Give it a look!
Wed 30 Aug 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Shelf Awareness| Posted by: Gavin
I was enjoying an author interview in Shelf Awareness this rainy morning when I was brought up short to see SL Huang is an evangelist for Kalpa Imperial. Now that is a way to wake up!
Shelf Awareness: Book you’re an evangelist for:
SL Huang: Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was is one of the books I’m constantly hyping that I feel like so much of SFF has slept on! It’s by Argentinian author Angélica Gorodischer, and the translation from Spanish was done by Ursula K. Le Guin. And it is stunning.
It also exemplifies a lot of unusual things, craft-wise, that are highly unusual elsewhere: a fantasy world with no magic, a book made up of interconnected short stories, a book that takes place over many generations and many thousands of years. Give it a look!
On Publishing Angélica Gorodischer
Mon 7 Feb 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer, remembering, Sue Burke, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin
On Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022 I was incredibly sorry to read in an email from Amalia Gladhart, who translated Trafalgar for us as well as Jaguars’ Tomb for Vanderbilt UP, that Argentinean author Angélica Gorodischer had died at her home in Rosario at the age of 93. Here’s a link to the obituary Amalia sent.
We published the first three of Angélica’s books to be translated into English: Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin) in 2003, followed by Trafalgar (translated by Amalia Gladhart) in 2013, and Prodigies (translated by Sue Burke) in 2015.
Publishing Angélica’s books — and meeting her when she came up to the WisCon conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2003 — have been one of the highlights of our work here at the press. Kelly and I publishing Angélica’s books in our third season put Small Beer onto a different plane and meant that we could from our early years use Kalpa Imperial to show that we had very broad horizons in our sights. Angélica was exceedingly generous to share her books with us and we very appreciative. The story of how we came to publish the books, while not as interesting as any of Angélica’s own wide ranging stories, shows a little of how publishing works, with a drop of luck, much hard work and juggling, and a little of being in the right place at the right time.
In 1998 Kelly read and admired a section of Kalpa Imperial, The End of a Dynasty, or The Natural History of Ferrets, in the anthology Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which had been translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was not the first translation of Angélica’s work into English. According to this useful site, Alberto Manguel translated “Man’s Dwelling Place” for his anthology Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (Three Rivers, 1985); four of her stories were translated (by Monica Bruno, Mary G. Berg, and two by Lorraine Elena Roses) for the 1991 White Pine Press anthology, Secret Weavers, edited by Marjorie Agosin; and Diana L. Vélez translated “Camera Obscura” for Latin American Literary Review, 19 (37).
At some point after reading Starlight 2, Kelly wondered if Ursula had translated more of Angélica’s work. We had met Ursula once or twice at WisCon, an annual feminist science-fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin, which we all loved and so we sent her a letter. I am still amazed at the response.
At this point, the two of us had published four books through Small Beer: in 2001, Kelly’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen and Ray Vukcevich’s collection Meet Me in the Moon Room, and in 2002, two books by Carol Emshwiller, a novel, The Mount, and a collection, Report to the Men’s Club. While talking to Carol we found out that Ursula was a big fan of Carol’s books and asked Ursula if she would blurb one of Carol’s books — Ursula said she could not . . . because she admired Carol (here’s her review of Ledoyt) so much that she had just asked Carol to blurb one of her books. So when we wrote, rather out of the blue, asking about Kalpa Imperial we had at least corresponded a little and at some point I’d been brave enough to buy her a bourbon in Madison. (Ursula and Angélica were both smart, no nonsense, and more than a little bit terrifying.)
Ursula’s agent at the time was the late Linn Prentis of the Virginia Kidd Agency — who was a mixed blessing. She was willing to work with our tiny press but between her office having work done on it and not everyone being on the same computer system it took three months for the manuscript to be sent to us and the final deal — our first translation contracts — wasn’t concluded until January 2003. Here’s the Publishers Lunch announcement:
Angélica Gorodischer’s KALPA IMPERIAL, a history of an empire that never was, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, to Gavin Grant at Small Beer Press, in a nice deal, by Linn Prentiss at the Virginia Kidd Agency (NA).
We were planning on publishing in August of that year — as we’d done for our first two seasons — but then an unmissable opportunity came up: the possibility that Angélica could attend WisCon on the Memorial Day weekend in May 2003. Suddenly everything was moving very fast. Fortunately for my monolingual self, Angélica’s English was strong: “I can make myself understood and I can understand your Scotch English. Je parle Français aussi.” (I read in the one of the obituaries that her 1988 Fulbright Scholarship allowed her to participate in the University of Iowa International Writing Program and she also taught at the University of Northern Colorado.)
She could do more than make herself understood. She was sharp and funny and sometimes returned emailed after trips to Ecuador or Bolivia (“where I thought I was going to die: 4,500m above sea level!”) and I learned that she too loved Carol’s books — I had mailed her our first four books and we were both delighted they arrived. The mail to Argentina then seemed to be about as reliable as the present day USPS.
And then the US started another war and we were all thrown for a loop (again).
However she was worried at the speed we were working.
She was right.
Our proofreader turned in a workmanlike job and after all the changes had been entered I sent the book to the printer. There’s nothing quite like having an internationally acclaimed award-winning author fly in from Argentina and when you meet for the first time she sits you down in an empty ballroom to show you the typos in her first book translated into English that you have just published.
Our printer also shifted the ship date at the last minute without telling us and we almost didn’t get books to the convention. For some reason they also individually shrink wrapped every copy. Ugh. It was both a fantastic and miserably stressful weekend and I learned that all that “extra time” in publishing schedules is very necessary.
By a happy coincidence in 2003 another of Angélica’s short stories, “The Violet Embryos” translated by Sara Irausquin, was published in the anthology Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (Wesleyan UP).
In the run up to the actual publication date of Kalpa Imperial, a bilingual friend of ours from the KGB Bar Fantastic Fiction reading series, Gabriel Mesa, offered to interview Angélica for the website Fantastic Metropolis. You can read the interview here which captures some of Angélica’s vivacity.
The book found many friends at independent bookshops and a few months later it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. It was easy to be enthusiastic about, as I loved it so much.
Being a very small press, I struggled with how we could afford more translations of Angélica’s work. I knew I wanted to read them but I didn’t know enough about the industry to even know where to begin. So I put a tiny line on our website saying that we were always looking for more translations of Angélica’s work. A couple of people contacted us over the years, usually grad students, to see if we had any funding or if they could work with us. My (ongoing) problem was that I have to read the full book before I can tell if I’m going to publish it so I could not read just a chapter or two. Early as 2003, two books were especially recommended to me: a short story collection, Trafalgar, and a novel, Prodigies. Both of them were said to be very different from Kalpa Imperial which only deepened my interest.
In 2011 I discovered something which made it much less likely that we would be able to publish another of Angélica’s books. All the checks we had sent to her agent from 2004 – 2011 had been cashed but none of the money had been sent on. I was truly horrified — I can still hardly believe it. I can see how easily it happened — many international editions don’t earn out their advances and I trusted the agent, of course, so I never checked with Angélica to see if she was receiving the money.
When I found out from the agent by email she replied saying how expensive it was (as it still is) to send money to Argentina, but that was no excuse. Despite my pushing, nothing happened until the agent retired and someone else took over that we were able to make any headway. I had given up on the agent by then and the Argentinean government had made it easier to send money into the country so I was able to send everything owed to Angélica. At some later time, the agency paid the press back for the unsent royalties — minus their percentage. Anyway, she was a good agent for a lot of people for many years and had done good work for Angélica at first.
Then, as I was trying to get information from the agent about the unpaid royalties, came the news that Angélica was going to be awarded a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards at their November 2011 convention — a lovely prize for a writer who had dipped in and out of many genres and who received many awards: here are a few from her extended bio:
1964 “Vea & Lea” award, III contest of detective stories
1965 “Club del Orden” award
1984 “Más Allá” award; “Poblet” award, “Premoi Konex”
1984-85 Emecé award
1985 “Sigfried Radaelli Club de los Trece”
1986 Gilgamesh (Spain)
1991 Gilgamesh (Spain)
1994 “Platinum Konex”
1996 “Dignity” award granted by the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights for works and activity in women’s rights
1998 Silvina Bullrich award, granted by the Argentina Writers’ Society to the best novel written by a woman during the three precedent years
2000: “Esteban Echeverría”
2007: Premio ILCH, California
2014: Konex Career Award
2017: Honorary Doctorate, National University of Cuyo
2018: Prix Imaginales for Kalpa Imperial
2018: Grand Prize for Artistic Career from the National Fund for the Arts for her contribution to Argentine culture.
At first it seemed the organization was going to bring Angélica in to receive the award in person but it did not work out. Another translator, Edward Gauvin, who had translated French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s stories in a collection, A Life on Paper, was good enough to collect the award in her place. This is the speech Angélica sent:
As you may see, I am not here, but just now, at this exact moment I am in Rosario, very far away from here but thinking of you all, and I wonder: what are they thinking now? Are they happy to be here? Yes. I know you are, and then, of course, I am happy too. And I feel immensely grateful. This Award is very important to me. It comes to my hands at the right moment. At eighty-three years old, I can count so many blessings: my husband, my sons, my daughter, my grandsons and my granddaughter, and my accomplices: the words I put in my thirty books of narrative. As Jorge Luis Borges said once I am condemned to the Spanish words. And I am trying to say in my poor English that I feel happy and joyful and that I send you my love and my gratitude. Thank you.
And here is Gauvin’s speech on accepting the award:
Any committee (or convention) that gives a prize like this to a person like this needs no reminder of the kind I’m about to give, so let me position this as preaching to the choir rather as a pat on its back, or a collective prayer. Angélica Gorodischer has been given a tremendous honor but one that I hope will serve to take her a step further down the trail first blazed eight years ago by the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Kalpa Imperial by Small Beer Press, Angélica’s publisher and mine.
Giving her this award is a little like hanging a medal round the tip of the iceberg whose other nine-tenths I hope one see the light of English day. By a curious metonymy of publishing economies, single books sometimes stand in for entire bodies of work. In the worst cases, single authors are allowed to stand in for entire countries or languages, as if the attention span of English-speaking readers were not enough to hold more than one complicated, funny-sounding name in its mind at a time. Or, as if with such an award, we Anglophones deigned to notice the rest of a world with a nod and now owed no more. We in this room know better.
Let fantasy, which draws already from so many folkloric world traditions, truly become world fantasy. Thank you.
At yet the same time, I received an email from a writer and translator, Amalia Gladhart, an Associate Professor of Spanish Department of Romance Languages. Amalia had translated two books by Ecuadorian writer Alicia Yánez Cossío (The Potbellied Virgin, UT Press, 2006, and Beyond the Islands, UNO Press, 2011) and after reading Kalpa Imperial and finding the note on our website, she contacted us about translating Trafalgar. She had been in touch with Angélica, had begun translating Trafalgar, and was heading to Rosario to teach so would be able to go over her translation directly. I was delighted and when she sent me the translation I was enamored of the strangeness of the book in which an intergalactic salesman tells stories of his travels to his friends back in a coffeeshop in Rosario.
We placed some of the stories in magazines (The Sense of the Circle [interview], The Best Day of the Year, Trafalgar and Josefina) and published the book in 2013. The colors in the cover came out muddier than the sharp piece of art we had selected. Our then printer didn’t agree with us and would not reprint so we did not work with them again. Despite the muddy cover, much to my relief, Angélica was very pleased and Amalia translated her letter on receipt of the books:
Dear Gavin: I received the copies of Trafalgar, just marvelous. The first thing I did was to caress them, because they are so beautiful that they call to the hand and the eye. What a fine object, so attractive, so precious. Afterwards, of course, with great feeling I began to turn the pages and, as always, I was stunned by Amalia’s expert translation. Well, everything is perfect, and I am very happy, very moved, and Amalia and I are planning public presentations and dialogues in bookstores, the College of Translators, etc., here in Rosario, to make the book known. Many thanks for everything and let’s keep in touch as in the past.
With warm greetings,
hugs,
Angélica
In 2020 Trafalgar was reprinted in the UK as part of a new Penguin Classics line and I very much like the presentation and the quotes they’ve used:
“A novel that is unlike anything I’ve ever read, one part pulp adventure to one part realistic depiction of the affluent, nearly-idle bourgeoisie, but always leaning more towards the former in its inventiveness and pure sense of fun.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
In an email in 2004, Ursula had said she was reading Prodigies and found it “fascinating and extremely difficult.” In his 2003 interview, Gabriel Mesa had asked Angélica:
Q. If after KALPA you had to choose another of your novels to be translated into English, which would it be?
A: PRODIGIOS, always PRODIGIOS which I believe is the best thing I have ever written in my life. Of course no one would read it because it is a difficult text.
A few months after Trafalgar came out we were approached by another writer translator, Sue Burke, to see if we were still interested in a translation of that very novel, Prodigies. An American, she was then living in Madrid and her most recent translation was Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Science Fiction (Sportula, 2013). Given that Angélica thought it was the best thing she had written, how could I resist? I may have ignored the last line in her answer above.
Prodigies is as promised, a slim, fabulous, somewhat difficult novel. We placed excerpts in the journals Eleven Eleven and Spolia Magazine. Reading it is like diving into a dream, with sentences and paragraphs that leave no room for coming up for air so the reader has to go with it or drown.
Angélica wrote around thirty books and so far Prodigies is the last translation of her work we’ve published — but never say never. Amalia Gladhart translated the dark, recursive, and fascinatingly structured Jaguars’ Tomb for Vanderbilt UP and Angélica’s name is now well enough known in the Anglophone world that I expect there will be more translations, perhaps published by us, perhaps elsewhere. Having more than one publisher means there is more than one team of publicists and editors talking up the books and there is more chance the books will find readers.
We were incredibly fortunate to work with Angélica — and her three translators — on these three books. I send my sympathies and condolences to Angélica’s family and those who knew and loved her and I am grateful that we have her books.
More
El Pais obituary
Locus obituary
Sofia Samatar on Kalpa Imperial
The End of a Dynasty or The Natural History of Ferrets
Fri 20 Oct 2017 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories, Angelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin
The storyteller said: He was a sorrowful prince, young Livna’lams, seven years old and full of sorrow. It wasn’t just that he had sad moments, the way any kid does, prince or commoner, or that in the middle of a phrase or something going on his mind would wander, or that he’d waake up with a heaviness in his chest or burst into tears for no apparent reason. All that happens to everybody, whatever their age or condition of life. No, now listen to what I’m telling you, and don’t get distracted and then say I didn’t explain it well enough. If anybody here isn’t interested in what I’m saying, they can leave. Go. Just try not to bother the others. This tent’s open to the south and north, and the roads are broad and lead to green lands and black lands and there’s plenty to do in the world—sift flour, hammer iron, beat rugs, plow furrows, gossip about the neighbors, cast fishing nets—but what there is to do here is listen. You can shut your eyes and cross your hands on your belly if you like, but shut your mouth and open your ears to what I’m telling you: This young prince was sad all the time, sad the way people are when they’re old and alone and death won’t come to them. His days were all dreary, grey, and empty, however full they were.
And they were full, for these were the years of the Hehvrontes dynasty, those proud, rigid rulers, tall and handsome, with white skin and very black eyes and hair, who walked without swinging their shoulders or hips, head high, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the horizon, not looking aside even to see their own mother in her death-agony, not looking down even if the path was rough and rocky, falling into a well if it was in the way and standing erect down inside the well, maintaining the dignity of the lords of the world. That’s what they were like, I’m telling you, I who’ve read the old histories till my poor eyes are nearly blind. That’s what they were like. Read more
From far away
Mon 24 Aug 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Delia Sherman, Kelley Eskridge, LCRW 33, Susan Stinson, Theo Fadel| Posted by: Gavin
Take a deep breath. Hold it. Read a book. Let it go. Feel better? Dead? Not sure? Me neither.
Meanwhile:
Read the first chapter of Solitaire on the Seattle Review of Books, a consistently readable new endeavor from Paul Constant and Martin McClellan.
Paul Di Fillippo read Delia Sherman’s Young Woman in a Garden and in this month’s Asimov’s points out a serious flaw: “The only flaw in this collection is that there are not more stories on the table of contents. You need this in your library.”
Theo Fadel, who illustrated our forthcoming edition of John Crowley’s The Chemical Wedding is updating her website. Just wait until you read her new bio.
Translator Sue Burke writing at Asymptote on translating Angélica Gorodischer’s favorite novel Prodigies: Different Beauty, Equal Beauty.
Check out this video and article by Laura Newberry as Susan Stinson gives her Bridge Street Cemetery tour and they talk about the new cemetery preservation efforts.
“Humanity’s a frog being slowly boiled in a saucepan” says Deborah Walker in the latest in Michael J. DeLuca’s series of contributor interviews for LCRW 33.
Previously:
M.E. Garber (“‘Doomed’ is such a bleak term. Are we ‘doomed’ if we have to live differently than we have in the past? If we have to adapt to radically changing situations? If many of us on the planet die, while others struggle onwards? I think not, and yet others would argue yes. Then again, as I said earlier, I’m a bit of a closet optimist.”)
Nicole Kimberling: “I forgave the trees for their indiscriminate air-based sperm-cell distribution. After all, they can’t help it.”
Giselle Leeb: “I worked in the Karoo, a semi-desert, counting plants for a botany lecturer during three of my summer holidays, and that’s when I discovered a conscious love of the earth.”
So much news: 2015 edition!
Thu 23 Oct 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Ayize Jama-Everett, Nicole Kornher-Stace| Posted by: Gavin
Here’s a large part of it: 4 new books for early 2015! Two of them are from Ayize Jama-Everett, The Liminal War (June) and The Entropy of Bones (August). You can read about how the covers came about today on Tor.com. The covers are both by John Jennings, check out his tumblr which is full of excellent art. You can read the first three chapters of Ayize’s first novel The Liminal People here. The books are all connected, but can also stand alone. More on these two pageturners soon-ish.
Two more books! First, another translation of an Angélica Gorodischer novel! Prodigies (translated by Sue Burke) is considered by the author and many others to be her best novel. After Sofia Samatar reviewed Kalpa Imperial so thoughtfully we asked her to have an early look at Prodigies and this is what she said:
“Gorodischer’s rhythmic and transparent prose reveals the violence underlying bourgeois respectability. Prodigies is both incisive and incantatory.”—Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria
The fourth book is the first Big Mouth House title of 2015, Nicole Kornher-Stace’s debut YA novel Archivist Wasp. It’s a dark, thrilling ride (wait, did I really write that? Yup. Sorry! But, you know: true!) set in a deeply imagined future. Just wait. Here’s a better description:
“Goes off like a firecracker in the brain: the haunted landscape, the sure-footed, blistering prose — and, of course, the heroine herself, the most excellent Archivist Wasp.” — Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
Bestsellers & Locus Rec Reading 2013
Mon 3 Feb 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Angelica Gorodischer, Bestsellers, Elizabeth Hand, Howard Waldrop, Kij Johnson, Nathan Ballingrud, Sofia Samatar, Susan Stinson, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin
Here are two different views of 2013 in SBP books. What will 2014 bring? Droughts! Witches! Yetis! More and more weird fun!
Congratulations to all the authors on the 2013 Locus recommended reading list. It’s always fun to peruse the list and see, for whatever reasons, what rose up and what didn’t. It’s especially nice to have links to all the online short stories and novellas and so on, thanks Mark et al!
In 2013, we published 2 Peter Dickinson reprints, one chapbook, and six new titles, and of those six, four titles are on the list:
- Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
- Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters: Stories
- Angelica Gorodischer (trans. Amalia Gladhart), Trafalgar
- Howard Waldrop, Horse of a Different Color: Stories
And you can go and vote in the Locus awards poll here. I have some reading to do before I vote. Votes for Small Beer authors and titles are always appreciated, thank you!
In sales, once again our celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantastic short stories were our best sellers for the year. However, if we split the two volumes into separate sales, Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others would climb a notch to #2. But! Counting them as one means we get another title into the top 5: Elizabeth Hand’s late 2012 collection Errantry: Strange Stories. We really should release more books at the start of the year, as those released at the end have much less chance of getting into the top 5.
According to Neilsen BookScan (i.e. not including bookfairs, our website, etc.), our top five bestsellers (excluding ebooks) for 2013 were:
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin - Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
- Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
- Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree
- Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Strange Stories
Last year it was all short stories all the time, this year Susan Stinson’s historical novel Spider in a Tree jumped in (I’d have said sneaked in if it was #5, but since it’s at #4, that’s a jump!). Susan’s book is still getting great reviews, as with this from the Historical Novel Review which just came out this week:
“The book is billed as “a novel of the First Great Awakening,” and Stinson tries to do just that, presenting us with a host of viewpoints from colonists to slaves and even insects. She gives an honest imagining of everyday people caught up in extraordinary times, where ecstatic faith, town politics and human nature make contentious bedfellows. Although the novel was slow to pull me in, by the end I felt I had an intimate glance into the disparate lives of these 18th-century residents of Northampton, Massachusetts.”
As ever, thanks are due to the writers for writing their books, all the people who worked on the books with us, the great support we received from the independent bookstores all across the USA and Canada, and of course, the readers. We love these books and are so happy to find so many readers do, too: thank you!
2013 in SBP books
Wed 18 Dec 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., 2013, Alan DeNiro, Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer, Greer Gilman, Howard Waldrop, Peter Dickinson, Sofia Samatar, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin
Sometimes I miss Badreads, the community reading site that AFAIK closed down earlier this year. I haven’t yet really migrated to LibraryThing (there’s that part ownership thing) or any of the others. I certainly liked seeing what other people were reading and keeping up with what I was reading.
Now, who knows what I read? I barely do. Although I really enjoyed the most recent issue of Pen America. Not just because they reprinted two stories from Three Messages and a Warning either. The whole thing was great, from the forum on teaching writing (Dorothy Allison, Paul La Farge . . . and Elissa Schappel’s heartbreaking piece) to the poetry by Ron Padgett (“Advice to Young Writers”) and two graphic narratives (comics!) by the fab David B. and Jean-Pierre Filiu (translated by none other than Edward Gauvin!) and Brian Evenson and Zak Sally. Anyway, you want a good magazine? Go read it.
I joined Pen a couple of years ago (teenage me: so proud!) and now Kelly’s a member, too. Are you a writer or editor? Do you care about intellectual freedom? If you can swing it, sign up here!
Ok, so, Small Beer: What have we been up to this fine year almost done and gone?
2 issues of LCRW! A record! Well, for recent years. We are planning 2 more for 2014. Phew!
A banner year for Weightless, yay!
And the New York Times just gave a great review to one of our final books of the year, Howard Waldrop’s new collection. I always think our books are so good that they all should be on NPR, in the WaPo, the LA, NY, St. Petersburg, Seattle, and London Times, etc., etc., so sometimes I surprised when they aren’t. I know: different strokes for different folks and all that, although really I think since all our books are so good they should overcome any reader prejudices. (“Short stories! Pah!”) The real reason they’re not reviewed anywhere? All the papers and magazines find it hard to justify reviewing half a dozen or more books from the same publisher. Right? Right!
BTW: if you would like to order Small Beer books (we have many signed copies!) to arrive in time for the holidays, please select Priority Mail. We are shipping until 5 pm on Thursday December 19th this year.
Here’s a picture of all the books we published this year and below, a little bit more about each book.
BOOKS!
Authors!
Chuntering on!
Reviews!
CRY MURDER! IN A SMALL VOICE
Greer Gilman
What, another chapbook? That’s two in two years! The last one we did was in 2004 (Theodora Goss) and the next one should be 2014. Woo! This one is a dark, dense and intense serial killer story with Ben Jonson, detective and avenging angel.
“A jewel of a novella.”—Strange Horizons
NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS
Nathan Ballingrud » interview
The darkest book I expect we will ever publish! Bleak? Check. Monsters? Check? Fabulous, fabulous writing? Check!
“Matched to his original ideas and refreshing refurbishments of genre set pieces, Ballingrud’s writing makes North American Lake Monsters one of the best collections of short fiction for the year.
—Locus
“The beauty of the work as a whole is that it offers no clear and easy answers; any generalization that might be supported by some stories is contradicted by others. It makes for an intellectually stimulating collection that pulls the reader in unexpected directions. The pieces don’t always come to a satisfactory resolution, but it is clear that this is a conscious choice. The lack of denouement, the uncertainty, is part of the fabric of the individual stories and of the collection as a whole. It is suggestive of a particular kind of world: one that is dark, weird, and just beyond our ability to impose order and understanding. These are not happy endings. They are sad and unsettling, but always beautifully written with skillful and insightful prose. It is a remarkable collection.”
—Hellnotes
SPIDER IN A TREE
Susan Stinson » Rick Kleffel interviews Susan Stinson (mp3 link).
Flying out the door in our town (Broadside Books alone has sold 140+ copies!) and now all over the country. Jonathan Edwards, we hardly knew ye. Until Susan brought you and your family and your town back to life.
“Ultimately, ‘Spider in a Tree’ is a lesson in what not to expect. Stinson eludes the clichés usually associated with religious extremism to peel away the humans underneath. We speak of a loving God, who asks us to embark upon a deadly war. We most easily see the sins in others that we are ourselves guilty of. Every ambition to perfect ourselves has a very human cost. As we reach for what we decide is the divine, we reveal our most fragile human frailties. Words cannot capture us; but we in all our human hubris, are quite inclined to capture words.”
—The Agony Column
A STRANGER IN OLONDRIA
Sofia Samatar
We still have a few hardcovers of this left, unlike most other places. Some reviewers have really got this book including Jane Franklin in Rain Taxi who just gave it a huge excellent review. Yes, it’s a fantasy novel. Yes, it’s fantastic. Sofia sure can write.
“Sofia Samatar’s debut fantasy A Stranger in Olondria is gloriously vivid and rich.”
—Adam Roberts, The Guardian, Best Science Fiction Books of 2013
“For its lyricism, its focus on language, and its concern with place, it belongs on the shelf with the works of Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, and M. John Harrison — but for its emotional range, it sits next to books by Ursula K. Le Guin or Joanna Russ.”—Jane Franklin, Rain Taxi
TRAFALGAR
Angélica Gorodischer. Translated by Amalia Gladhart.
Our second Gorodischer—and we have high hopes of a third and maybe even a fourth! This one is a discursive, smart, self aware science fiction. Don’t miss!
“Perhaps the strangest thing about these tales is how easily one forgets the mechanics of their telling. Medrano’s audiences are at first reluctant to be taken in by yet another digressive, implausible monologue about sales and seductions in space. But soon enough, they are urging the teller to get on with it and reveal what happens next. The discerning reader will doubtless agree.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: STORIES
Howard Waldrop
We keep getting letters from Waldrop fans who are so pleased he has a new book out: and that after 40 years he’s in the New York Times! Spread the joy!
“What’s most rewarding in Mr. Waldrop’s best work is how he both shocks and entertains the reader. He likes to take the familiar — old films, fairy tales, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas — then give it an out-of-left-field twist. At least half the 10 tales in his new collection are prime eccentric Waldrop . . . as he mashes genres, kinks and knots timelines, alchemizing history into alternate history. In “The Wolf-man of Alcatraz,” the B prison movie rubs fur with the Wolf-man; “Kindermarchen” takes the tale of Hansel and Gretel and transforms it into a haunting fable of the Holocaust; and “The King of Where-I-Go” is a moving riff on time travel, the polio epidemic and sibling love.
“Among the most successful stories is “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On),” an improbable confluence of vaudeville (two of the main characters perform in a horse suit) and the Arthurian Grail legend that manages to name-check Señor Wences, Thomas Pynchon, “King Kong” and more as Mr. Waldrop tells of the Ham Nag — “the best goddamned horse-suit act there ever was.” It’s certainly the best horse-suit-act story I’ve ever read.”
—New York Times
TYRANNIA AND OTHER RENDITIONS
Alan DeNiro
Alan’s second collection marries absurdity to with politics and heart. Every writer is unique. Alan? Alan is like a superhero made up of the best parts of half a dozen of our favorite writers. Read these two excerpts to see why: “Tyrannia”, Walking Stick Fires [excerpt].
“Most of Tyrannia‘s rambunctious, immensely entertaining stories — seven of them science fiction — blend bizarre speculations with intermittent humor. When there isn’t humor, there’s weirdness — often extreme weirdness, funny in its own right. Fair warning: what I’m about to describe might not always make sense. That’s in the nature of this highly unconventional collection.”
—Will George, Bookslut
DEATH OF A UNICORN & THE POISON ORACLE
Peter Dickinson
We added Reading Group Questions to the former and the latter includes an author interview carried out by none other than Sara Paretsky. These two sort of mysteries are filled with bon mots, memorable characters, and the strangeness of the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s. There is nothing as haunting as the last line of The Poison Oracle.
“Dickinson’s crime novels are simply like no other; sophisticated, erudite, unexpected, intricate, English and deeply, wonderfully peculiar.”
—Christopher Fowler, author of The Memory of Blood
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!
Small Beer Podcast 17: Angélica Gorodischer’s “The González Family’s Fight for a Better World”
Tue 19 Mar 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer, Julie Day, Podcastery, small beer podcast, The González Family’s Fight for a Better World, Trafalgar| Posted by: Julie
I don’t always take authors very seriously, but when Angélica Gorodischer indicated in Trafalgar’s foreword that the stories should be read in order, something in her tone made me pay attention. And something in her writing. She amused me right from the beginning, and so I decided to take her at her word and allow the journey to unfold over the course of the novel. Honestly, it was no hardship. Once I started the first story, I realized nothing less than mainlining the entire book would satisfy.
Angélica Gorodischer is the recipient of the 2011 World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. She has published over nineteen award-winning books in her native Spanish. Still, for me, an English-only reader, Gorodischer feels like a “new author” discovery. Trafalgar may have been written in 1979, but it’s already one of my top five books for 2013.
A fix-up novel, a mosaic novel, or as the book copy suggests “a novel-in-stories:” whatever the term you choose to describe Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar, it is funny, dry, and always engaging. Trafalgar feels like some sort of Douglas Adams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez hybrid. The narrator of Trafalgar is Trafalgar Medrano’s coffee-shop companion. It is she who transcribes the various intergalactic adventures Trafalgar describes over cups of strong, black coffee. And it is she who understands Trafalgar and his foibles enough to fill in the blanks he might have left in these stories. Unlike Dr. Watson, this biographer has no misapprehensions about human nature.
And now we have one of these stories available on the podcast. When Amalia Gladhart offered to read for the podcast, I was thrilled. Amalia translated Trafalgar; she read the original novel and she shepherded that novel from Spanish to English. What better person to read the English translation?
Episode 17: In which Amalia Gladhart reads Angélica Gorodischer’s “The González Family’s Fight for a Better World” from Trafalgar.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Trafalgar, here, there, everywhere
Thu 21 Feb 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer, translations| Posted by: Gavin
Thanks to translator extraordinaire Amalia Gladhart, I’m very happy to be celebrating the first English language publication of Angélica Gorodischer’s novel Trafalgar. The credit for this book coming out also goes back to Ursula K. Le Guin whose translation of Kalpa Imperial opened our eyes to this excellent writer. I am so glad I put this rather optimistic line in our About page:
We are seriously interested in more translations — especially of Angelica Gorodischer. However, we are monolingual (sorry) which makes the editorial process difficult. If you are a grad student looking for a translation project which may be of interest to us, we recommend Gorodischer’s Trafalgar and Prodiges.
We heard from a few translators of Gorodischer’s work in the ten years(!) since we published Kalpa Imperial but nothing panned out so when I received an email in June 2011 from Amalia I didn’t know whether to get excited or not. She had published a couple of previous translations, The Potbellied Virgin and Beyond the Islands, both by Alicia Yánez Cossío of Ecuador, which seemed like a good sign. But I still wasn’t sure, of course, until I got the book.
The first story, “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” is great and really off the wall—check it out in Fantasy & Science Fiction this spring—so I was on edge, wondering where the book was going. But the second story, “The Sense of the Circle,” blew me away and I knew we were going to publish the book.
When it was announced that Angélica was one of the two winners of the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, I had a mad thought that we could get the book—or at least a chapbook—out in time for the convention. Ha. Did not happen. But in the meantime Kelly found Ron Guyatt‘s fabulous travel poster “Caloris Basin – Mercury” and we worked with him to use it for the cover.
And now the book is out!
Two of the stories are already online: “The Best Day of the Year” (on Tor.com) and “Trafalgar and Josefina” (on Belletrista), and just today “Of Navigators” went up on the lit journal Eleven Eleven’s new site (their print edition will be available here). And reviews are coming in from all over. The Willamette Week (“a thing of digression and casual wonderment”) liked that Trafalgar was translated by an Oregonian. Abigail Nussbaum, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called it “A novel that is unlike anything I’ve ever read, one part pulp adventure to one part realistic depiction of the affluent, nearly-idle bourgeoisie, but always leaning more towards the former in its inventiveness and pure (if, sometimes, a little guilt-inducing) sense of fun.”
Trafalgar is hard to describe, which is part of the fun of it. Put the coffee on and join in.
Coffee? Sure. La Morenita or La Virginia?
Thu 17 Jan 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin
Reforma gives Trafalgar a very strong recommendation (“Highly recommended for Public and Academic Libraries”), which I translate as: a book for everyone!
I suppose a good quote from the review would be “The narrative of this compilation draws the reader into the story of an ordinary man traveling to alternative worlds. Gorodischer creates an atmosphere where fascinating stories take on the ordinariness of everyday life.”
Not mentioned: Trafalgar drinks a lot of coffee. We should have partnered with an Argentinean coffee firm because this book is going to cause a lot of people to get up and put the coffee on. La Morenita! La Virginia! Coffee shops! Baristas! Call us!
How much coffee? Seven cups. Begins like this:
I was with Trafalgar Medrano yesterday. It’s not easy to find him. He’s always going here and there with that import-export business of his. But now and then he goes from there to here and he likes to sit down and drink coffee and chat with a friend. I was in the Burgundy and when I saw him come in, I almost didn’t recognize him: he had shaved off his mustache. . . .
Marcos brought him his double coffee and a glass of cold water on a little silver plate. That’s what I like about the Burgundy. . . .
Marcos brought him another double coffee before he could order it. That Marcos is a marvel: if you drink nothing but dry sherry, well chilled, like me; or orange juice—not strained—with gin, like Salustiano, the youngest of the Carreras; or seven double coffees in a row like Trafalgar Medrano, you can be sure that Marcos will be there to remember it even if it’s been ten years since you went to the Burgundy.
Marcos arrived with the third double coffee. . . .
Marcos had put down the paper—he had collected at one of the other tables—and now he was coming with the fourth double coffee. . . .
All right, coffee, anyone?
But, wait, if you prefer it with wine, the third edition of Wine and Word Tasting at Winter’s Hill Vineyard will take place on Saturday, February 16, 11:00-5:00 in Lafayette, Oregon. Yum.
Trafalgar and Josefina
Wed 5 Dec 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin
Belletrista just posted “Trafalgar and Josefina,” an excerpt which will give you a nice sense of our forthcoming book by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar. Along with the book there is a short intro—and a great picture of the two of them—by the translator, Amalia Gladhart:
Trafalgar’s adventures are curious, funny, sometimes hair-raising, always thought-provoking. His stories are sought after, traded among acquaintances, shared sparingly by those lucky enough to hear them first hand. And the importance of the storytelling process is always evident. Trafalgar loves to tell a tale—and he loves to draw it out, pausing for another cup of coffee, petting a friend’s cat, playing hard to get; his listeners prod him impatiently, but he will not be rushed.
Trafalgar’s chaste light
Thu 15 Nov 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Amalia Gladhart, Angelica Gorodischer| Posted by: Gavin
Before you know it we’ll be publishing our second novel by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar, translated by U. of Oregon professor Amalia Gladhart. Originally published in Argentina in 1979, it’s a very light and funny book. We had some good news recently: the book is getting a small grant to help with translation costs from the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Culture of the Argentine Republic. (Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.) How cool is that? It is awesome.
We’re also working with Ron Guyatt on the final cover.
Trafalgar is a novel-in-stories and the first one, “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” is more bawdy than the others, which is a funny way to set things up! But it also starts right in with Trafalgar Medrano, salesman and storyteller, who, given time and seven double coffees, will tell all about his sales trips to the farthest parts of the galaxies. Another of the stories, “Trafalgar and Josefina,” is forthcoming on Belletrista, but you can get a tiny taste of the first story here:
“By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon”
I was with Trafalgar Medrano yesterday. It’s not easy to find him. He’s always going here and there with that import-export business of his. But now and then he goes from there to here and he likes to sit down and drink coffee and chat with a friend. I was in the Burgundy and when I saw him come in, I almost didn’t recognize him: he had shaved off his mustache.
The Burgundy is one of those bars of which there aren’t many left, if there are any at all. None of that Formica or any fluorescent lights or Coca-Cola. Gray carpet—a little worn—real wood tables and real wood chairs, a few mirrors against the wood paneling, small windows, a single door and a façade that says nothing. Thanks to all this, inside there’s a lot of silence and anyone can sit down to read the paper or talk with someone else or even do nothing, seated at a table with a cloth, white crockery dishes, and real glass, like civilized people use, and a serious sugar bowl, and without anyone, let alone Marcos, coming to bother them.
I won’t tell you where it is because one of these days you might have adolescent sons or, worse, adolescent daughters who will find out, and goodbye peace and quiet. I’ll give you just one piece of information: it’s downtown, between a shop and a galería, and you surely pass by there every day when you go to the bank and you don’t even see it.
But Trafalgar came over to me at the table right away.
books, whisky, and cards
Fri 5 Mar 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alasdair Gray, Angelica Gorodischer, Geoff Ryman, Interstitial Arts, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Catching up on the open tabs: be gone before the weekend!
Geoff Ryman is interviewed at The Short Review—which is an awesome site that only reviews that most commercial of forms, the short story!
Lois Ava-Matthews and friends have a great new(ish) online zine, Belletrista, whose mission is to Celebrate Women Writers Around the World. Issue 4 just went up and in it Tim Jones reviews Kalpa Imperial:
it stands in the distinguished tradition of fabulation of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and it is arguably not a novel at all, but a collection of linked stories. As translated by Ursula K. Le Guin from the 1983 original, it reminded me most of a humanist equivalent of Gene Wolfe’s science fiction series The Book Of The New Sun.
Diagram has a 10 year antho which is a set of cards. Buy now.
An excellent review of Interfictions 2 by Sue Bond is up at Australian site MC Reviews with a lovely line (at least for interstitial enthusiasts):
I am still left puzzled as to what the deciding factor was for the choice and placement of the stories that are included in this anthology. It doesn’t seem to be restricted to particular themes, or to stories that contain an element of fantasy, or even stories that are unusual narratively.
And Erin asks are there interstitial writers in (between) other genres?
Speaking of (potentially) interstitial stuff, our Alasdair Gray book is at the printer and fingers crossed all will go well with all that pretty blue art on the inside. Here’s that bottle of whisky that he did the art for. Must try!
Our friends at Zygote games posted about an 11,000 year old site in Turkey.
When the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt, those stones in Turkey were older than the Pyramids are today.
Phew. Also, while you’re at it, pick up both their games for only $20!
Zine World reviews LCRW 23 and 24. 23 gets the better response:
Long-running, reliably good lit-zine. . . . There are stories from just about every genre, from fairy tales, surreal stories, and even an essay on logic problems. I enjoyed the bizarre surprise ending of “The LoveSling” and the engrossing story of “The Girl with No Hands. Truly something for everyone.
24 gets a light lambasting:
The bulk of the zine is the fiction pieces. They all seem to have the exact same style.
Eek! But they go on to say “Those who like to discover new writers, check this out.”