Christopher Barzak's Birds and Birthdays

I'm pleased to announce the release of Christopher Barzak's Birds and Birthdays, the thirty-fourth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. 

Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated Surrealism. This is Christopher Barzak’s tribute to them, three stories and an essay that enter into a humane surrealism which turns away from the unconscious and toward magic.

Sometimes the stories themselves seem to be paintings. Sometimes painter and writer may be characters, regarding each other through a painful otherness, talking in shared secrets. Barzak’s stories are huge with the spacious strangeness of worlds where there is always more room for a woman to escape her tormenters, or outgrow an older self. Here we find a bird-maker and a star-catcher whose shared history spills over into the birds and the stars themselves; a girl who outgrows her clothes, her house, and finally her town—and leaves to find her body a new home; a landlord, whose marriage, motherhood, separation, sexual exploration, and excursions into self-portraiture all take place within a single apartment building.

In “Remembering the body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism,” Barzak comments on the images that inspired these stories and discusses his own position as a writer among painters--and gender politics within the Surrealist movement.

 Here's a passage from "The Creation of Birds," the tale that engages with the paintings of Remedios Varo:

The Bird Woman hasn’t been able to make birds for a long time. Nearly four months have passed without one new bird. The birds in the next room were the last to receive the required teaspoon of moon and starlight needed to give them life. The stars and moons, a lot of them have been disappearing. It’s because of the Star Catcher—he’s been out there again, in the night sky, taking them down, so many of them, as if they were mere ornaments or lanterns. Without them, the Bird Woman won’t be able to complete even this sparrow, small and slight as it is. There isn’t enough available light to make it live. Why do I try, she wonders.  Habit, she thinks. Wishful thinking, she decides.

She tries not to attribute anything to hope.

A swan strolls into the workshop, sidling up beside the Bird Woman’s leg, attempting to view the parchment, but its neck isn’t long enough to stretch that high. “Shoo,” the Bird Woman scolds it. “Back with the others, silly swan. We’ll be leaving soon for the market.”

She strokes the top of its head before it turns to leave the room. Her fingers come away damp, sticky with ivory.

You can purchase Birds and Birthdays here.

Lesley Wheeler's The Receptionist and Other Tales

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct has just released The Receptionist and Other Tales, a new Conversation Pieces volume featuring narrative poetry by Lesley Wheeler. I'll let Ursula Le Guin's and Gwyneth Jones's descriptions speak for the volume:

Gwyneth Jones, author of Spirit and The Universe of Things writes: Lesley "Wheeler's The Receptionist is a delight: a stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, “Zombie Thanksgiving” (T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force."

Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia and Cheek by Jowl, writes: "How much Modernism deprives us of when it declared both the fantastic in fiction and the narrative in poetry unrespectable, and what a pleasure it is now to see the exiled witches and the forbidden rhymes return. Where can an evil Dean meet his doom more fitly than in terza rima? Lesley Wheeler’s brief novel of misbehaviour in academia, subtle and funny, rashly inventive and perfectly realistic, uses all the forgotten powers of metaphor and poetry to make the mundane luminous."

Edna, the heroine of "The Receptionist," is a mother and the receptionist for an academic department. The morning after hearing a Voice telling her The first revolution: simply to refuse, going through her email inbox, "Edna thought to check her spam."

 There it was, from "Gnomic Utterance." Subject
line: Solve for X. My destiny approaches,
she thought, and chuckled like a cracked crock-pot.

 You can purchase it now, here.

Stuff of Interest

--The Weird Review has not only posted a review of The Moment of Change, but also reprinted two of its poems. Reviewer Adam Mills characterizes the anthology as "a collection of works so extensive, dense, and intense that it expands the space it is placed within and makes a territory for itself."

 --The Future Fire has posted a review of Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient. Reviewer Martha Hubbard writes, "Throughout the language is stunning, like music become words. I found my own mind dazzled and my imagination stretched to keep up with the flow of images. The story that spoke most strongly to me was that of ‘Marie’, a young Creole woman who has gradually become disconnected from her Louisiana home and her family identity."

 --The AALBC has also posted a review of Ancient, Ancient. Reviewer Emanuel Carpenter is a bit uncomfortable with its fantastic and science-fictional elements-- "If you haven’t been exposed to this type of writing, which can be described as African storytelling with a touch of poetic verse, erotica, science fiction and spiritual themes, then each story may indeed have you scratching your head and asking questions. Questions like: What’s up with the moths? Was that really a part snake, part human? What’s up with all the poetry?"-- even as he likes the book (and calls it a "page-turner"): "The stories in this book are sensual, unique, and thought-provoking. In fact, it’s easy to imagine many of the stories as the basis for short films instead of a book. Many of the stories that deal with issues of sexuality, desire, and even revenge (including some not mentioned in this review) will have you wishing they were expanded into a novel."

 --Sofia Samatar has reviewed Ellen Klages's In the House of the Seven Librarians for Strange Horizons. She characterizes the physical book thus: "Since the story takes place in such a library, the illustrations are more than padding: they cast a shadow of the world we know into the enchanted realm of the rather special Carnegie Library in the tale. Even with the illustrations, however, the book is small. You could put it into the envelope of a birthday card. It feels like a gift, and it would make a good one, because the story is delightful. Like other magical small spaces—the wardrobes and rabbit holes of fantastic literature—Klages's House is bigger on the inside." -

-Wired's Recovered 1927 Metropolis Film Program Goes Behind the Scenes of a Sci-Fi Masterpiece is worth checking out: "A remarkable 32-page theater program from Metropolis’ 1927 debut has surfaced at a well-known rare book shop in London, which scanned it and shared some pages with Wired. The program was created for the premiere of Metropolis at London’s Marble Arch Pavilion, and it’s packed with firsthand anecdotes from the making of the movie, and some stunning photographs. Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist, according to the Peter Harrington rare book shop, which has its copy on sale for 2,750 pounds ($4,244). (All 32 pages are available for viewing.) The program reveals the intriguing backstory behind the German sci-fi epic, as told from the perspective of Lang, his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou, and several members of the cast and crew."

 --New York Magazine has posted an essay by Frank Rich on the media's reaction to actor Andy Griffith's death to mourn not Griffith's passing but his role's being "one of the last links to another, simpler time" and a repository of “values which actually transcended the deep divides which tore the nation apart during the years the show aired from 1960 to 1968.” "In reality," Rich writes, "The Andy Griffith Show didn’t transcend the deep divides of its time. It merely ignored them." Rich then examines some of the narratives of American decline now flourishing, particularly the right wing's accusations against the Obama Administration and the reintroduction of the claims for American exceptionalism by Sarah Palin in 2008:

Once Obama was elected, American exceptionalism became as Palin had defined it—a proxy for the patriotism that the new president lacked. From there, it took just a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to link Obama’s deficiency of Americanism to America’s advancing decline. The conflation was consummated by Charles Krauthammer in an influential October 2009 article for The Weekly Standard titled “Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy.” To make his case, he leaned on an Obama quote from a press conference at a NATO conference in Strasbourg, France, that spring. In response to a question from Edward Luce, a Financial Times reporter (and himself the author of a subsequent declinist tome subtitled America in the Age of Descent), the president had answered, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In Krauthammer’s view, this was proof that Obama was endorsing American decline, for “if everyone is exceptional, no one is.”

Since then it’s been pile-on time on the right, usually with that one Obama quote brandished as the smoking gun. The president is constantly being lashed for his lack of commitment to American exceptionalism, much as he was slapped around during the 2008 campaign for not at first slavishly donning a flag lapel pin. Newt Gingrich helped lead the way with a campaign book titled A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters; he explained that he is an “American exceptionalist” because he believes in “fundamentally rebuilding the America we inherited,” as opposed to Obama, who “believes in fundamentally undermining the America we inherited.” Mitt Romney’s contribution to the genre, No Apology, is one long dirge for how America has lost its greatness in the Obama era’s bankrupt “reorientation away from a celebration of American exceptionalism.”

“On the right, the word ‘exceptional’—or ‘exceptionalism’—lately has become a litmus test” is how the columnist Kathleen Parker accurately characterized her fellow conservatives last year when chastising Obama for not obediently saying “that word ‘exceptional’ ” during his 2011 State of the Union address and instead “studiously” avoiding “the word conservatives long to hear.” The only flaw in her argument is that no American president has ever publicly referred to “American exceptionalism” in the more than eight decades since Stalin coined it—with the sole exception of Obama. According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara—a repository of all the presidents’ public words, eagerly mined by fact-checking bloggers in response to exceptionalism fetishists like Parker—George W. Bush did at least use exceptional in office, albeit twice in reference to his torpedoed Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why Obama, branded as an outlier to the “real America” by Palin in 2008, would be held to a different standard than his predecessors by a modern GOP that is almost as lily-white as Mayberry. But declinists not normally engaged in conservative partisan politics have fallen into the American-exceptionalism trap as well by buying wholeheartedly into the right’s elevation of Stalin’s coinage from near obscurity to a jingoistic buzz term. Murray writes that the country will be on the right track “only when we are talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional.” Friedman and Mandelbaum second the motion: American exceptionalism “has to be earned continually” and “is now in play.” Their intention may not be to join the right in tarring Obama with America’s collapse, but in this hothouse political climate that is the practical effect.

You can read the entire essay here.

Links for a Sunday afternoon

Summer officially arrived in the northern hemisphere this week, but Seattle's weather continues to be Spring-like, as though we've settled into mid-May weather for good. Which is all very pleasant, but I worry about my tomatoes and other hot-weather vegetables. (The lettuces and spinach and kales like it just fine, of course.)

I still haven't managed to write anything about WisCon for this blog. (Getting a bit late, I know...) I still hope to do that. In the meantime, here are some links.

--Versification has posted a review by Francesca Forrest of The Moment of Change. "Lemberg," she writes, "has chosen poems that represent the unruly, ungeneralizable expanse of human female experience."

--Electra at Starlady reviews Andrea Hairston's Mindscape-- and does so adopting the narrative form Andrea uses for character Lawanda Kitt's sections of the novel.

This is, in a way that I suspect many people would not want to really acknowledge, a truly American science fiction (science fantasy?) novel, and probably one of the few that I have read. Though there is a lot of Afro-futurism in here, there is also a lot of specifically American history, particularly the history of U.S.-Indian relations - born-again Sioux Ghost Dancers are central to the plot, and the final scenes take place at Wounded Knee. Furthermore, movies and a lot of Hollywood permeate the characters' lives and worldviews, as well as the fact that many of them are involved in movies as directors or actors or unwilling Extras. I liked the way that some of the characters were explicit about the fact that they didn't want to be co-opted into mainstream narratives, and probably my favorite character overall was Lawanda Kitt, a loud and proud ethnic throwback who shakes up the corrupt and rotting zone of Los Santos without fully realizing her own power, even though we only get her viewpoint in transmissions to various people. I didn't like Elleni quite so much, but by the end I understood her - indeed, one of the awesome things about this book is just how many awesome female characters there are.

--I've discovered a fantastic blog for high-quality local bird gossip: Union Bay Watch. Not only does the author, Larry, post his (and others') observations of avian life in Seattle, but he also provides spectacular photos (currently of eaglets and ongoing crow harassment of eagles, ospreys, and other larger birds) and very brief videos (for instance, of a Northern Flicker performing a mating dance). If you're at all interested in  birds, it's well worth checking out.

--A battle is under way at the University of Virginia between the board that governs the university (all of them--excepting the student representative-- the governor's political appointees who have contributed huge sums of money to political campaigns) on one side and the university's administration, faculty, and students on the other. To kick off its grand plan of turning the university into an online, for-profit diploma mill (explicitly, like Phoenix University), it fired the president of the university. I've been told of similar agendas at work on other campuses, but I've never heard of such a full-frontal assault quite like this one. The corporate-speak board members apparently conceive of themselves as enacting something known in the business world as "strategic dynamism." It's basically an embrace of instability as a way of ramming through measures of massive change before anyone has a chance of questioning much less thinking through the potential consequences of those measures. (Sort of like what happened in the US Government after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as POTUS.) The board has also hired the notorious Hill+Knowlton Strategies to manage public perceptions of their machinations. Although the protests at the UVA campus are tremendous (as seen by the refusal to serve of the person the board appointed as the president pro-tem), the fact that it is summer makes it seem unlikely that the protests can be sustained. I also wonder how far the main source of protest-- the faculty-- will be willing to go in the struggle. Of course it is their jobs (and their workplace) that will eventually be on the line. But since lost jobs aren't imminent, and almost all notions of personal interest tend to be located in the short-term, my hopes aren't high.

A few links of interest

--Apex Magazine has an article by Tansy Rayner Roberts: Girl Meets House: Kitchen Sinks, Joanna Russ and the Female Gothic.

--Amal El-Mohtar, reflecting on the requirement of exceptionality for women characters in the 1970s Sandbaggers spy series, posts More Thoughts on Feminist Characters: Sandbaggers and Female Exceptionalism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews The Moment of Change for Tor.com. "These poems," she writes, "are howling, and they are whispering, and they are calmly—or madly—telling stories about what it means to be a woman, any kind of woman, any person who reaches out for the name “woman.” I appreciated the inclusivity of this text, and the concern with gathering in as many voices as possible to put them in tension and in conversation. Some of the best poems of the text—and, having heard them performed, I may be biased—are JT Stewart’s “Say My Name” and “Ceremony,” one short and one long, both poems dealing with issues of race, immigration, and self-definition Also, it goes without saying, but: they are beautiful, wrenching, astounding pieces. Which is not to say that the whole book isn’t fabulous, because it is. With enough time, I would review every single poem of the approximately 70 pieces included here." You can read the whole review here.

--Gary Trudeau distills the reality of sexual harassment and rape in the US military into 20 frames of his Doonesbury strip.

Impolitic! by Andrea Hairston and Debbie Notkin

Now that we're back from WisCon, Aqueduct is ready to offer the latest book in our WisCon Guest of Honor series, Impolitic!, to those who didn't make it to WisCon this year. We always wait to offer this because we print only 175 copies. (They are also numbered.) Impolitic! is 180 pages. In a long essay, Debbie samples her incisive blog posts on body politics, examining the narratives told about our bodies and how we are told to live in and think about them, inciting her readers to the most profound rebellion. Andrea offers us a short fiction, “Griots of the Galaxy,” that enacts that profound rebellion in all its visceral, thrilling drama. Her essay, “Prophetic Artists,” grounded in the early twenty-first century, looks to Octavia Butler and others to illuminate the immanent possibilities of the here and now, reminding us of why sf/f is so necessary to us in 2012. And finally, Debbie and Andrea interview one another. Impolitic! is, throughout, an exemplar of what Hairston in that interview calls the “theatre of the mind,” where “lived experience is transformed into meaning and performed.” 

You can purchase it here. Just fyi, the GoH books are the only books we allow to go out of print when their runs have sold out.

Superlatives for Gwyneth Jones's fiction

Lovely to see Ian Sales's review of Gwyneth Jones's Universe of Things at the Daughters of Prometheus website.

This is one of the strongest collections of genre short stories I have ever read. There is not a bad story in it – even the single-page ‘One of Sandy’s Dreams’, originally written for The Drabble Project in 1988, manages to do more in 100 words than China Miéville’s BSFA Award nominated short story ‘Covehithe’ did in several thousand.

If that is not praise enough, consider Sales's conclusion to the review: "Gwyneth Jones is the finest writer of science fiction who is currently still writing that this country has produced. Highly recommended." Indeed.

Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient

It's May, and that means a bouquet of new publications from Aqueduct Press-- viz., the rest of her Spring 2012 list. The first of these has just arrived here in Seattle, and so I'm pleased to announce the release of Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient. For many sf readers, this is a new name. But her stories have been appearing in a variety of anthologies over the last few years-- in Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter and in Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, to mention only two. I had read and taken special notice of her stories, myself, so when she sent me a manuscript, I was excited at the prospect of becoming better acquainted with her work. (She will, by the way, be attending WisCon later this month.)

I asked Nisi Shawl to write an introduction to the collection. Her brief essay remarks particularly on the sensuality and erotic power of Kiini's prose. “Sexuality-cum-sensuality is the experiential link between mind and matter," Nisi writes, "the vivid and eternal refutation of the alleged dichotomy between them. This understanding is the foundation of my 2004 pronouncement on the burgeoning sexuality implicit in sf's Afro-diasporization. It is the core of many African-based philosophies. And it is the throbbing, glistening heart of Kiini's body of work. This book is alive. Be not afraid.”

"Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you breathless with their beauty."   — Nalo Hopkinson, author of The New Moon's Arms and The Salt Roads
 
"Kiini Ibura Salaam's collection of short fiction, Ancient, Ancient, demonstrates that she deserves to be considered as one of today's most promising contemporary genre writers. With writing that challenges assumptions on gender, the nature of fantasy, the uses of myth and much more, she offers the readers stories that they will not soon forget. A marvelous introduction to a marvelous writer."
  — Jack Womack, author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence
 
"Kiini Ibura Salaam is a natural-born storyteller and a gorgeous writer who chooses her characters and words with the care and skill of a poet. Her stories are transformative, wise and vivid with the quality of fantasy and fable. I loved reading this!"   — Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories and Poems and editor of the award-winning Dark Matter anthologies

"My favorite piece is one of three original to this collection, “Pod Rendezvous.” A long and entrancing look at the last libertine hours of a future female who must dedicate her remaining life to selfless nurturing, it swoops on gossamer contrails from crèche to club, from finger-shoveled cafeteria food to bars dispensing star juice. It is the book’s final story. At its end the heroine disappears, a bright spark flying out of sight, and the story is done but not over, or over but not yet done. The pull, the sometimes literally visceral attraction of what Kiini does with words, continues on beyond them."   — Nisi Shawl, author of Filter House, from her introduction to Ancient, Ancient

Ancient, Ancient received this review from Publishers Weekly:

"Salaam's collection of 10 reprints and 3 original stories introduces readers to alternate worlds built around magic, sensuality, sexuality, and the search for emotional comfort, however tenuous. A lusty god temporarily bestows his sexual spark on a worn-out and unappreciated young woman in ''Desire.'' The world of mothlike aliens who feed on the heated ''nectar'' of human sexual energies is explored in three linked tales. A young man's grandfather sends him time traveling into danger as a punishment in ''Battle Royale,'' while ''Rosamojo'' is a straightforward revenge story about a young girl who uses magic to punish her rapist father. Unearthly magics frame ''Ferret,'' an intriguing snippet about a space colony ship guided by animal divination, and ''Marie,'' in which a pregnant Creole woman is willing to sacrifice anything to feel at home in New York City. Salaam's unusual settings and lonely characters will call to readers who hunger for sex, identity, or just a place to belong."

You can purchase a copy from Aqueduct Press here. 

Rebecca Ore's Alien Trilogy

I'm happy to announce that Aqueduct Press has just released e-book editions of Rebecca Ore's Alien Trilogy: Becoming Alien, Being Alien, and Human to Human. I remember, on first reading Becoming Alien, running around from one Seattle bookstore to the next, in desperate, needy search of the other two. There'll be no need to do that now! The trilogy was first published in the late eighties and has been out of print for a long time. Aqueduct Press is selling them here for $7.95 each.

Aqueduct will, by the way, be releasing e-book editions of more of Rebecca's backlist in the near future.

ETA: It occurs to me that I should mention, this trilogy features a protagonist who thinks of himself as "a country boy" (which others call "hillbilly"), and offers a lot of insights into class relations from a view that's not middle class.   

Brit Mandelo's We Wuz Pushed: Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling

It's my pleasure to announce that Aqueduct Press has just released a new volume in the Conversation Pieces Series, We Wuz Pushed: Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling, by Brit Mandelo. "To speak radical truths—unapologetically, ferociously, rudely when necessary—is the central purpose of Joanna Russ's influential body of work," declares Mandelo in her essay on Russ's radical, groundbreaking literary and critical work. Mandelo’s essay traces Russ's evolving efforts to speak truth throughout her literary career—examining both Russ's successes and failures in doing so. She insists that Russ problematized and individualized her ultimate understanding of truth without rejecting its possibility. Rather, Mandelo argues, the trajectory of change in Russ's work and her revision of prior truths itself constitutes a valuable part of the truth-telling project. Russ emerges in Mandelo's essay as a heroic though all-too-human intellectual and artist, one whose angry, brilliant work we cannot afford to ignore or forget.

To tell you the truth, when this arrived in Aqueduct's mail, I snatched it from the pile to read first, rather than let it go to Kath, as mss sent to us usually do--and I devoured it one sitting. I suspect that a lot of Aqueduct readers will be as riveted as I by this essay.

You can buy the volume here for $9, or the e-book for $5.95. I'll be interested to hear what its readers might have to say about it. 

Unruly Islands

I'm pleased to announce Aqueduct's release of Unruly Islands by Liz Henry, as a trade paperback. Unruly Islands collects 36 poems suffused with science fiction, revolution, and digital life on the edge.

Annalee Newitz, editor of i09, says of the collection: “Liz Henry's poetry is always moving, funny, and weird, regardless of whether she's flying us on a rocketship through a science fictional social revolution or telling us a wry story about being an adolescent embezzler. This collection is like a monster cyborg mashup of Walt Whitman, Joanna Russ, and the internet. Which is to say: Fuck yeah!”

Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive, Why Things Burn, and Final Girl, writes: “With all the awe and shiny of Barbarella, the breathless curiosity of Robert Hayden's American Journal, and the dismal, too-real fluorescent sheen of the corner store, Liz Henry takes the world (and the otherword) and makes it ours in all of its signal and noise, its glorious classwar and cussmouth. She takes the unknowable along with the familiar and shows us how, incontrovertibly, the future is here, and the future is us.”

And Maureen Owen, author of Imaginary Income and Zombie Notes, observes, “Liz Henry's protean, phantasmagorical images slingshot us out and boomerang us back simultaneously over multiple plains in all directions. Immediate, futuristic, subliminal. An intimate, wild ride through a surrealistic mind field.”

You can purchase Unruly Islands through Aqueduct Press's website here. (I'm sorry to say we won't be able to offer e-book editions of the book because e-book formats aren't yet able to accommodate the book's stylistic characteristics, which it wouldn't be fair to either readers or authors to sacrifice.)

In the House of the Seven Librarians

I'm delighted to announce that Aqueduct Press is now releasing a delicious little book by Ellen Klages, In the House of the Seven Librarians. Here's its first, enticing sentence:

Once upon a time, the Carnegie Library sat on a wooded bluff on the east side of town: red brick and fieldstone, with turrets and broad windows facing the trees. Inside, green glass-shaded lamps cast warm yellow light onto oak tables ringed with spindle-backed chairs...

This charming story recounts the tale of what happens when an old Carnegie library is closed and its seven librarians refuse to abandon it. They lock the doors, and a forest grows around them like a cloak, sheltering them from the rest of the world. But their lives are changed when a book of fairy tales is found in the Book Drop, very, very overdue and the payment accompanying it is a first-born child.

In the House of the Seven Librarians is a timeless tale for anyone who spent a childhood in the refuge of the public library, or who believes that a world full of books is a truly magical place. And as Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels, has noted, “Ellen Klages writes like a dream—a dream from which you wake up laughing, and that fills the rest of the day with its strangeness and sweetness.”

Ellen's book is available in trade paperback for $9 and in e-book formats for $2.99. At the moment it's available only from Aqueduct Press, but will soon be available from other venues.

Pre-Release Special for Rebecca Ore's Time & Robbery

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the publication of Time and Robbery, a new novel by Rebecca Ore, author of Gaia's Toys, Time's Child, Slow Funeral, and other well-received books, as a trade paperback, in March 2012. Aqueduct will be selling the book for $13 through its website until its release date of March 1.

Time and Robbery features the protagonist of Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Vel, a gay immortal born in Paleolithic who jumps time at will. Unless Vel can help out his younger self, Vel's tribe's descendants—a big chunk of the 21st-century British population—will be eliminated from the timeline. Present-day Vel, though, has problems of his own, so he takes a chance and outs himself (and his talented teen-aged daughter Quince) to Joe Tavistock, a subcontractor on the weak end of the plausible deniability chain dangling off British intelligence, making it Joe’s problem. Joe's superiors are dubious, and Joe doesn't know who to trust. The stakes are high not just for Vel, but for everyone involved.

Rebecca Ore's first book about Vel, Centuries Ago and Very Fast, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick and the Lambda Awards. As Jeff VanderMeer wrote for Locus Online: “Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (from the truly amazing Aqueduct Press) has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane—scandalous?—the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and every-day.”

Advance Praise

"Rebecca is up to her old tricks here: surprising, puzzling, and delighting us at every turn; and in this sleek, lean detective tale, coolly twisting the tail of Time itself. Ore is that rarest of creatures, a writers' writer that readers also love."   —Terry Bisson, author of Fire on the Mountain and TVA Baby

 "When does a short novel qualify as an epic? When Rebecca Ore writes of centuries of kinfolk, millennia of hot sex, and a few days of investigating an impossible crime. Read this like you'd take a pill pushed into your hand by a stranger in a new nightclub in a city you've never been to. It's worth the trip." —Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and Sensation
 

A storyteller's book

Strange Horizons has a long, thoughtful review of Anne Sheldon's The Bone Spindle, by Sofia Samatar. She remarks, "I would have liked to see more from Anne Sheldon in this book, and I will look forward to reading more of her work" and concludes:

The Bone Spindle includes images as well as words: the illustrations are based on photographs of looms, spinning wheels, yarn and hands busy with knitting or embroidery. They complement the written words and add another thread to Sheldon's tapestry of old, new and reinterpreted stories. This collection would make a beautiful gift for a knitter or weaver, but it's also a storyteller's book, so full of voices that it seems to beg to be read aloud. And of course, when a piece is spoken, the way it's arranged on the page becomes less important. The oral mode, I suspect, is the best way to experience Anne Sheldon's "story-poems."

Those who've had the pleasure of hearing Anne read (at WisCon and elsewhere) would no doubt heartily concur with that.