Here’s a relaxed and mellow seven-minute cartoony version (with title cards) of Kelly’s story “The Specialist’s Hat” made by a team of student artists for “ENC1142 final project at FSU”:
John Kessel and Greg Frost are on the road this week (no this isn’t an APB) reading at three great North Carolina bookshops (damn, wish we were there! but they’ll be up here are Readercon which will come soon enough):
Washington DC is rightly excited to have a new bike rental program up and running. But if you live in or visit Lexington, Kentucky, for the second year in a row you take part in the program for a mere $10 (or free if you paid your $10 last year). Rumors that Christopher Rowe takes part in this just to ladies wearing little black dresses and heels “pedaling one down Main Street” are unsubstantiated and would not be repeated in any journal worthy of the public trust.
Shake Girl, a collaborative graphic novel based on real life experiences of Cambodian women attacked with acid.
Jacob MacMurray not only posted his annual Clarion West poster, but also—and this is wild (although it would be even better if VW were making a new hybrid/greaserunning van)—pics of his design for a VW van. (So now we will go buy Pacifico beer because any company that does this kind of thing has to make good beer.)
Interested in how one art intersects and inspires another? This week the Interstitial Arts Foundation, celebrating the one-year anniversary of publishing the anthology Interfictions, begins an auction of jewelry inspired by the stories in the anthology. And it’s beautiful stuff.
There is a new piece going up every couple of days (auctions only last 4-7 days, so keep checking in) and the prices begin at all of $10. These are all donations to the IAF and any monies raised go to funding the recently-announced next anthology.
Participants include artists Elise Matheson, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Mia Nutick, Kris McDermott, and many more. And, most remarkably, some of the authors themselves have created unique pieces based on their own work! Keep an eye on IAFAuctions.com to see wearable interpretations of their own work by Interfictions authors Leslie What, Rachel Pollack, and K. Tempest Bradford.
What we are doing: a new catalog, galleys of 2 books for BookExpo, a game for BookExpo, a zine, a chapbook for BookExpo, Sales Conference this weekend, sending forth review copies of The Ant King, enjoying the reviews of John Kessel’s book and sending that out further, the Phil. Book Festival next weekend. Maybe other stuff? Who knows.
Coming soonish on a website, a bike, a firecracker near you: the zine known as LCRW. And what will be in it? Pomegranates! Of course. Also, mostly fiction. This will go to the printers devils in a week or two. Here’s what’s it is:
William Alexander, “Away”
Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”
Becca De La Rosa, “Vinegar and Brown Paper”
Kristine Dikeman, “Dearest Cecily:
Carol Emshwiller, “Self Story”
Eileen Gunn, “To the Moon Alice” (poem)
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Snowdrops”
Maureen F. McHugh, “Going to France”
Jeremie McKnight, “The Camera & the Octopus”
Mark Rigney, “Portfolio”
David J. Schwartz, “Mike’s Place”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “The Honeymoon Suite”
Caleb Wilson, “American Dreamers”
Cara Spindler, “Escape”
Miriam Allred, “To a Child Who Is Still a FAQ”
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Abby Denson, Comic
Tickle your ears today with the sound of “The Ant King”—the title story of Ben Rosenbuam’s upcoming collection—the fifth in the new fantasy-flavored PodCastle (a castle in a pod: how science fictional!):
Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
Rated PG. Contains surrealism, involuntary cohabitation, strong language and characters with unconventional genders. Also, an extremely large number of geek culture easter eggs.
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
No free books this week! Making more books, LCRW (hey, we still put out a zine!), a catalog, und, yes, so weiter, is getting in the way. Also: we are planning a fun thing for BookExpo, hee hee. Cough. (Sounds look weird in Wordpress. May need to add sound.)
ARCs of Ben Rosenbaum’s collection are on their way to the secret masters of the universe who will declare it a bestseller. Yes, they are in touch with the public’s unending appetite for short story collections.
Kelly is reading next week at the South Street Seaport in NYC as part of the NYRSF reading series with Jennifer Stevenson whose sexy new novel The Brass Bed is about to about to about to arrive.
Hey, in February we sold a couple of books on the Kindle. Who knew! Asked Amazon if they would send us a Kindle to see what the reading experience was like. They demurred. People should always feel free to send us expensive gifts. We are not public servants. (Neither are we savants.) We do not fear the gifting. We are just very bad at the return part.
Just a note that our distributor is running out of the hardcover of John Kessel’s collection. We have some in stock for conventions and so on but if you want one from a store, sooner is better than later.
If you’d like a signed copy, John’s got some more signings coming up.
And: here’s a pic of Jed in LA just before the book festival madness began!
Jedediah Berry will be manning the Small Beer booth at the LA Times Book Fest this weekend so if you’re in the area go say hello (and congratulate the man!) at Booth # 1023 in Zone: J – Moore Hall Grass, UCLA campus.
Small Beer are splitting a table with the wonderful Coffee House Press. Drop by and say hi to some of their authors, and meet other local stars such as Cecil Castellucci and more authors than a forest could shake sticks at. Admission to the Festival of Books is free. Parking is $8.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, that forest will not be shaking sticks at Kelly Link who will not be there after all. Maybe next year.
Do they deliver to Massachusetts? How about to Edinburgh, since we’re there in August?
If you are after mung beans and carrot sticks, look away now. Amanda Powley, Terre à Terre’s creative force, does not believe vegetarianism has to mean abstinence. “For me our food is all about indulgence”, she tells me. “It’s not about sacrificing anything, it’s about gaining something.”
This has nothing to do with Trickster gods (excepting The Coyote Road, which has lots to so with it). Instead it is just a tricky headline to make you wonder what we’re on about now. It’s Locusfinalist celebration day—thanks to John K. for the heads-up!
The finalist list is a reminder that 2007 was a strong year, especially for men writing in this genre. That’s not snarky, look back at the list. Congratulations to Elizabeth Bear (”Tideline,” Asimov’s Apr/May 2007) and Connie Willis (“All Seated on the Ground,” Asimov’s Dec 2007;The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Subterranean), the only women in short fiction. SF novels are all men, then Fantasy, YA, and Debuts are all pretty mixed—and all are very strong categories (below the cut). Too much work to look at more except perhaps there should be a PR campaign by any women artists in the genre?
It will be fun to see who wins but the real winners, said without cheesiness—especially after serving on award juries—are readers who use this as a reading list to see what’s good out there at the moment.
Here comes the lunch truck? Nope. The boat? Nope. Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection? Ping! We have a winner!
Ben doesn’t know this yet (because we are evil, or, maybe because we’ve been busy giving away free books?) but we just received the advance reading copies of his debut collection, The Ant King and Other Stories. So today (besides cursing the errors—they’ll be gone by August) we’ll be sending it out to reviewers and maybe sending a few to Ben over there in Switzerland.
How does it look? Who cares? Does it go well with beer? You decide.
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.
When we asked Maureen if she was interested in releasing her collection this way she took a moment out from working on Top Secret Gaming Things to say go for it. It is awesome to work with authors like Maureen and John who are so enthusiastic about this.
The thirteen stories in McHugh’s “gorgeously crafted” (Nancy Pearl, NPR, Morning Edition) collection include her her Hugo Award winner “The Lincoln Train” as well as a reading group guide. Mothers & Other Monsters was a Story Prize finalist and a Book Sense Notable Book.
Although we think our paper editions are of course prettier than these downloads, please pass the word along. The further out these CC-licensed books go (especially from our site where we can count them) the higher chance there is of persuading other authors of doing the same with their books.
Mothers & Other Monsters is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them. The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats.
The paper edition is much nicer, although not free:
Western MA being the land of maple syrup, and spring being the maple sap season, I thought I’d run a couple of experiments brewing beer with maple syrup. This is just the kind of decadent weirdness that homebrewing is perfect for. You’d be hard put to find a maple beer available from even the tiniest and most daring of commercial brewers, but for a homebrewer, all it takes is the will and a bit of thinking.