Kij Johnson at Constellation
Wed 3 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kij Johnson| Posted by: Gavin
There’s a new review of Kij Johnson’s collection The Privilege of the Happy Ending in Strange Horizons by M. L. Clark — the kind of review I’d love to just paste the whole thing in instead of excerpting a strong line. Anyway, if you’ve not read the book, go for it, and if you’ve read the book you might enjoy it as much as me.
Kij will be one of the Guests of Honor at Constellation in Lincoln, NE, in a couple of weeks. Set out now, arrive by April 19:
Richard Butner @ KGB Bar
Fri 8 Mar 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, KGB Fantastic Fiction, Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
Richard Butner has stepped in to read next Wednesday evening with Moses Ose Utomi at KGB Bar in New York City.
Kelly @ Book Moon Tomorrow
Fri 16 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Book Moon, events, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
Kelly will be at Book Moon tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 17, from 3-5 p.m. signing The Book of Love (and so on), saying hello, and passing out cookies. Drop by if you can!
More events. (Cambridge, Natick, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, online.)
Kelly’s Book of Love Tour
Wed 7 Feb 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kelly Link, tour| Posted by: Gavin
Kelly’s new (first!) novel, The Book of Love (reviewed today by Ron Charles in the WaPo) comes out next Tuesday and very appropriately she will be at Books Are Magic with Hilary Leichter in Brooklyn to launch it.
Since we don’t host readings at Book Moon, she’ll do a local reading (with Yvette Lisa Ndlovu) on Thursday with our friends over at the Odyssey in South Hadley, and then will do a drop-in signing at Book Moon on Saturday. The next week she’s off to the Harvard Bookstore and the B&N in Natick before a quick jaunt over to the West Coast. One extra day in Atlanta, then home.
Here’s a link to all the events — there will be a virtual event with Kathleen Jennings open to all hosted by Moon Palace on March 5 — and if you do manage to go, please do wear a mask.
Anya, Prairie Lights, 10/27
Fri 25 Aug 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, bookshops, events, readings| Posted by: Gavin
We’ve just confirmed another event for Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche this one in October at the justifiably famed and lovely Prairie Lights in Iowa City.
How great is the reading series? Tonight’s reading is kind of a stunner: National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley reading from his new short story collection, Witness, and then in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado. Check out the rest here.
More details to come as we get closer but for now set your landyacht’s autodrive calendar to Iowa City for 7 p.m., October 27th, and plan on arriving in time to browse those shelves.
Readercon 2023
Mon 10 Jul 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Greer Gilman, Jeffrey Ford, Readercon, Sarah Pinsker, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin
Readercon is back in Quincy again this year and while we’re not going the lovely Steve Berman of Lethe Press will have a few Small Beer titles available at his table so that when you hear Jeffrey Ford, Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Hand, Sarah Pinsker, or Susan Stinson read you can dash over and pick up one of their books.
Steve will also have 1 or 2 other SBP titles — and maybe a couple of copies of Kelly’s White Cat Black Dog? — but he only has one table, so there won’t be the whole cit and kaboodle, he spoonered. These books will be there — email me ahead of time if there are any others you’d like to pick up there:
Susan Stinson and Alison Bechdel celebrate the first ebook of Venus in Chalk
Wed 20 Apr 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Book Moon, events, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin
Please join us at at 7 p.m. on as we host superstar Alison Bechdel in zoom conversation with Northampton’s own Susan Stinson as they celebrate the first ebook publication of Susan’s novel Venus of Chalk.
Alison Bechdel is the author of many fantastic graphic novels including most recently The Secret To Superhuman Strength — Susan and Alison have known and read each other for years and Alison had this to say about Venus of Chalk:
“This neatly-stitched tale of a latter-day home economist’s ‘glaring departures from sensible living’ is a religious experience. Under Susan Stinson’s microscopic needlework, the fabric of the phenomenal world shimmers with sublime beauty. A can of baking soda, a traffic pylon, a city bus—these things will never look the same again. Stinson lavishes the same minute reverence on her human subjects, discovering rich, sacramental meaning in their most banal small talk. This book unravels what you think you know about women and men, the freakish and the normal, shame and salvation—then mends it anew into a most surprising story.”
— Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
There is no print edition of Venus of Chalk but if you’d like signed copies of Susan’s novels, Martha Moody and Spider in a Tree, or her chapbook, Belly Songs — please order here and add your request in the comments, thank you!
*Register here*
NoWP 2022
Thu 24 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bodies, events, Long Covid, meh, the world| Posted by: Gavin
I’m sorry not to be at AWP (ha) this week.
tl:dr I am out sick
Longer version:
I like tabling. I like talking to people about books, selling some, surprising people with LCRW (a paper zine? What?!), and the accessibility of being right there for people to ask questions about Small Beer/publishing/whatever. I like wandering the book fair and buying books and magazines from publishers new and old. I like going to an occasional panel and some readings — I especially like putting on or being involved with other presses putting on an offsite reading — and I really enjoy catching up with people I know, meeting new people, all that.
If we were there . . . we’d have a stack of Richard Butner’s new collection The Adventurists — it’s so good! It came out this week! We’d have books by Small Beer authors who are at the big show: Sofia Samatar’s world bestriding A Stranger in Olondria and her collection Tender; Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American — one of his stories is soon to be read on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space; and Elwin Cotman’s NPR Best of the Year Dance on Saturday. And we’d have all those pretty books in that picture below that came out oh just quite recently.
We aren’t there for 2 reasons: the first is Covid — which as far as I know I have never had. I have had all 3 of my vaccines. I’m delighted that AWP required vaccinations and masks. Science, FTW! But the idea of being in a book fair with up to 3,000 people is too much for me. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (updated 3/24/22) has the US covid fatality rate at 1.2%. The deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated and the immunocompromised — but risking my (and by extension my family’s) life on someone else’s masking choice when there is a 1 in 100 chance we might die is too high for me.
I am sorry not to be at AWP, but: I haven’t even been to the Small Beer office or Book Moon in more than 3 months because the second reason we’re not there is that I am out sick.
I’m writing from my couch where I’ve been laid up since mid-December with something — most likely post-viral fatigue. In the first week of December I had a small cold(?) and had multiple negative Covid results. A week later I was in the ER. I’m improving — at a glacial rate. I have only left the house since then to see the doctor. I lie around all day, do a little work, watch Abbot Elementary and Better Things and sometimes read (including, for my sins, twitter) — although that brain fog made fiction too hard for a bit. So please accept my apologies for being slow at everything, including email. In early December I was running up the stairs from the Book Moon basement carrying boxes of books. Now a zoom conversation leaves me exhausted. (As in: I will lie flat for 3 hours and do nothing.)
Ugh, I did not want to have to write this but since I am missing a very enjoyable event and have been down for 3 months it seemed like time. I am 51 (when did that happen?) and despite having to lie around all the time (walking is a lot; running is woah so very far away) I feel very lucky, very well looked after at home. I’m not really looking for feedback — unless you have a similar experience with post-viral fatigue — and I apologize in advance for not keeping up as I’ve used much of today’s energy to write this. Although my prognosis is unclear, if all goes as it seems it might, it looks like I will be healthy again by summertime. Fingers crossed!
And if you just can’t help yourself and must buy some books, why, stop by here. Or: we have a tiny, mighty bookshop, Book Moon, with fabulous booksellers who can help you out Monday-to-Saturday 10-6.
So and So
Wed 9 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Richard Butner| Posted by: Gavin
If you’re in the Raleigh, NC, area, the Triad, North Carolina, the southeastern part of the USA, in other words, somewhat close by, please do plan to head to So and So Books on Saturday, April 2, at 6 p.m. where Richard Butner will be reading from his new story collection, The Adventurists, and will be in conversation with John Kessel. Introductions by Wilton Barnhardt.
Refreshments provided by Anisette.
Ben Rosenbaum event Wednesday night!
Mon 28 Jun 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Benjamin Rosenbaum, Book Moon, events| Posted by: Gavin
Join us Wednesday night for the last Book Moon zoom of the month with 2 fabulous authors. We published Ben Rosenbaum’s absolutely fabulous collection The Ant King and Other Stories a few years ago and this novel is a leap from there. I used to read Annalee Newitz on io9.com and now I enjoy her monthly column in New Scientist. Her latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age which I’ve started and recommend. They are both lovely, smart people and I’m looking forward to listening to them (and seeing them!) build the future we want to see in conversation:
Wednesday, June 30th @ 7:00 pm ET
Join authors Benjamin Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) and Annalee Newitz (Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, The Future of Another Timeline) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Rosenbaum’s amazing first novel, The Unraveling, published this month by Erewhon.
**Register here**
Hope to see you there!
Elle, Zen, Saving Animals on the Moon
Wed 12 May 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Holly Black, Susan Stinson, Zen Cho| Posted by: Gavin
Alison Bechdel spotlighted the first line of Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody in an interview with Elle:
This “speculative western” first came out in 1995 but was just reissued. The first sentence is magnificent in the way it’s a microcosm of the whole book, as well as a glimpse at the way Stinson writes so beautifully about fat bodies: “I was crouched next to the creek baiting my hook with a hunk of fat when I heard a rustling on the bank upstream.”
This Saturday June 15th Book Moon will be part of a Cottage Street Sidewalk Sale, We’ll have books on the sidewalk. Should be interesting.
And at 3 p.m. ET/8p.m. UK on Sat. the 15th Zen Cho (England) and Kelly Link (Massachusetts) will do an online event celebrating Zen’s new novel Black Water Sister which came out this Tuesday. Register here.
Book Moon has some excellent events coming hitting up a couple of different parts of the old cerebellum:
June 1st, 6 p.m. ET: Strange Light Reading Series features Rivers Solomon (Sorrowland) and Leigh Bardugo (Shadow and Bone). UMass zoom link goes live 2 weeks before the event so will post it again then.
June 2nd , 7 p.m. ET: Join local author Elan Abrell (Saving Animals) and Alex Blanchette (Porkopolis) online for celebration of the publication of Saving Animals and an interesting conversation on same.
June 15th, 7 p.m. ET: Join NYT bestselling authors Gayle Forman (Just One Day, If I stay) and Holly Black (The Cruel Prince, Tithe) at Book Moon for a reading and discussion of Gayle Forman’s new book, We Are Inevitable, which will be published in June by Viking Books for Young Readers. Register here.
Join Rebecca Roanhorse & Isabel Yap tonight on le Zoom
Tue 13 Apr 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Book Moon, events, Isabel Yap, zoom| Posted by: Gavin
Join co-hosts Alexandra Manglis, Yvette Ndlovu & Nadia Saleh of the Strange Light Reading Series (originally planned to take place at Book Moon) at tonight’s event featuring Isabel Yap (Never Have I Ever) and Rebecca Roanhorse (Black Sun).
Rebecca Roanhorse is a meteor these days. Her recent novel Black Sun is a Nebula Award finalist. She’s also published a Star Wars novel (Star Wars: Resistance Reborn), a middle-grade novel in the very succesful Rick Riordan imprint (Race to the Sun), two novels in her Sixth Worldseries, and has found the time to write for Marvel Comics, for TV, and has had projects optioned by Netflix, Paramount TV, among others. Rebecca (@RoanhorseBex) will be coming to us from Northern New Mexico.
This February Isabel Yap (@visyap) published her first short fiction collection, Never Have I Ever.Isabel started publishing short stories in 2009. Since then she has published stories in many magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and the Philippines. She wrote two new stories for the book, “A Canticle for Lost Girls” and “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” while completing her MBA — here’s her essay on her postgrad choices: MFA vs MBA. She works in the tech industry and drinks tea and will be coming to us from California.
Our events are fun. Hope to see you tonight: Tuesday, April 13 @ 8 p.m. EDT.
**Register here**
Susan Stinson in San Miguel de Allende
Sun 3 Jan 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Susan Stinson, zoom| Posted by: Gavin
Here’s a chance to join an interesting event:
Tuesday & Thursday: Martha Moody Days
Fri 27 Nov 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, online events, Susan Stinson| Posted by: Gavin
Next Tuesday is a big day, pun intended, around here: it’s publication day for our new, 25th anniversary edition of Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody.
Martha Moody was a hit the first time around when it came out from Spinster’s Ink and the Women’s Press in the UK — just check out some of the reviews. — Time Out London said “Stinson’s follow-up to the utterly fantastic Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.”
I realize that December in the northern hemisphere may not be running naked through the meadow weather (for most, who knows?), but it is indicative of the joy oozing from this book.
We’ll be celebrating the publication of the book online through Book Moon on Thursday, Dec. 3, at 7 p.m. with the fabulous Elizabeth McCracken. Hope you will join us, it is sure to be a relaxed and fun time and Susan will be signing books. See you there!
Oct. 21, 7 p.m. Nathan Ballingrud & Elizabeth Hand
Mon 12 Oct 2020 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Elizabeth Hand, events, Nathan Ballingrud| Posted by: Gavin
Good news for those enjoying visiting the literary part of October country, we have an online event coming up with two favorite authors whose books are definitely on the darker and spookier part of the spectrum.
Join us on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. EST as we welcome Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters (aka Monsterland, a new TV series available now on Hulu) & Elizabeth Hand, author of many fabulous books including her new novel, fourth in the Cass Neary series (which begins with Generation Loss), The Book of Lamps and Banners to the online space occasionally generated on this planet by the gravity of Book Moon for a reading and discussion of their latest books.
Register for this Book Moon event HERE — and please do help spread the word. See you there!
Tonight in Easthampton
Fri 6 Sep 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kim Scott, readings| Posted by: Gavin
Come join us at 7 p.m. at White Square Books, 86 Cottage Street, where Kim Scott will be reading from his award-winning novel Taboo. Kim lives in Perth, Western Australia, and this is an opportunity not to be missed. The reading was featured in the Boston Globe:
Australian novelist Kim Scott was the first writer of Indigenous Australian ancestry to win the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for his second novel “Benang,” a prize he won again for his fourth book, “That Deadman Dance.” Widely lauded in Australia, Scott’s work hasn’t yet penetrated the market in the US, but this week, the boundary-pushing Western Mass-based Small Beer Press is publishing the North American edition of his latest award-winning novel “Taboo.” In this potent, ghostly book, Scott, part of the Noongar people of Western Australia, tells what happens when a group of Noongar return to the site of a massacre which followed the killing of a white man for kidnapping a black woman. The book wrestles with the haunt of history, and poetry lives on each page. “Now his own house was haunted, and he was glad.” In the taboo farmland, the group reckon with language and connection, and what reconciling with the past means for the present. They face the way the history and its sins live on, and how rebirth demands destruction. “Death is only one part of a story that is forever beginning,” Scott writes. On a brief US tour, Scott will read and discuss “Taboo” on Friday at 7 p.m. at White Square Books in Easthampton.
And here’s a short clip of Kim reading at the Library of Congress Book Festival in Washington, DC, last Saturday:
"Come close. Closer." The spilling wheat, "Golden, it has both the look and sound of great wealth." Kim Scott reading from TABOO @librarycongress Book Festival—moderator @BWheeler_PhD who put the panel together on the left & graphic novelist @brentonemckenna on the right. pic.twitter.com/yJBhkpiYYg
— Small Beer Press (@smallbeerpress) September 5, 2019
A Trippy Genre-Hop Featuring a Trace of Fairy Tale, a Touch of Gothic, & More
Fri 23 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kim Scott, readings| Posted by: Gavin
Not this Saturday, but the next one, Kim Scott, the first Indigenous writer to receive the Miles Franklin Award will be traveling to the USA for a series of events in support of his fourth novel, Taboo. It has been a very quick run up for us on this book: it was submitted on January 25th of this year, which makes the publication date of September 3 the equivalent of a sprint in publishing terms. Thank you! to everyone at Consortium and all our sales reps who have brought the book to booksellers’ attention, to the trade reviewers at Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and to all the indie bookstores and others who are stocking it.
Taboo is Scott’s 4th novel. In his afterword, as quoted by Kim Forrester of Reading Matters, Scott calls it a “trippy, stumbling sort of genre-hop that I think features a trace of Fairy Tale, a touch of Gothic, a sufficiency of the ubiquitous Social Realism and perhaps a touch of Creation Story” which rings true to me.
Although Scott has twice won the Miles Franklin award in his home country and Taboo received four literary awards (totalling AU$80,000) in Australia, his voice is one of those mostly missing from literary discourse in North America so I am deeply gladdened that the Australian Embassy is bringing him to the USA.
If you’re in DC on August 31 for the Library of Congress Book Festival, I hope I see you at the 10 a.m panel, “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers.” This will be a near unique opportunity to see these writers in the northern hemisphere.
After a trip to UVA, and before he heads to Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, Scott will come up to Western Massachusetts for a reading at Easthampton’s own White Square Books on Friday, September 6, where I hope we can show him a SRO crowd of enthusiastic, open-minded, and curious readers.
Here’s the full list of events:
Aug. 31, 10 a.m “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers” with Jeanine Leane and Brenton McKenna , Library of Congress Book Festival, Washington, D.C.
Sept. 5, 6 p.m. “Truth Telling,” Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, UVA, 400 Worrell Dr., Charlottesville, VA 22911
Sept. 6, 7 p.m. White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA
Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m., NYU
Sept. 9, 7 p.m. Community Bookstore with Terr-ann White, 143 Seventh Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Kim Scott in the Valley
Mon 19 Aug 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kim Scott, readings| Posted by: Gavin
We’ve just added a local reading for Australian author Kim Scott, whose novel Taboo, we are publishing next month. Kim will be reading at White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA, at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 6.
Kim is an Australian superstar and we’re hoping to get a crowd together for good nights in Easthampton and Brooklyn. Come on by!
The full list of Kim’s events is:
August 31, 10 a.m “The View From Country—Australia’s Aboriginal Writers” with Jeanine Leane and Brenton McKenna , Library of Congress Book Festival, Washington, D.C.
UVA
September 6, 7 p.m. White Square Books, 86 Cottage St., Easthampton, MA
September 9, NYU
September 9, 7 p.m. Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Tomorrow: Greer Gilman @ PSB
Mon 20 Apr 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Greer Gilman, keep it indie| Posted by: Gavin
Tomorrow night, meet at a crossroads on a windy night, the moon in tatters and the mist unclothing stars, and make your way clear to Porter Square Books in Cambridge for Greer Gilman’s first reading from the shiny new paperback edition of her Tiptree award winning novel Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales.
Sonya Taaffe (who re-read Cloud & Ashes with a fabulous eye for detail, thank you!) will also be reading. She is celebrating the publication of her new collection of 36 poems and 1 story, Ghost Signs.
It will be a night of language explored, stretched, and broadened: don’t miss it!
Tuesday, April 21, 2015 – 7:00pm
Porter Square Books
25 White St.
Cambridge, MA 02140
When a star falls, we do say: the Nine are weaving. Look! The Road’s their skein, that endlong from the old moon’s spindle is unreeled. Their swift’s the sky. O look! says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes. Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy’s coat. The twins, still whirling in the meadow, seem as heedless as the light, as leaves. Now one and now the other one, they tumble down and down the slope, lie breathless in the summer grass. His mantle’s of the burning gold, says Whin; and Will, His steed is January. I’m to have his spurs.
Bright-lipped in her bower of meadow, imber-stained, small Annot gazes. She is like bright Annot fled; is like herself. I’ve counted seven for the Ship. Like cherrystones. I’ve wished.
What Nine? says Tom.
Why, sisters in a tower—see yon smutch of silver, where it rises? Back of Mally’s Thorn?
He studies. Aye. And stars in it. Like kitlins in a basket.
Their house. It is a nursery of worlds.
Is’t far? says Annot. Can I walk there?
Not by candlelight, says Margaret. ’Tis outwith all the heavens, sun and moon. I’ll show thee in my glass. But she is elsewhere now, remembering the Road beneath her, and the heavens that her glass undid. Remembering the Nine, the sisters at their loom of night.
Cloud & Ashes pb
Wed 25 Feb 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe| Posted by: Gavin
I’m pleased to note that the first paperback edition of Greer Gilman’s amazing, immersive, enchanting, mind boggling, fever-inducing, death-defying literary tightrope walk, Tiptree Award winner Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales has gone to press and will be published in April of this year.
Greer will be reading and taking questions at the mighty Porter Square Books on April 21st at 7 pm along with one of her amazing first readers, Sonya Taaffe, who will be celebrating the publication of her own latest book, Ghost Signs, a collection of 36 poems and one story, published by our friends at Aqueduct Press.
Should you read Cloud & Ashes? Here is one reader’s response:
“Cloud & Ashes is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It’s also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.) There might seem to be a contradiction in those words, and there might well be, were every human to read. But to my, mind reading is an effort that exists outside its own exercise; that is when we read, it may feel like an internal, unshared, indeed unsharable experience. But that is not, I think the case. When we read, we go to the place where writing comes from, and in so doing, I think we leave something of ourselves behind as readers. Greer Gilman found whatever it is that is left behind, she has captured it in her net of words and managed to write it down and get it published. That is a herculean feat. It may only happen once in her lifetime or in ours. But it’s happened here and now. What you do with it is up to you. For eternity, as it happens.”
—Rick Kleffel
Ursula K. Le Guin @ Powell’s, Sunday, Jan. 6
Fri 4 Jan 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin
Ursula K. Le Guin will be at Powell’s City of Books this Sunday evening at 7:30 PM. Would that we could be there! But this is your chance to order your signed copy:
Upcoming Event
Joan Aiken, new Wolves editions
Thu 20 Sep 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Joan Aiken| Posted by: Gavin
Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite series is celebrating its fiftieth(!) anniversary this year.
There are beautiful new editions coming out in the US and the UK as well as a new audio book, read by Joan’s daughter, Lizza. (You can see all the international editions here!)
There will be events in the USA (at the Bank Street College Auditorium on Oct. 26th) and in the UK (at the Cheltenham Festival, Saturday, October 13.
Clarion West reading series
Fri 8 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Clarion West, events| Posted by: Gavin
Hey, we’re going to teach week 5 at Clarion West in Seattle this year. We haven’t been to CW—or out west—for ages. Can’t wait!
While there we’ll do a reading at the fabby University Book Store—although you might also want to pick up tix for some of these other readings, too.
The readers for the 2012 Clarion West Summer Reading Series are:
Mary Rosenblum
June 19, 7 p.m., University Book Store
Mary Rosenblum explores climate change, biotechnology, and class inequity in stories based on her profound knowledge of science and technology and her passion for sustainable living. Her first novel, The Drylands, won the 1994 Compton Crook Award, and in 2009 she received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for her story “Sacrifice.”
Stephen Graham Jones
June 26, 7 p.m., University Book Store
Stephen Graham Jones has published eleven novels and over 140 finely-honed stories about innocents, unfairness, and scary truths. A Blackfoot Indian from Texas, a Professor of English at the University of Colorado, an NEA Fellow, and a Bram Stoker Award finalist, Jones can warm an audience to laughter or chill it with icily observed inevitabilities.
George R.R. Martin
July 3, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle
George R. R. Martin is the author of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, basis for HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ He has received four Hugos, two Nebulas, and many other major awards over his four-decade career. Martin was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2011. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.
Connie Willis
July 10, 7 p.m., University Book Store
Connie Willis peppers her live appearances with humorous insights on everything from the Oscars to current elections. Willis has won more major awards than any other author, including most recently her eleventh Hugo for Blackout/All Clear, a time-travel novel about World War II London. She explores comic and tragic aspects of the human condition through characters that run the gamut from desperately likable to sweetly infuriating.
Kelly Link & Gavin Grant
July 17, 7 p.m., University Book Store
Kelly Link and Gavin Grant founded Small Beer Press, arguably today’s most important independent publisher of avant-garde fantasy. Link’s award-winning fiction was described as “an alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’” by Salon.com. Grant’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons and The Christian Science Monitor. The pair’s editorial projects include the literary zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, several volumes of The Years’ Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow), and 2011’s Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories.
Chuck Palahniuk
July 24, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle
Chuck Palahniuk is known for his reclusive nature and his skillful hand with disturbing modern fables. His most recent book, Damned, references the young adult novels of Judy Blume as it follows a thirteen-year-old girl through Hell. Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club won critical acclaim and cult status before being turned into a major motion picture. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.
More University Book Store Readings
In addition to the Clarion West Summer Reading Series, every year the University Book Store hosts dozens of other readings of interest to fans of SF. Check out their events calendar for further information.
ICFA, Brattle, Juniper
Wed 14 Mar 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., book fairs, events, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
What are we doing in the next few weeks?
Kelly will be Guest of Honor (with China Mieville) at ICFA, March 21 – 25, Orlando Airport Marriott, Orlando, FL, and I will be running around with Ursula.
Gregory Maguire and Kelly Link, Brattle Theater, Cambridge, Mass.
Discussing Stone Animals and Tales Told in Oz—beautiful new chapbooks published by Madras Press, and all the proceeds got to charity.
March 29, 6 PM
UMass Amherst Juniper Literary Festival, Amherst, Mass.
Julia Holmes and loads of other interesting people are going to be there, yay! We will have a table in the book fair.
April 13 & 14
Japan/America Writers Dialog
Masatsugu Ono and Tomoka Shibasaki will be joined by Stuart Dybek and Kelly Link for an intriguing and original cross-cultural encounter facilitated by translators Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata.
Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue at 70th St., NYC
May 6, 2 PM
Yale Writers Conference
We will be there on the last day to talk about publishing in all its many joys.
June 22
Joy! It’s what we live for. If you don’t love it, why do it? Oh, wait, must go try and understand and fill in another spreadsheet, eek!
(Jim) Kelly (Link) @ the KGB
Wed 11 Jan 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
It’s an all Kelly night at KGB Fantastic Fiction at the excellent KGB Bar in NYC next Wednesday:
FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:
| James Patrick Kelly is best known for his short fiction, Including “Think Like A Dinosaur,” “Ten to the Sixteenth to One” and “Burn.” His work has been translated into nineteen languages and has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. His most recent publishing venture is the ezine James Patrick Kelly’s Strangeways on Kindle and Nook. | |
| & | |
| Kelly Link is the author of three collections of stories and her fiction has won three Nebula Awards, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She recently co-edited Steampunk!: An anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories with her husband Gavin J. Grant | |
Wednesday January 18th, 7pm at
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/
Subscribe to our mailing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kgbfantasticfiction/
Readings are always free.
Please forward to friends at your own discretion.
No power, no feast, no podcast!
Wed 2 Nov 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookstores, Delia Sherman, events, podcast, steampunk| Posted by: Gavin
Wow, did we get snowed under. The early snowstorm here in New England means that Julie is off doing sekrit real (saving the) world work for peeps without power which means we won’t have a podcast this week. Besides, we’re not even sure if the power will be on at the office tomorrow!
That also means all orders are a bit delayed—including pre-orders of The Freedom Maze, which should have shipped out Monday. My apologies!
It’s been pretty incredible here over the last few days and we know a lot of people without power. But everyone really is hanging together.
If all goes well, Kelly and I and Cassandra Clare will be reading and signing from Steampunk! tomorrow night at the Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley:
Thursday, Nov. 3, 7 PM
The Odyssey Bookshop
9 College St.
S. Hadley, MA 01075
The Odyssey, one of our excellent local indie bookstores, never charges for kids’ events, so the reading & Q&A will be open to anyone who would like to attend. However, they do require that attendees purchase Steampunk! from them in order to get into the signing line. The good news is that you can bring as many other books from home as you like to have signed but you do need to purchase the new book from the bookstore.
Also! While supplies last they will be giving a free YA ARC to attendees in Steampunk attire.
Ayize (San Francisco), Kelly et al (Boston), Geoff (NYC)
Mon 18 Jul 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events| Posted by: Gavin
Busy week for Small Beer readings:
Thursday, July 21, Ayize Jama-Everett is reading from The Liminal People (you can sign up here to get a free copy from LibraryThing) as part of an open reading at the “Black Futurists: Progressive Thought to Sci-Fi” exhibit:
African American Art and Culture Complex (AAACC)
1410 Turk St, San Francisco, CA 94115 (Map)
(415) 922-2049
| Jul 21st, 2011 (Thu) |
7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
|
| Open Mic – Hosted my D. Scot Miller
Location: Floor 1
D. Scot Miller welcomes featured Black Futurist readers and host open mic. Speculative and fantastic poetry and fiction that explores possible and alternate futures within and around the diaspora are welcome! |
The same night (7/19, 7 PM) here in Boston, Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant (me!), David Blair, Michael J. DeLuca will be reading from the new issue of LCRW, #27, at the New England Institute of Art.
The Library Reading Room, Second Floor, Main Campus
New England Institute of Art, 10 Brookline Place West, Brookline, MA 02445-7295
1.617.739.1700 • 1.800.903.4425
And on Wednesday (7/20, 7 PM) down there in Gotham City, Geoff Ryman will be celebrating the release of his first short story collection, Paradise Tales, at the KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading Series, held every month at the most excellent KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., NYC.
And then next Tuesday (7/26, 7 PM), in LA, Lydia Millet reads from her first children’s book, The Fires Beneath the Sea, at another most excellent venue, Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California.
Hope you can get out to one of them. Photos always welcome!
On a happier note (signed books galore)
Thu 7 Jul 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., events| Posted by: Gavin
we have copies of two new books in stock! Lydia Millet’s first book for kids, The Fires Beneath the Sea (our third Big Mouth House title), and Geoff Ryman’s long-delayed new collection, Paradise Tales. One for the kids, one for the adults!
Los Angeles News Flash! We just confirmed a reading for Lydia on July 26th at 7 PM at the most excellent indie Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena.
Boston, not a news flash: Geoff is one of the Guests of Honor at Readercon in Boston next week (and is reading at KGB in NYC after that) so we will have stacks of his books for your enjoyment. We’ll also have some signed copies in the office after the con.
Which reminds me of one of the things we should make more of a fuss about . . . we have signed copies of a bunch of our books! Order here and they’re yours (free shipping in the US & Canada as usual):
Alan DeNiro · Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (5)
Carol Emshwiller · The Mount (5); Carmen Dog (2)
Greer Gilman · Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales (2)
Julia Holmes · Meeks (6)
John Kessel · The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (5 hardcovers)
Kelly Link · Stranger Things Happen (5)
Kelly Link · Magic for Beginners (5)
Laurie J. Marks · Water Logic (7)
Vincent McCaffrey · Hound (5)
Maureen F. McHugh · Mothers & Other Monsters (8 pb, 4 hc)
Benjamin Parzybok · Couch (5)
Geoff Ryman · The King’s Last Song (2)
Sean Stewart · Mockingbird (1); Perfect Circle (4)
Jennifer Stevenson · Trash Sex Magic (2)
Howard Waldrop · Howard Who? (7)