Weightless Books

Ursula K. Le Guin Appreciations in Locus

by Gavin Grant March 14th, 2018

Ursula K. Le Guin  is remembered with an obituary, photos, and appreciations and reminiscences from friends and colleagues — including appreciations by Eileen Gunn, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ginger Clark, Gregory Benford, Peter S. Beagle, John Kessel, George R.R. Martin, and Tom Whitmore — in the current issue of Locus.

There are also all the usual goodies, news, reviews (Sofia Samatar! John Kessel! Kelly Robson! Aliette de Bodard! Kelly Barnhill! and many more), commentary by Cory Doctorow, and more.

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Mary Rickert in Locus

by Gavin Grant January 19th, 2016

There’s a fascinating interview with Mary Rickert in the current issue of Locus where she talks about trying to write novels over the years and what works and does not work for her, writing in general, and her mother’s death.

I love Mary’s writing (we recently published her collection You Have Never Been Here at Small Beer) and am fascinated that she says she does not always know everything about her stories. I think it’s the gaps in the stories that make them so fascinating (or scary) and lifelike to me.

You can read part of the interview on Locus’s site and the rest (and an interview with superstar Charlie Jane Anders) in Locus.

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New Elizabeth Hand interview and ebook

by Gavin Grant October 23rd, 2015

Wow, is it spooky around here right now? Everywhere it’s argh! this and eek! that. What if you just want a great read? I have good news for you. Wait, turns out Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love was a finalist for the International Horror Guild Awards, oh no! Maybe it is dark and spooky after all? Although it was also a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award and longlisted for the Tiptree, so it has to be good, even if it is scary. Wait (again), I know the answer to this: it’s all of the above! Yep!

Annnd, don’t miss this month’s Locus which has a timely interview with Elizabeth Hand — along with all the usual other goodies:

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August by Rilo Kiley; Kat Howard

by Gavin Grant August 1st, 2014

August, see Rilo Kiley song below. Isn’t it time for a cold drink? Shouldn’t we sit under a tree, read a book? Hmm.

Since we just got bombarded with a ton of new magazines I though a quick survey of what’s new would be worth while. Looks like it’s Kat Howard‘s month!

Locus has an interview with one of the hottest new writers this year, Ann Leckie, whose debut novel Ancillary Justice has been sweeping awards as well as an interview with Ian McDonald and a column by Kameron Hurley with a great title: “People Don’t Buy Books They Don’t Know About (Even Great Ones).”

Clarkesworld Magazine: New stories from James Patrick Kelly, Caroline M. Yoachim, Kat Howard, and Joseph Tomaras, and reprints from Naomi Novik and Ian R. MacLeod.

Lightspeed: New stories by An Owomoyela, E. Catherine Tobler, Tahmeed Shafiq, and Kat Howard, along with reprints by Gardner Dozois, David I. Masson, Ken Liu, Gwyneth Jones, and a novella by Sherwood Smith.

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine brings stories from Clint Spivey, Emma Osborne, Mary Alexandra Agner, William Delman, J. Daniel Batt, Frank Smith, Jared W. Cooper, and Garrick Fincham.

Nightmare Magazine has dark fiction from Desirina Boskovich and Ben Peek, and reprints from Tia V. Travis and Simon Strantzas, and an excerpt from the novel Proud Parents, by Kristopher Rufty.

Interzone brings us James Van Pelt, Andrew Hook, Neil Williamson, D.J. Cockburn, E. Catherine Tobler, and Caren Gussuff, and much in the way of nonfiction.

Meanwhile, dropping quarterly, The Dark has stories from Stephen Graham Jones, Octavia Cade, Emily B. Cataneo, and Darja Malcolm-Clarke.

If that isn’t enough from you this week, I want to hear about it!

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Hugh Howey, Locus interview

by Gavin Grant December 16th, 2013

The December issue of Locus is flying out the door here and I think it is because it has a great interview with Hugh Howey, author of Wool, etc. Howey’s story is interesting. Wool is not his first, second, or third novel. Read the interview, he’s pretty impressive, although he self-deprecatingly says he was just in the right spot at the right time. Sure!

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May 2013 Bestsellers

by Gavin Grant June 3rd, 2013

The May issue of Locus was last month’s bestseller, no doubt helped by the focus on indie publishing (yay!). You can read more about it here. Ginn Hale, superstar, took 2nd and 3rd place—and The Rifter popped up again on the Subscription List: maybe I missed some kind of Ginn Hale news? The books were followed mostly by magazines: props to the new issue of Electric Velocipede for making the list! Wearing my (nonexistent, maybe I should get one?) Small Beer Press hat, it’s heartening to see Sofia Samatar’s dense and beautiful debut novel A Stranger in Olondria and Kij Johnson’s very different At the Mouth of the River of Bees on the list.

In subscriptions Clarkesworld once again had a heck of a month—surely powered by all those awards and nominations—and their 80th issue was packed with all the goodies. At the moment, Clarkesworld is also the most popular magazine on Weightless.

For comparison here are the last couple of month’s bestseller charts—March, April—and for real fun, May 2011!

Books

1. Locus, May 2013
2. Lord of the White Hell Book One & Book Two, Ginn Hale
3. Ginn Hale et al, Irregulars
   New York Review of Science Fiction #296
   Clarkesworld Magazine – Issue 80
   A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
   
4. Electric Velocipede, issue 26
5. At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson

Subscriptions

1. Clarkesworld Magazine
2. Galaxy’s Edge Magazine
3. Lightspeed Magazine
4. The Rifter
5. Nightmare Magazine

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Locus

by Gavin Grant May 9th, 2013

This month in Locus there is a great section on THE SMALL & INDEPENDENT PRESS which includes many of our favorite publishers—many of which are also on Weightless (and some aren’t that we hope to add). It’s a fascinating cross section of a moment in publishing. Five years ago most of these publishers were around, except ChiZine (founded 2008) and Twelfth Planet Press and Cheeky Frawg (both circa 2011). How about five years from now? Who knows? (And if you do, drop me a line!) Check it out, it’s a fun piece. Links below go to books on the site.

(Here’s a full list of publishers on Weightless.)

I also wondered which of the Locus Award finalists we had on Weightless and came up with the following. Clarkesworld rules? 

NOVELLA

• After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

SHORT STORY

• “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)
• “Mantis Wives”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 8/12)

COLLECTION

• Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime)
• At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson (Small Beer)
• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)

MAGAZINE

• Clarkesworld

PUBLISHER

• Subterranean Press

EDITOR

• John Joseph Adams
• Ellen Datlow
• Gardner Dozois
• Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

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FTR sale, new magazines, and, at last, Was

by Gavin Grant February 5th, 2013

Hey fairy tale fans, we’re running a week long sale on all titles from Fairy Tale Review. Use the coupon FTR when you check out and save 25% on Joy Williams’s Changeling, the Fairy Tale Review Special, and more.

Congratulations to Karin Tidbeck whose debut collection Jagganath just received the Crawford Award!

New this week:

• Apex Magazine featuring Sarah Monette and others.
• The Second Ghost Story Megapack featuring M.R. James et al.
• Clarkesworld Magazine (Erzebet YellowBoy, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Greg Kurzawa).
• Nightmare Magazine (Ted Kosmatka, Sarah Langan, a reprint by Margo Lanagan, and a feature interview with Caitlín R. Kiernan).
• Lightspeed Magazine (C.C. Finlay, Carrie Vaughn, Genevieve Valentine; reprints from Maureen F. McHugh, Marly Youmans, and John Crowley; interviews with Lois McMaster Bujold and Steven Erikson; ebook-exclusive novella by Tad Williams; an excerpt of Karen Lord’s new novel The Best of All Possible Worlds).
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies (James L. Sutter and Leslianne Wilder).
• Locus (Year in Review issue with essays, the Locus 2012 Recommended Reading List, interviews with Catherynne M. Valente and Brian Slattery, etc.).
• More, always more.

And, at last! Today is the ebook release day for one of the best, saddest, deepest, most heartbreaking novels we know, Was by Geoff Ryman.

And for instant gratification, you can read an excerpt from another Small Beer title, Trafalgar, right now at Tor.com: “The Best Day of the Year.”

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Nice review of The Unreal and the Real in Locus

by Gavin Grant December 12th, 2012

Gary K. Wolfe reviews Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Unreal and the Real in the latest issue of Locus:  “After a while, though, the experience of reading any retrospective as excellent as the Selected Stories reduces you, if not to bab- bling, to just delighting in some of your favorites.”

Reader reviews are always welcome.

We’re going to post a quick picks for the holidays so we’d love to hear from you about what books you’re reading and enjoying and which you recommend (maybe not always the same thing?).

I’ve been slowwwly reading Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire. I fear it is coming to an end and then what will I do?

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Wizard’s Tower added, Apex reached, Lethe has a green thumb

by Gavin Grant August 7th, 2012

Out goes the latest issue of Apex Magazine into the world. It has a story and interview with Genevieve Valentine as well as stories by Kat Howard, Marie Brennan, and Nir Yaniv, an article with the best title ever by Jim C. Hines (“Mighty Axes and Beer-Soaked Beards: The Portrayal of Dwarves in Fantasy”) and Lynne M. Thomas’s editorial. If monthly isn’t enough for your magazine fix, don’t forget that every two weeks there’s a new issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

We’re happy to announce that we have added the first five titles from Wizard’s Tower Press which is run by our pal Cheryl Morgan over in the UK. Get your Ben Jeapes and Juliet McKenna here. Also this week, new titles from those busy bees at Lethe Press, including the fascinating looking Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone where “Mutability blooms in the Florida Keys after the Red War.” Caught my eye.

Lethe have also published a few very interesting looking anthologies of late:

• Publishers Weekly gave a starred review (“will inspire writers, delight and satisfy readers who are already familiar with fluid gender identities, and leave newly enlightened readers determined to make the world more welcoming”) to Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction edited by new Strange Horizons editor Brit Mandelo.
• Charles A. Tan is one of the busier people we know and it is thrilling to see he’s converted some of that energy into a book Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology. Publishers Weekly says, “SF/F blogger and critic Tan has assembled an eclectic, innovative mix of 14 stories for what is almost certainly the first Filipino–Chinese speculative fiction anthology.”
• And Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman’s latest anthology is Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction features 15 of last year’s best stories.

What else? The new Locus hasn’t arrived at my house yet, but you can get it instantly in pdf, epub, and mobi. It has interviews with Jack Vance and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, awards winners, an appreciation of Ray Bradbury by his daughter, and all the usual good stuff.

In Small Beer Press news it was a great weekend as Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze had received its third(!) award, the Mythopoeic, and Karen Lord’s debut novel Redemption in Indigo received its fourth(!!), the Carl Brandon Parallax Award.

There’s also a new Small Beer Podcast wherein Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility” is read by Dave Thompson, and for those who like apps, Joan Aiken’s lovely “The Sale of Midsummer” is now up for free on Consortium’s free Bookslinger short story app.

Lastly: there were a few errors in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, so we have uploaded the most recent, corrected edition of issue 71 which is now available to all readers and subscribers in the Library.

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DRM? Pah! Plus: Shimmer, Locus, Apex, LS, & much more

by Gavin Grant May 1st, 2012

DRM-free ebooks are in the air (as it were) with MacMillan announcing that all Tor books will be DRM-free by July of this year. We’ve always thought that DRM-free ebooks are the only way to go as they’re the most reader friendly so we’re super happy to see Tor make this great choice. Yay! Well done to everyone involved! We’ll talk to Tor and see if we can get their titles up here once they’re available.

New this month to Weightless is Shimmer magazine. We have their current issue, #14, available in (yes, DRM-free, ok, ok, I’ll stop) pdf, epub, and mobi, and will be adding pdfs of back issues in coming months. (Ping us if you have a fave issue you’d liked added and we’ll see if we can get those sooner.) I’ve always enjoyed the physical Shimmer—it’s well designed and feels great in the hand—and am looking forward to seeing how it translates into an ebook.

We just posted the May issues of Locus (interviews with Seanan McGuire and Nick Mamatas, reviews galore), Apex (fiction by Rachel Swirsky, Nnedi Okorafor, et al), and Lightspeed (fiction from Linda Nagata, C. C. Finlay, Nicola Griffith, Catherynne M. Valente, Kage Baker et al, excerpts from new novels by Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as interviews with Vernor Vinge and Michael Chabon). New issues from Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies will also go up in the next couple of days.

I was talking to a friend who publishes a quarterly magazine recently—naming no names in case it doesn’t work out—and it looks like we may  have a nice announcement about that in the works. We’re always happy to add new magazines and indie publishers. We hope to add NYRSF soon.

Elsewhere on the site, Wildside are selling a lot of those megapacks and Aqueduct have promised us more ebooks very soon—although like many people we know they are busy, busy with WisCon prep. So sorry we won’t be there this year. Hope to get back soon. We will have a table (courtesy of David J. Schwartz) and will co-sponsor the Genderfloomp dance.

Since we’re now well into the second quarter of the year, we dropped the price of A Working Writer’s Daily Planner from $3.99 to $2.99 and the Almanac edition from $4.99 to $3.99.

April Bestsellers

1. Ginn Hale, Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara, Nicole Kimberling, Irregulars
2. Kickstarter prodigy, Fireside Magazine
3. Melissa Scott, Lisa A. Barnett, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant
4. Nancy Kress, Fountain of Age: Stories
5. Lightspeed Magazine subscription

In sadder news, we’re sorry to say Something Wicked announced they are officially stopping their monthly publication schedule. We refunded all subscribers and are happy to point readers to their website where they will continue to post individual stories, reviews, and interviews. Back issues are available here—and with luck more back issues will be added as spring goes on. It was a brave run and we wish Joe and Vianne the best of luck with future projects.

These continue to be interesting times in ebook land with Microsoft and bn.com teaming up together, Google giving everyone the boot (boo), Tor going DRM-free and so on. Weightless exists so that indie publishers and readers could find one another. Thanks for reading, for supporting indie publishing, and for spreading the word, it’s much appreciated! We’re always happy to hear from readers and encourage reviews and comments.

That’s it. Happy May Day!

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Infinity Plus Singles, e-Locus Is a Hit

by Michael February 14th, 2012

This week we have ten new short story singles from UK publisher Infinity Plus, all at the low low price of 99 cents! These are part of a numbered series, including some brand new stories and some classics. Hopefully we’ll have more of them in the not-too-distant future.

Meanwhile, electronic issues of Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field have been selling like gangbusters since we added them last week. Just seven days and they’re already our bestseller for the month (!), thanks in no small part, no doubt, to a boingboinging.

In other news, Gavin is away in Oz for the next month, which leaves me, Michael, to do things like add new titles and write updates.

Which allows me to share with you the following (hopefully) helpful troubleshooting hint: Locus ebook files are big, upwards of 15 megabytes, due to the array of wonderful color photos and book ads which are part of what make each issue great. Unfortunately this is a little too big for some email servers to handle, including ours. This means the best way to get them onto your ereader is by downloading the files to your computer and loading them via a cable rather than trying to send them wirelessly.

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Welcoming Locus Magazine

by Gavin Grant February 7th, 2012

Weightless Books is very happy to announce that they have added the digital edition of Locus Magazine, “The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field.”

Subscriptions and individual issues are available as well as back issues going back to January 2011.

As with all Weightless Books titles, Locus is available DRM-free. Readers can choose either pdf, epub, or mobi format.

Locus is a monthly magazine which has covered the science fiction and fantasy field since 1968. Locus publishes news of the science fiction publishing field with extensive reviews and listings of new science fiction books and magazines. The magazine is published from Oakland, California. It was co-founded, published, and edited by Charles N. Brown until his death in 2009; the current editor-in-chief is Liza Groen Trombi.

The latest issue is the February 2012 issue which features:

— the annual Year in Review essays
— the Locus 2011 Recommended Reading List
— an interview with Joe Haldeman
— reviews of new books by Tim Powers, Ted Kosmatka, William Gibson, Catherynne M. Valente, Sarah Monette, Matthew Hughes, Cory Doctorow, and more.

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