A Treat for Readers
Mon 25 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kathleen Jennings| Posted by: Gavin
Our first book of 2024 has received a good early review in Kirkus Reviews — there’s a hilarious tag line at the end — but this will give you a good idea of why we’re publishing it and how enjoyable it is:
Old tales and new turning points converge in a dozen fantasy-rich stories.
Here’s a treat for readers who wish each fable launched by the words “Once upon a time” would segue into a cautionary tale punctuated with mythical motifs and genuine danger. In the opener, “The Heart of Owl Abbas,” a songwriter and a songbird in a mythical land bring forth one final song. “Skull and Hyssop” taps into the swashbuckling spirit of old Errol Flynn movies with its tale of a reluctant pirate and a low-powered enchantress at odds with a government flunky. Meanwhile, “A Hedge of Yellow Roses” is steeped in medieval lore; we meet a masterless knight on the run, carrying only “news of the murder of a King, a sword wrapped in a cape and tied to my saddle, and a secret so close to my own heart that even I did not then suspect it.” A child walks through fire in “Ella and the Flame,” two lovers of death find each other in “Not To Be Taken,” and a stowaway boggart causes a bit of chaos in “On Pepper Creek.” Even when the book veers past familiar fantasy into the boundlessly imaginative, it’s still beautifully composed, as in “The Present Only Toucheth Thee,” in which a storybook offers its own postmortem in the form of poetry, and “The Tangled Streets,” which features an enchantress helping a troubled young man find his true form. More often, it’s luridly imaginative—see the helpful amateur cryptozoologist in “Undine Love”—and genuinely exciting, like the ending of the title story: “No, I can’t stay any longer. I’ve been tangled in this story for too long. I have tigers to hunt, dragons to slay. An old friend to find.”
Women with guts and men of good fortune in search of their personal treasures.
Literary, Trans, and Science Fictional Spaces
Fri 22 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro| Posted by: Gavin
As Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche moves out into the world I’m delighted to have seen a couple of reviews pop up — we’re publishing four books this year so getting review space against those behemoths who publish 12 or 15 books a year/month/day in September is an enjoyable achievement and it will be fun to see what other kind of literary, trans, and science fictional spaces this transtastic little novel will be written up in.
Nina MacLaughlin wrote about the book for the Boston Globe:
“An exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. . . . In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.”
and E.C. Barrett has reviewed it in Strange Horizons and it is a treat to see the book read so closely.
“. . . the second-person telling lets the reader in on a conversation this character is having with herself as she creates within herself the understanding that she needs: a sort of literary camera obscura that offers glimpses of how she pieces her historically disparate selves together.”
OKPsyche
Tue 12 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin
trade paper · 160 pages · $15 · 9781618732088 | ebook · 9781618732095
Subjective Chaos Kind of Award Winner
In this playful and aching short novel, an unnamed trans woman is on an epic journey to find the place where she belongs. As she navigates her many realities, she must wrestle with anxieties and fears about the world. Her son and her ex live in another state. Environmental disasters are being outsourced to the Midwest. She can’t decide whether or not to unbox the companion automaton under her bed. And some of her friends may not just be ghosting her, they might not even be real.
OKPsyche is a fever-pitched odyssey through the joys, fears, and weirdness of trans adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.
Interview: Anya joins Mary Anne Mohanraj and Benjamin Rosenbaum on Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans
Lithub: 17 Best Covers of September
Read
Read a short excerpt, “Take Pills and Wait for Hips,” on Catapult / Listen on WNYC’s Selected Shorts read by Pooya Mohseni.
Q&A with Zhenya Loughney for The Daily Iowan.
A recommendation on Poets & Writers.
Reviews
“This novel tore my heart up—in the very best way. Our narrator is a semi-recently-out trans woman in her forties, she is an ex-wife, a mother separated from her son, and largely between stable work (a former writer, whose metafictions pepper the text). Friendships real and imagined provide a mirror of reflection in which our narrator turns the mundane into profound. This is a portrait of a woman who has so much love in her heart, and slowly learns to afford herself some of that love.” — Charlie, Room of One’s Own
“I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to find friendship and love in a hostile world, is aided by magical figures and contraptions, but it’s her voice that stands out. This is absolutely brilliant writing: raw and unflinching in how it portrays transphobia and self-doubt, sweeping and dynamic in its use of language and imagery.”
— Jake Casella Brookins, Locus
“Ultimately, though, it’s still a story that leaves me at a loss. For so small a volume, it looms too large to be captured in 1,000 words and change. It craves hand gestures, tone of voice, all the little things that tell the story when we can’t tell the story. So please, picture me waving my hands, leaning forward, emphasising that this book is something special. Because it is. And if you read it, hopefully you’ll be left speechless too.”
— Roseanna Pendlebury, Nerds of a Feather
“A dreamlike, speculative novel. . . . the heart of this short novel . . . is about the narrator’s journey as a trans woman, someone who’s trying to come to terms with the pain of her closeted past even as she struggles to find her way in a fragile, uncertain present.”
— Daily Hampshire Gazette
“In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, ‘OKPsyche,’ published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
“. . . the second-person telling lets the reader in on a conversation this character is having with herself as she creates within herself the understanding that she needs: a sort of literary camera obscura that offers glimpses of how she pieces her historically disparate selves together.”
— E.C. Barrett, Strange Horizons
“This story contains and covers multitudes. It ties its character to the sticking place, and we are bound as well, by a trans woman’s hopes, desires, losses, and visceral fears of the danger she faces every single day. Those dangers are indeed more real than imagined for a woman who doesn’t pass society’s purity test.”
— The Novel Approach
“DeNiro’s novel is a lyrical, emotionally powerful story about what it means to try and find a place for yourself in the midst of a hurricane of climate disaster, violence, and fear. It’s a story told through weird, ghostly, haunting fantasy. Fans of enigmatic speculative fiction like Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (2022), will enjoy this tale of queer parenthood, of the reality of the sharp fear of trans lives, and of complicated self-discovery.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“An unnamed trans woman is at an uneasy stage in her metamorphosis. She has finally cast off the male persona that never fit her, but she has yet to become the woman she dreams of being. Part of her discomfort is physical—she does not have the body she wants—but much of it is social and emotional. She knows that most strangers do not see her for what she is. Her ex-wife is still adjusting to what is, for her, a surprising new reality. Her mother deadnames her. And, most importantly, her young son is shutting her out. DeNiro’s significant achievement here is making palpable the excruciating, inescapable self-consciousness of her main character. Her decision to narrate in the second person is a bold one; this move will help some readers immerse themselves in the story, but it will just as likely alienate others.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Beguiling. . . . a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly
Early Reader Reactions
“OKPsyche is a spectacular novel, like a shard of stained glass in brilliant reds and greens and purples. DeNiro shows us the impossible and the possible with equal honesty. The book is a chronicle of hope and hurt and freedom, suffused with anxiety and grace, and told in prose that just won’t quit. It’s major. You’ll remember where you were when you read it.”
— Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections
“Tense and funny, heartfelt and uncanny, Anya Johanna DeNiro takes us on an hallucinogenic tour through the mind of a woman on the edge. Guided by strange angels or losing touch with reality — either way, it’s happening to you!”
— Morgan M. Page, screenwriter of Framing Agnes
“DeNiro has done something beautiful here, weaving a luminous lament for a ruined world with the simmering pain of a woman finally coming to life. Delicate, lovely, and ultimately full of the impossible hope that shines forth in trans lives.”
— Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing
“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters. DeNiro writes with a complexity that reflects the internal emotional struggles of her unnamed protagonist as she fights for happiness and a better relationship with her young son. A uniquely told and refreshingly weird story of self-realization and the courage it takes to love.”
— Sam Edge, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, Chapel Hill, NC
“DeNiro (City of a Thousand Feelings) offers a beguiling if somewhat opaque glimpse into a trans woman’s journey to find safety, acceptance, and love in a near-future Minnesota. . . . this is a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly
Reviews of Anya DeNiro’s books:
“That trust in emotional urgency over conventional logic to guide a story is, for me, a critical part of a queer aesthetic. Coming out is about obeying an interior, often inarticulable emotional push over majority logics. . . . DeNiro’s gorgeous and emotionally flawless navigation . . . is masterful, cerebral but full of complex feeling, and nothing short of word-magic.”
— Theodore McCombs, Fiction Unbound
“Surreal and lyrical.”
— Publishers Weekly
“What makes the story even more compelling, is that DeNiro gives you all this, allegory and action, without ever losing sight of the heart of the story: the fundamental bond and evolving relationship between two characters who choose different ways to survive, and yet find a greater power, and maybe even a new kind of salvation, when they come together.”
— Maria Haskins
“Strange, menacing worlds whose contours only gradually become clear (or, perhaps, more complexly mysterious).”
—Dylan Hicks, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Minnesotan DeNiro gives us large hunks of riveting weirdness.”
—Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Wildness, fierceness, and anarchic imagination are traits, then, to be prized in this book, above beauty, order, and sense—or, in classical terms, the Dionysian over the Apollonian—and process.”
— Strange Horizons
“Each story feels new, unique, and important.”
—Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com
“There’s no other writer like DeNiro working today.” — Tim Pratt, Locus
Earlier
May 2: MIBA Spring Tour, Des Moines, IA
Sept. 14, 6 p.m. Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406 (FB)
Oct. 14, 11 a.m., Twin Cities Book Fest, Fine Arts Stage, Minneapolis, MN
Oct. 27, 7 p.m. Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
3/25, A Room of One’s Own, 2717 Atwood Ave., Madison, WI
5/8, KGB Bar, New York, NY, with John Wiswell
5/9, Astoria Bookshop, Queens, NY, with Nino Cipri
Cover Art
“Psyche Asleep in a Landscape,” Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola, 1837, metmuseum.org.
About the Author
Anya Johanna DeNiro is a trans woman and a speculative fiction writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of City of a Thousand Feelings, which was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. [website | twitter]
Elegant, Lyrically Descriptive Prose
Mon 11 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
I was writing a newsletter to go out tomorrow in celebration of Anya’s novel coming out and I realized I’d never posted that the first trade review for Kathleen Jennings’s Kindling had come in from Lucy Lockley in Booklist:
“Following her debut, Flyaway (2020), Jennings here compiles a collection of 12 of her previously published short stories. Samplings of her elegant fantasies include “The Heart of Owl Abbas,” a beautifully detailed tale of a lonely songwriter who sends anonymous compositions to a recently arrived virtuoso, which unfortunately brings her presence to the attention of their dissipated ruler. In ‘Ella and the Flame,’ three sisters and a child spin wondrous tales while awaiting their cruel neighbors’ unjustified vengeance, and in ‘Not to Be Taken,’ the survivor of a murdered family returns home after decades away intent on finding a place for her burgeoning collection of poison bottles. As a riff on ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘A Hedge of Yellow Roses’ has a fully-awake but abandoned lady faire hoping for rescue by the unwitting knight who stumbled into her thorn- encrusted compound. The title story, ‘Kindling,’ links six customer scenarios to a clumsy but intuitive barmaid and her lovelorn admirer. Offer to fans of lyrically descriptive prose.”
Love to Open Up a Newsletter/Newspaper
Fri 8 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro| Posted by: Gavin
. . . and see OKPsyche. First this morning in the Boston Globe Nina MacLaughlin included a lovely write up of Anya’s novel and then in this week’s Consortium Communiqué newsletter, there was Sam Edge’s lovely write up!
1) Boston Globe:
In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, “OKPsyche,” published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.
2) Consortium Communiqué, Sam Edge, Epilogue Books of Chapel Hill, NC:
“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters.”
One Week to OKPsyche
Thu 7 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, readings| Posted by: Gavin
Come out Twin Cities — or, order your signed/personalized copy from Moon Palace:
One week tonight: Anya Johanna DeNiro launches her new novel, OKPsyche
9/14/23 6 p.m.
Moon Palace Books (FB)
3032 Minnehaha Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55406
Old House of Fear
Wed 6 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bodies, Long Covid, meh| Posted by: Gavin
Yesterday was a wash. After I put together breakfast for me and the kid, I had a health crash. It wasn’t hospital level, happily, rather one where, lying on the couch as per usual, I wanted needed to lie down. I was lying down but I need to lie down more. I had the smallest pillow under my head and it was a too much to bear.
In the morning my ambitions for the day had included a little light laptop work, making lunch, maybe even dinner, playing a video game, doing some dishes, skimming Bluesky, taking the dog for a short night walk. So all of those things fell to Kelly as I felt the squeeze of the air above me crush me down further. ~15 lbs of air above me was too heavy but there was nowhere to go.
The day improved slowly. I did as close to nothing as I could. That was easy during the first part where staring at the ceiling took everything I had. As time went by and I slowly (metaphorically) crawled back to my new norm, I realized I’d achieved the zen state of no thoughts. Zen-like, this made me neither happy nor unhappy.
Today I’m again on the couch, no different from the last eighteen months and my plans today are on the simpler end.
I’m attributing yesterday’s crash to Post-Exertional Malaise, a term I did not know before December 2021. On Sunday and Monday we had friends visit. They all tested — for which I am very grateful — and I did very little. While I was never a great host, now I am quite terrible. Someone else — Kelly — has to take care of welcomes and drinks and snacks and comfort and conversation and so on. Instead I sat half-slumped trying to be as near horizontal as was polite (ha, silly me, just give up and lie down) and to use as little energy as possible even as I was still delighted to see people (and dogs!). I did very little and removed myself from company after a little while and apparently it was all still too much.
So: no events, no conferences, no parties, no book fairs, no nothing that is just even the littlest bit interesting for a while yet more for me.
Hilariously I’d been meant to see my doctor last week. They cancelled it. I got a new last minute appointment for this Friday. Yesterday they called: and cancelled it. Maybe they’ll call me to re-arrange. I don’t have the energy.
———
What I’d wanted to write about this past weekend — instead of about this mushy piece of flesh attempting to pass itself off as a body — was a book I’d been reading: Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear.
My mother died two years ago and in the run up to her anniversary I decided to read one of the books she’d included in a late-in-life reading journal. My mother loved books as much as anyone I know, although our tastes did not particularly align. However the books she recommended to me, siblings, extended friends, and family, were quite often a good fit. I also loved that she did not care one whit about condition or edition. A rare, signed first edition hardcover was the same book to her as an ex-library charity shop find. The story mattered, the particular book did not.
I’ve read and enjoyed all the books she’d recommended to me over the years and what fascinated me about these Russell Kirk books was their uncanny nature. She’d told me she loved Dennis Wheatley when she was young but her recent favorites included Dorothy Dunnett and Anthony Trollope — she was delighted to have found and read every book Trollope published. Kirk sounds like someone my mother would have argued with — she was religious but still a humanist. Now that I’ve read Old House of Fear, however, I can see why she had listed it. Or, without being able to ask, I think I can.
The novel is set and was written in 1960 and published in 1961 and begins along the same lines as the film Local Hero: an American employee of a large firm is sent to Scotland to try and buy some land, here an island off the north coast. The novel quickly moves into John Buchan territory, with no one quite as they seem and strange events and behaviors, and then there are the stories within the story. Fair warning to readers, it is a novel of its time and while it doesn’t have some of the worst markers of the time the attitudes are sometimes rank.
If you read this edition, I definitely recommend leaving the introduction until you’ve finished the book — the writer says there are some great covers on the pulp editions. And if possible, read the book late at night. Even better if the wind is high and there are branches scraping at the window and you’re not quite sure there are any branches near enough the window to make that noise.
So that’s more writing than I meant to do and I’m stopping here before writing more about the book. Do tell me if you’ve read it or recommend more Kirk. I haven’t looked for the other 2 on my mother’s list.
Now it’s time for me to put my computer aside and take a break. We have a book out next week, so maybe I can do some last minute work on that. Maybe not. I am definitely not able to do as much work, Small Beer or otherwise, as in the past. So any help spreading the word about these new books is always appreciated.
New Flier
Fri 1 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
Admin for me: added our new flier to the catalogs page where anyone who ever wants can download more Small Beer fliers than anyone would ever need.