Fri 14 Jul 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

TrickedAlex Robinson, whose Tricked ain’t a bad book, writes a great piece on the music behind the book. (Which is one of those books with pictures.) One of the very enjoyable aspects of the book is that all the music and the bands are imaginary — which, for a book about a musician, is amazing fun. All this band history and hagiography gets tossed around, with tons of injokes and references, but instead of being some music scene you know/don’t know, care/don’t care about, it’s all part of the furniture and decoration of the novel. One quote:

Reading Albert Goldman’s THE LIVES OF JOHN LENNON was actually a big influence on the conception of the book. Though it seems pretty much forgotten today, Goldman’s book was very controversial when it came out in the late 1980s. Basically, Goldman said that the Lennon-Ono version of their life (Lennon and Ono madly in love and off drugs, Ono runs business while Lennon “retires” to raise son, bake bread and be a house husband, etc) was a big fat lie. In Goldman’s version, Lennon was a reclusive, violent drug addict who was about to leave the cold, cunning Ono until she had him hypnotized (!) into staying.


Fri 14 Jul 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

TrickedAlex Robinson, whose Tricked ain’t a bad book, writes a great piece on the music behind the book. (Which is one of those books with pictures.) One of the very enjoyable aspects of the book is that all the music and the bands are imaginary — which, for a book about a musician, is amazing fun. All this band history and hagiography gets tossed around, with tons of injokes and references, but instead of being some music scene you know/don’t know, care/don’t care about, it’s all part of the furniture and decoration of the novel. One quote:

Reading Albert Goldman’s THE LIVES OF JOHN LENNON was actually a big influence on the conception of the book. Though it seems pretty much forgotten today, Goldman’s book was very controversial when it came out in the late 1980s. Basically, Goldman said that the Lennon-Ono version of their life (Lennon and Ono madly in love and off drugs, Ono runs business while Lennon “retires” to raise son, bake bread and be a house husband, etc) was a big fat lie. In Goldman’s version, Lennon was a reclusive, violent drug addict who was about to leave the cold, cunning Ono until she had him hypnotized (!) into staying.


Book Sense!

Thu 6 Jul 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Big News: A.’s book is a Book Sense Pick for August with a great quote from Caleb Wilson of Davis-Kidd who obviously got the book. (Thanks go all those bookshops who nominated it!) So now the bookshops should have it and hopefully be selling the heck out of it!

SKINNY DIPPING IN THE LAKE OF THE DEAD: Stories by A. DeNiro
“This is a great debut collection of loopy, off-the-wall, and still-somehow-packing-emotional-weight stories; DeNiro can weld words into some mighty strange configurations.”
— Caleb Wilson, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Nashville, TN

If you are in Massachusetts, come meet A. Deniro, hear him read, pick up a reader’s guide (and drinking guide), join the LCRW launch party, and see him and Theodora Goss all in the next few days:

7-9: Readercon 17, Burlington, MA (where Small Beer will have a table and many interns will attend!)

10 (Monday): Amherst Books, 8 Main Street, Amherst, MA 01002 413.256.1547 — 800.503.5865
— with LCRW 18 launch party

11 (Tuesday) — Porter Square Books, Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 · (617) 491-2220
— with Theodora Goss (In the Forest of Forgetting)

Also on the Book Sense list in case you didn’t believe us earlier. This is a damned good book:

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s)
“Alice Sheldon trekked across Africa with her parents in the 1920s, became an accomplished painter, joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary, worked for the CIA, received a Ph.D. in psychology, and married twice. She also had a career as an influential writer of science fiction as James Tiptree. Her complex gender identity and sexual orientation is utterly fascinating, as is her remarkable life, which is made all the more vivid in this rich biography.”
— Kris Kleindienst, Left Bank Books, Saint Louis, MO


20 rainstorms

Mon 3 Jul 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

In 20 Epics there is some rain. We sold all the copies we had at Readercon. It was an epic job of salespersonship by interns, friends, us, others. Finding the epically designed books was a long sordid tale of hidden icons, misdirection, and dead letter offices which was only concluded when Mary “I live in Iceland” Robinette “Shimmer” Kowal tracked them down far into the Labyrinth past the Steaming Kitchens of Despair. The books sold grandly, richly, with bread and cheese and some ale. They found spots by the fire in inns, they were purchased by plucky, heartfelt, surprisingly good looking kids who in a certain light looked like writers. The books were prizes, ill-gotten gains, kept in saddlebags, used as hats, ripped in two and kept by distance-separated lovers. There are at least twenty epics in the book but you only have to buy one. Lulu. Powells.

– Damn rainmakers. Damn rain gods. Damn all the Rain Cowboys. Living in the rain forest. No rainbows. Would love a rain check on the rain, thanks. Refuse to get out the rain wear. This is more of a squall than a storm. Being rained out. Sad not to be rain proof.

– A. DeNiro interviewed by John “Whatever” Scalzi. Read a couple of the stories in a funsize PDF edition.


Thu 29 Jun 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Sarah Monette, who has had a few stories in LCRW, has a second novel out right now, The Virtu. This one stands by itself in the way her debut didn’t (the books are in a series, although they don’t tell you that). The Virtu races along and Monette gives her characters some great dialogue. It’s a book mostly about boys but there is a great governess (who isn’t, of course) who is so much fun that she is missed when she disappears off screen. A great book to get stuck into late on a summer’s eve.


Thu 29 Jun 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Sarah Monette, who has had a few stories in LCRW, has a second novel out right now, The Virtu. This one stands by itself in the way her debut didn’t (the books are in a series, although they don’t tell you that). The Virtu races along and Monette gives her characters some great dialogue. It’s a book mostly about boys but there is a great governess (who isn’t, of course) who is so much fun that she is missed when she disappears off screen. A great book to get stuck into late on a summer’s eve.


Thu 22 Jun 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Howard Who? Books. That thing above is the real and actual Howard Who? cover. More stuff was added to the page. A crap condition hardcover of this can be got for almost the same price as our upcoming pb, but you wouldn’t get Kevin Huizenga’s Ugly Chicken drawing! On Bookfinder, ABE, etc., it runs about $40 for a nice non-library copy, and Elliott Bay, B. Brown, and more have it up around $125 for a fine/fine signed HC. Howard will be at World Fantasy Con in Austin, TX, in November, and you can get him to sign your copy there.

This book should shoot out once word gets around. It’s 20 years old but this is alt. hist. fic. so the stories aren’t dated, if anything they’re just more heartbreaking, more harsh. Was “Horror, We Got” really published? Damn. Should send it out to blowhards and talking heads and step back and watch them get all head-explodey.

– In picture books, you gots to read MOME. The Spring/Summer ish is “Designed by acclaimed designer and cartoonist Jordan Crane” and “spotlight[s] a regular cast of a dozen of today’s most exciting cartoonist.” ‘Tis true. Wacky, deep, odd, not your average kitchen sink-is-clogged-what-should-I-do lit comics antho.


Thu 22 Jun 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Howard Who? Books. That thing above is the real and actual Howard Who? cover. More stuff was added to the page. A crap condition hardcover of this can be got for almost the same price as our upcoming pb, but you wouldn’t get Kevin Huizenga’s Ugly Chicken drawing! On Bookfinder, ABE, etc., it runs about $40 for a nice non-library copy, and Elliott Bay, B. Brown, and more have it up around $125 for a fine/fine signed HC. Howard will be at World Fantasy Con in Austin, TX, in November, and you can get him to sign your copy there.

This book should shoot out once word gets around. It’s 20 years old but this is alt. hist. fic. so the stories aren’t dated, if anything they’re just more heartbreaking, more harsh. Was “Horror, We Got” really published? Damn. Should send it out to blowhards and talking heads and step back and watch them get all head-explodey.

– In picture books, you gots to read MOME. The Spring/Summer ish is “Designed by acclaimed designer and cartoonist Jordan Crane” and “spotlight[s] a regular cast of a dozen of today’s most exciting cartoonist.” ‘Tis true. Wacky, deep, odd, not your average kitchen sink-is-clogged-what-should-I-do lit comics antho.


BEA

Mon 22 May 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Book Expo — the annual trade show of the sliced wood imprinted with colored marks — is out of the way for another year. This time Small Beer did not have a booth (rather our distro, SCB, displayed some of our books and stacked up freebies of our catalog, the paperback edition of Mothers & Other Monsters, and Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. One of the fun things of the show was A.’s reading guide and drinking game which can be downloaded here: (PDF warning) The Cabana on the Lake of the Dead. A. signed a ton of copies of his book and carried boxes of them all across our great taxed-but-not-represented capital city. Thanks, A.!

There were awesome parties (PGW [w/ the Brazilian Girls], Consortium, SCB[!] and others at Madam’s Organ, maybe the one below), a good time was had by most, galleys were picked up, and food was gathered more sparingly than dietitians recommend.

Books at the top of the stack include:

There are tons more but now it is time to empty the suitcases into the washing machine (mustn’t mix up the galley-filled suitcase with the smoke reeking post-party clothes) and get ready to git on the road to WisCon.


May reading

Mon 22 May 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

– Not to be missed: a huge LA Times profile of Jim Sallis and review of his latest book.

– Takedown in Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review of Nathaniel Philbrick’s book Mayflower, a history of King Philip’s War (ca. 1675) in which Philbrick relies on a biography of Benjamin Church written by his son long after the war:

On the second-to-last page of his book, he [Philbrick] reluctantly concedes that Church is a “persona,” even as he insists that “Church according to Church is too brave, too cunning, and too good to be true is beside the point.” This is about as reasonable, and as indefensible, as writing a history of the Vietnam War that relies extensively and uncritically on an “autobiography” of John Kerry written in 2013 by Kerry’s daughter Vanessa.

– Congrats to Rick Bowes whose SCI FICTION story ” There’s a Hole in the City” won the Million Writers Award. (Seen at Matt‘s.)

– “The United States announced that it would free 141 of the 490 “enemy combatants” at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba because they do not threaten U.S. security after all.” (Harpers Weekly)

– New story on Strange Horizons by Gavin Grant: “We Are Never Where We Are.”

– Today’s moral leader: Steve Almond? Wow. Go Steve. (Seen at Bookslut.)

Like the president whom she serves so faithfully, she refuses to recognize her errors or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power.

This is the woman to whom you will be bestowing an honorary degree, along with the privilege of addressing the graduating class of 2006.

It is this last notion I find most reprehensible: that Boston College would entrust to Rice the role of moral exemplar.


Fordmania

Mon 1 May 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

More Jeff Fordian news: Gwenda Bond and others are pushing and pulling at The Girl in the Glass all this week at the Lit Blog Coop. Short and punchy, baby.

– Crazy good news as Jeff Ford’s The Girl in the Glass wins the Edgar Award for Best Paperback! World domination beckons as his new collection, The Empire of Ice Cream, is available for all those readers looking to find out more.

– Time travel? Jeff Ford says he can.


April reading &c.

Sat 29 Apr 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Jane Jacobs died yesterday in Toronto at the age of 89. She lived there because she thought it was one of the best cities in the (Western) world. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has had a great effect on city planners (and should be read by the people guilty of suburbing this country to death). She synthesized a ton of information and makes it palatable to the general reader. One smart woman. You could do worse than read more of her books.

– Meant to post a link to this obit for Muriel Spark who wrote many enjoyable books gave Maggie Smith the role of a lifetime.

– The Zoo Press story keeps going the rounds and Tom Hopkins won’t let it go — yay!

– Mad comic book update. As in, update on a mad comic book, not a long, impassioned, knowledgeable update on many comics. Mostly because while traveling we are piling up comix at our local comic shop (hoping they have added the new Kevin Huizenga titles) which means that at some point there will be champagne, chocolate truffles, and a pile of comics-day. Always a day to look forward to.

Meanwhile, the people at NBM keep putting out these absolutely crazy Lewis Trondheim books (as do Fantagraphics — great days for picturebook lovers). First “read” (as they’re often wordless) some of the minibooks (Diablotus was noted but not much said about it in LCRW 4) and loved the whimsy — not something that’s generally hugely popular around here — cut with irony.

Meanwhile, the people at NBM keep putting out these absolutely crazy Lewis Trondheim books (as do Fantagraphics — great days for picturebook lovers). First “read” (as they’re often wordless) some of the minibooks (Diablotus was noted but not much said about it in LCRW 4) and loved the whimsy — not something that’s generally hugely popular around here — cut with irony.

The latest NBM book is Dungeon Twilight Vol.1 Dragon Cemetery. There’s a whole complicated back story about a stopped planet with a dark side and a light side (hmm, think of the storms at the dark/light edge!) but what’s really going on is an absolutely mad quest with the Dust King, a barbarian-in-training rabbit who named himself after his hero, Marvin, giants, love (why not?), and so on.

If, since you stopped reading Conan and Rider Haggard, you miss the mountains of skulls those titles often featured; quick, order the book.

Talking of poetry (and we know you were as you are a secret poet (except your secret is out now!) and you have been gleefully using April, NatPoMo to you, to push chapbooks on everyone you know, you bastard) here’s an enthusiastic if uninformed recc: Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk is great. It’s made up of seven long poems, you can read part of one here — which was also published in a chapbook, A Ghost As the King of the Rabbits.

Poetry is like stained glass windows, there’s light coming through and it illuminates the world in odd ways. Some people like it, some don’t. The light coming through here is hypnotic (hey, isn’t all poetry to a certain extent?) and addictive.

– Strange Horizons are in the midst of their spring fund drive. Please consider supporting them. With Scifi.com closing Scifiction last year and the recent closing of Fortean Bureau this is an especially good time to support Strange Horizons. Also, they have some great gifts (including a limited edition of Mothers & Other Monsters) and even memberships. Ok, it’s always a good time.

I doubt Strange Horizons will have Kelly Hogan singing backup the way the amazing Neko Case does on her current tour (Do Not Miss), but they do have annual Reader Awards and apparently readers are enjoying speculative poetry and getting put off starting a small press, yay!

Articles

Also, in reviews, Third Place went to a review of Magic for Beginners by Geneva Melzack. Congrats to all the winners and thanks to all the readers who read and voted.

One of the nice things about editing the Year’s Best Fantasy is that people will sometimes send or give you books. (Of course, sometimes we can’t track down the books we’d really like to read which sucks.)

Last year at some convention Scott Thomas (I think!) gave us a copy of his book, Westermead. It sat on the shelf (we have a section of the office where Year’s Best materials pile up. It is not always pretty or tidy.) for a while until one of those days when a stack (in this case a stack is the length of one’s arm) was moved to a reading area for some quick smart reading. Westermead slowed everything right down. Its a collection of linked stories that borrows from nineteenth century pastoral novels without being the usual pastoral fantasy. It isn’t just the odd twists that the stories take, it’s the embedded stories and mythologies, the depth of the world glimpsed at in the margins. In some ways this was more reminiscent of the pastoral novels of Thomas Hardy or the short stories of M.R. James than other fantasy novels. Either way, a treat. Westermead is also available in a beautiful over-sized limited edition.

– A review of Justina Robson’s Living Next Door to the God of Love. Is it the title that makes readers love this book?

– Publishers Weekly did their annual science fiction and fantasy issue (yes, we all have issues) including a good piece on the state of the nation by by Gwenda Bond.


Sun 12 Feb 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Lydia Millet’s Pure & Radiant HeartOh Pure and Radiant Heart is an incredible, immersive experience. It is at once hopeful and also a dark, depressing journal of our national and and international potentially-fatal nuclear fascination.

Millet imagines the consequences and fallout of the sudden appearance of three nuclear scientists from the 1940s in 2004. Most of the novel is told through the eyes of Ann and Ben, a quiet and content couple from New Mexico. They have found places in the world, a library, gardens, to work and to love.

Ann is one of the first to recognize and then believe in the scientists, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi. Ben is less convinced but goes along with Ann as she gives the scientists a place to stay. She, as are most others, is most taken with Oppenheimer. A cult of personality forms around the scientists even as they try to get the government to acknowledge their existence and listen to their message of nuclear nonproliferation. Millet makes occasional swipes toward explaining the scientists’ reappearance, but for the most part they are taken as an unexplained natural phenomena which people interpret to fit their preconceived beliefs.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is a dark, brilliant novel by an author not afraid to look into our hearts and see our best and the worst. If the end is inevitable and unsurprising it is also commentary on our times that make it so.


Sun 12 Feb 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Lydia Millet’s Pure & Radiant HeartOh Pure and Radiant Heart is an incredible, immersive experience. It is at once hopeful and also a dark, depressing journal of our national and and international potentially-fatal nuclear fascination.

Millet imagines the consequences and fallout of the sudden appearance of three nuclear scientists from the 1940s in 2004. Most of the novel is told through the eyes of Ann and Ben, a quiet and content couple from New Mexico. They have found places in the world, a library, gardens, to work and to love.

Ann is one of the first to recognize and then believe in the scientists, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi. Ben is less convinced but goes along with Ann as she gives the scientists a place to stay. She, as are most others, is most taken with Oppenheimer. A cult of personality forms around the scientists even as they try to get the government to acknowledge their existence and listen to their message of nuclear nonproliferation. Millet makes occasional swipes toward explaining the scientists’ reappearance, but for the most part they are taken as an unexplained natural phenomena which people interpret to fit their preconceived beliefs.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is a dark, brilliant novel by an author not afraid to look into our hearts and see our best and the worst. If the end is inevitable and unsurprising it is also commentary on our times that make it so.


Tiptree

Tue 3 Jan 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

A book for yous to read: The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith. So why do you need it?

  • One of the best short stories of the previous decade: “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” by Raphael Carter.
  • An essay by Nalo Hopkinson.
  • Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, and Eileen Gunn & Leslie What.

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2All of that (and more) would have been enough to make this an anthology worth your while. But what really makes it a must read is a second essay and a letter.

The essay, “Talking Too Much: About James Tiptree, Jr.”, is by Julie Phillips, author of this summer’s big biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Why do I say “big”? Because the letter is by James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) and it’s great. It’s the kind of letter that should give any writer pause when next they dash of an email. It’s not that long but it was enough to make me look forward to this 480 page bio. Making space on the calendar now.

The Tiptree Award anthology series is a great idea, well executed, with beautiful design by John Berry. This one’s just hitting the stores now: go on, start the new year off right.


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