Flavorwire recommends
Tags: Joy Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Karin Tidbeck, Nathan Ballingrud, Yoon Ha LeeNice reading list posted yesterday on Flavorwire included a few books you might know or want to know:
Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee
“Science fiction and fabulist stories with mathy, orchestral, universal tones, written in gorgeous prose.”
Jagganath by Karin Tidbeck
“Strange, haunting goodness from Sweden, with an emphasis on unbelonging. A captivating read.”
What I Didn’t See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler
“A stunning collection that mixes history, fantasy, myth, and something else altogether unknowable. Witty and powerful and totally out there.”
North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud
“Love stories/monster stories.”
The Changeling by Joy Williams
“As Rick Moody says in its introduction: “The Changeling, which is rich with the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published about the same time), and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano, would have seemed perfectly legible in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow was published, or Gaddis’s J.R. But the late seventies, with their punk rock nihilism and their Studio 54 fatuousness, were perhaps not properly situated to understand this variety of Joy Williams challenge. To their shame.” We’re over all that fatuousness now, though.”
Ad many more including: Amelia Gray, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Matt Bell, Laura Van den Berg, Karen Russell, Jeff VanderMeer, and Nalo Hopkinson.
Science and Herself
Tags: Karen Joy Fowler, PM Press
I’m really enjoying the whole Outspoken Authors series from PM Press and last week I read Karen Joy Fowler’s entry, The Science of Herself, and now I want you to go and read it, too. And, bonus, today it is on super sale! (Full disclosure: I know Karen, published a collection of her work, and really want you to read her books!)
The title story “The Science of Herself” is about (ok, forgive me, it’s about a lot of things) Mary Anning, who from an early age, was one of the foremost fossil hunters in Britain. Of course, she wasn’t recognized as such: those who bought her discoveries claimed them as their own and Mary and her family had to struggle for their daily bread. This is Karen in her element: writing about women in history doing their own thing, investigating the world, and not always being recognized or even noticed by the men around them. She mixes in some Jane Austen — after all, she did write The Jane Austen Book Club — and breaks your heart over and over. (That is kind of her specialty.)
The second story, “The Pelican Bar,” won both the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards and is a spectacular story, although all the spectacle is slipped underneath the surface. In the interview, Terry Bisson asks whether the story (which is about a North American teenager) was inspired by the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and Karen says:
“Definitely Guantánamo. Also Abu Ghraib. But even more directly, from the chain of overseas schools run by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), particularly the notorious Tranquility Bay in Jamaica and High Impact in Mexico. I read online a statement that we shouldn’t be surprised that Americans are OK with torturing foreign prisoners, because apparently we are OK with the torturing of American children, as long as it happens overseas. That statement was the seed of my story.”
The last story is “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” which was originally published in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists and is another fabulous how does she do it story.
And, you know, the stories are fabulous, but the two pieces of nonfiction are what makes this book a must have. Karen is one of the smartest people I know and any time I can see her on a panel or listen to an interview (or even read one), I do. Her conversation with Terry Bisson is worth the price of the book alone, and, given that The Science of Herself is on super sale today, I hope you’ll give it a shot.
What I Didn’t See + Unicorns! Pegasus! Kittens!
Tags: Fairy Tale Review, free ebooks, Ginn Hale, Karen Joy Fowler, site update blatheringsToday we’re very happy to release the ebook of Karen Joy Fowler’s awesome new collection What I Didn’t See and Other Stories. Karen’s stories are some of the best you’ll read in any genre: science fiction, fiction, historical, alternate history, fantasy. . . . Two of the stories here received Nebula Awards and “The Pelican Bar” received the Shirley Jackson Award. It’s a subtle and stunning collection and I think this might be the first site the ebook is available on (I’m probably wrong!). Hope you enjoy it!
We’ve been working away on a few things trying to see how we can bring lots of presses on without us having to put in more than the occasional afternoon every three or four weeks (come on, it’s publishing, we’ve got tea to sip and deep obscure novels to flash around coffeeshops).
And: we’ve been talking to Blind Eye Books about making 2011 the Year of Ginn Hale and being able to publish something new every month. It will be gobsmacking! All will be revealed later this fall. It will be huge! A rift will form in space time! (At least in yours and ours!)
The new Red Issue of Fairy Tale Review is coming soon. We also need to add Michael’s (et al) Homeless Moon chapbooks. There are more magazines to bring on board. Still working on electronic subscriptions—anyone who has a good fix for this, feel free to email us!
I remembered a story that Kelly and I published a while ago, “Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky” in Altair, that I doubt will ever end up in any book (besides The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror) so we’ll probably put it up here as an ebook. That will be an interesting experiment to see if we should do more of that sort of thing. What do you think the price should be?
In the meantime there are Unicorns! Pegasus! Kittens! What does it mean? I have no idea! But you should go here (check out this url: http://unicornpegasuskitten.com!) and download the DRM-free completely free ebook with stories from Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi, Cat Valente, Rachel Swirsky, and many others. The book is free but please consider making a donation as it’s a fundraiser for the benefit of the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America. You can also donate and get a tax receipt for it here on Gretchen Schafer’s donation page.
