a Warning, a collection of the Mexican fantastic.
This podcast was something akin to a seventies concept album, think The Allen Parsons Project or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I seem to remember a intense discussion with the proprietor of the fabulous craft beer store, Tru Beer, in Easthampton, Massachusetts. A rapid convert, he donated a few beers to the cause. From Bread Euphoria, we acquired Day of the Dead bread. And then, like so many concept albums, the production requirements along with the obligatory aviator sunglasses and hair mousse almost brought the entire project to a screeching halt.
We are absolutely thrilled we’ve finally got our act together enough to finish this particular podcast.
Episode 5: Julie Day, Gavin Grant, Michael J. DeLuca and Three Messages and a Warning.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast in iTunes or using the service of your choice:
Next week (+ giveaway)
Fri 9 Dec 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ach, Ayize Jama-Everett, podcast, Three Messages and a Warning| Posted by: Gavin
We have a new episode of Who Is Amazon Trying To Stomp Out of Business/Subsume/Buy Out This Week. Then we will keel over in shock, shock I tells you when we discover that the $34-billion WalMart-wannabe has disclosed its teeth to the public once again. You should see what they’re like behind closed doors. Not pretty. They’ve hired some great people, they’re going to buy some great books for their publishing arm, but, man, those people are, um, not nice.
Besides that, we have a new installment of Julie Day’s excellent Small Beer Podcast. This one features two stories from Three Messages and a Warning as well as actual and real beer from our new fave beer store, TruBeer, in Easthampton.
Want to preview the anthology? You can read two stories here.
We’ll also have office copies of at least one of our January books (yes, they were December, they slipped, darn it!), Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People. We will have giveaways for that, so be ready to define liminal.
In fact, we’ll send a free galley to the first five commenters (US/Canada only, sorry) on this post who post comments either on people or liminality(!).
Remember the holiday shipping deadlines—and how they don’t apply to our ebooks!
And: we will be posting some new books. Preorders welcome! We love preorders! We send them out asap so that you get the book long before it reaches the distribution system. Go, baby, go.
What else? Next week we will be trying to finish up a lot of work before 2011 goes quietly into the night. You never know, might get it done!
Small Beer Podcast 3: Michael J. DeLuca, Head Brewer and CTO
Thu 10 Nov 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Julie Day, Karen Chacek, LCRW, michael Deluca, Podcastery, small beer podcast, The Hour of the Fireflies, Three Messages and a Warning| Posted by: Julie
I’m thrilled to be back from wilds of Western Connecticut where I was billeted after the recent Nor’easter. Small Beer headquarters feels like a book-filled Shangri-La. I can’t believe I’ve returned.
In Episode Three of our Small Beer podcast, Michael J. DeLuca and I talk about yarrow-infused beer, medieval brewing, his fiction and why Small Beer’s ebook portal, Weightless Books, is a bibliophile’s dream. Not content to leave it at that, in part two of the podcast Michael reads “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek. It’s part of our upcoming Three Messages and a Warning anthology and I don’t know how you couldn’t love it. It comes out in December.
Episode 3: Michael J. DeLuca, Head Brewer and CTO along with Julie Day and Three Messages and a Warning.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Oh, and if you’d like, go listen to Michael’s story, “The Eater,” on Pseudopod.
Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast in iTunes or using the service of your choice:
We’re Preparing Our Electronic Feast
Fri 28 Oct 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Day of the Dead bread, Gavin Grant, Julie Day, michael Deluca, Three Messages and a Warning, Tru Beer| Posted by: Julie
Next week Mike, Gavin and I will be hosting the very first Small Beer Press, multi-state, chili-beer tasting, and it’s all going to be captured on audio for episode 4 of the Small Beer podcast.
The fabulous Tru Beer here in Easthampton donated a few bottles of Left Hand Brewing’s Fade to Black Pepper Porter. It’s brewed with Serrano, Chipolte and Ancho chili peppers. I, personally, am more than a little afraid. Let’s be honest here; I’m terrified.
To go with the beer, I’m also picking up some Day of the Dead bread from Bread Euphoria. Love your local businesses is our motto here at Small Beer Press. And, really, how could we not when they create bread people with folded arms and little raisin eyes?
All this and some fine Mexican fiction. Episode 4 is going to be fantastic. With luck, we’ll have pictures to post along with the podcast.
About “Pink Lemonade”
Fri 5 Aug 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Three Messages and a Warning| Posted by: Gavin
We asked some of the writers from Three Messages and a Warning to tell us the story behind the story. Here’s the first installment . . . !
About “Pink Lemonade”
Liliana V. Blum
Although must of my writing has always been in the realistic side, I am an assiduous reader of dystopias. I love 1984, The Handmaid’s tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Day of the Triffids, for example. So I was happy to give it a try when I was invited to write a science fiction or fantasy short story for the anthology.
One of my deep and personal obsessions has always been food, and not in the bulimic or anorexic kind of way. I suffer a weird distress whenever I think about people not being able to eat, going hungry. Needless to say, when my children are sick and cannot hold food in their stomachs, I suffer more than with other common illness. When I watch a movie in which the characters can’t eat due to their fictional context (they’re in a war, or lost in the woods, or held prisioner), I grow anxious. Events like the Holocaust and famines, then, are my worst nightmares.
Since my husband, Ramón, is in the agro business, I am close to and more or less versed on the newest agrocultural trends and technologies. I am very aware of the antagonism of many people in this area. Curiously enough, everybody thinks the more technology in health, science, education, transportation, computers, gadgets, the better. But when it comes to agriculture, it suddlenly becomes satanized. It wouldn’t worry me, except because if agriculture worldwide would go “organic”and use zero-technology seeds, more than two thirds of the population would die of starvation, and most of the forested areas in the world would have to be destroyed in order to make room for those inefficient crops. So I decided to write about what would happen if these “green” groups would really have it their way. That’s how “Pink Lemonade” was conceived . . .
Liliana V. Blum (Mexico, 19xx) is not one of those women who refuse to reveal their date of birth; she just likes coincidences. So that she was born the same year that Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was published, is a great one. She is a ginger gal who suffered through her Mexican childhood of pinch-the-redhead-in-the-arm-for-luck. Now she only suffers the sun. She was born in Durango (famous for its scorpions, revolutionaries and narcos) and currently lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas (famous for its crabs and narco-related violence). Despite the eight-legged creatures, the daily bread of bullets and mutilated bodies, and being the mother of a boy, a girl, a beagle and a guinea pig, she has managed to write five short-story collections; one of them, The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (Host Publications, 2007) was translated into English. Her work has been published in literary magazines in the US, Mexico, England, and Poland. One of her books will be reprinted for a reading-campaign in Mexico City, to give away for free in the subway. She is currently working on her first novel.