Help: RSS Feed?
Archive for August, 2007
Acquisitions round-up: nine new titles, publication dates to be confirmed
Posted by Darren on August 21st, 2007 at 15:45
Pete and Nick have recently made a number of new title acquisitions, some of which we've reported on separately already, but which we thought we should round-up and post here, just to make sure that we've covered absolutely everything.
PS Publishing is therefore both pleased and proud to announce that we will be publishing the following new titles over the course of the next couple of years:
- Just Behind You - a brand new collection by Ramsey Campbell (The Darkest Part of the Woods, Told by the Dead, The Overnight, Secret Stories, The Grin of the Dark)
- Insinuations - The autobiography of Jack Dann (Promised Land)
- The Alice Encounter - a new novella by John Gribbin
- Reunion - a new novella by Rick Hautala
- Cast a Cold Eye - a new novella by Derryl Murphy and William Shunn
- Cloud Permutations - a new novella by Lavie Tidhar (Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography)
- The Situation - a new novelette chapbook by Jeff VanderMeer
- The Painting and the City - a new novel by Robert Freeman Wexler (In Springdale Town)
- The Last Book - a new novel by Zoran Živković (Impossible Stories, Twelve Collections and the Teashop)
Full publication dates and format details will be announced and posted to the main website as and when they're finalised.
Format alteration: Michael Coney novels now to be published in £20 / $40 hardcover
Posted by Darren on August 21st, 2007 at 15:44
We've taken the decision to alter the format and pricing of our two forthcoming novels by Michael Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye and its previously unpublished sequel I Remember Pallahaxi.
Instead of releasing them in jacketed hardcover editions for £25 / $50 (approx.) they will now be published in £15 / $30* £20 / $40 (approx.) un-jacketed hardcover editions. These have proven extremely popular for other recent titles (notably Ramsey Campbell's The Grin of the Dark and our first two volumes of collected Ed Gorman stories, Out There in the Darkness and The Moving Coffin) and, we believe, offer great value for money for our customers.
We'd like to stress that this is absolutely not any sort of comment on the quality of these two volumes. We firmly believe that both novels are masterful works and deserve to be read by as wide an audience as possible; it's for this reason that we've decided to alter the previously advertised format and pricing for both volumes.
The two-volume slipcased edition will still contain jacketed hardcover editions of both titles and will remain at £50 ($100 approx.), which will be signed by Eric Brown and Brian Aldiss, who have provided respective introductions to the two volumes. The unjacketed hardcover editions will not be signed, by either contributor.
If you have previously ordered and paid for a £25 / $50 edition of either or both title(s), rest assured that the difference will be refunded to your credit card prior to publication and despatch (just as soon as we get chance to process the transactions, in fact).
If you have any questions at all, please contact the PS office.
*Edit 10.09.07 - Following another review of our pricing and print runs, we've settled on £20 ($40 approx.) as the standard price for our un-jacketed hardcover editions. Apologies for any confusion caused...
Eric Brown’s ‘Starship Summer’: 26-copy slipcased edition added to range
Posted by Darren on August 21st, 2007 at 15:08
Following the recent success of our 26-copy, lettered, slipcased editions of Mark Justice & David T. Wilbanks' Dead Earth: The Green Dawn and Philip José Farmer & Danny Adams' The City Beyond Play - both of which are all-but sold out on pre-orders alone, we've decided to offer a similarly limited, slipcased edition of one or two more titles.
The first of these will be Eric Brown's science fiction novella Starship Summer. The strictly limited, 26-copy lettered, slipcased edition of this title is available to pre-order now, priced £50 ($100 approx.) Details are available on the appropriate catalogue page on the main PS website.
If you have already ordered a hardcover (£10) or jacketed hardcover (£25) copy of the novella and would now like to upgrade to the lettered, slipcased edition, please contact the PS Publishing office as quickly as possible so we can arrange for the additional payment to be made.
Collection acquisition: Ramsey Campbell’s ‘Just Behind You’
Posted by Peter Crowther on August 20th, 2007 at 17:45
We have today bought a new 110-000-word story collection from Ramsey Campbell, Britain's most celebrated horror writer.
Entitled Just Behind You, the new collection will appear in the latter half of 2009 as a triptych first edition: a 300-copy trade, a 100-copy slipcase, and a lettered 26-copy, mock leather traycase containing an extra story and other additional material.
We're very excited about this one. When it comes to spooky short stories, there's nobody better than Ramsey.
Full details will be posted to the website in due course, once they're finalised.
Finished Cover: ‘Dead Earth: The Green Dawn’ by Mark Justice & David T. Wilbanks
Posted by Darren on August 16th, 2007 at 14:11
Another fantastic finalised cover-design for you to feast your eyes on, folks. This time it's the gruesomely eye-catching (and, quite possibly, stomach-churning) Glenn Chadbourne artwork for our forthcoming Mark Justice and David T. Wilbanks zombie apocalypse novella Dead Earth: The Green Dawn. Design-work on this one is by Vincent Chong.
And in other Justice-related news, Mark dropped us a line last week to say that the latest edition of his Pod of Horror podcast is available now from www.horrorworld.org, featuring pieces by or with Tim Lebbon, Michael Arnzen and Scott Bradley.
Keith Brooke’s Great North Run in aid of The Big Issue Foundation
Posted by Darren on August 16th, 2007 at 12:00
Author, web-publisher, PS anthology editor (Infinity Plus One, Infinity Plus Two) and all-round good bloke Keith Brooke is taking part in this year's Great North Run on September 30th, to raise money for the Big Issue Foundation who work to empower the homeless and disadvantaged across the UK.
Keith has already surpassed his (quite modest!) sponsorship target but is still taking donations via www.justgiving.com if you want to show him a bit of extra financial encouragement.
Postscripts: new short story acceptances, August ‘07
Posted by Darren on August 13th, 2007 at 11:06
Pete and Nick have accepted three new short stories for publication in future issues of Postscripts:
- A new Ray Bradbury tale called 'Juggernaut'. Pete says: "It's a joy!"
- Jack Dann's 'Under the Shadow of Jonah', which Nick describes as: "an extraordinary alternative history story about an alien invasion of Renaissance Italy."
- 'The Eye of Vann' by Matthew Hughes, which Nick tells us is Hughes' "latest Luff Imbry caper, set in the far-future Archonate, picaresque venue supreme."
We'll post more information on which issues of Postscripts these will be appearing in once we've confirmed and finalised the relevant line-ups.
Novella Acquisition: ‘Reunion’ by Rick Hautala
Posted by Darren on August 13th, 2007 at 8:33
We're delighted to announce that we've agreed the purchase of a brand new novella by Rick Hautala: Reunion. It'll be a late 2009 publication... possibly even our first one for 2010.
Reunion is a time-travel paradox, semi 'rights of passage' cum 'coming of age' yarn, very gentle smalltown Americana, very traditional, and very Finney-esque... something that could have appeared in the old comicbooks put out in the 1950s and '60s by the American Comics Group (you youngsters'll have to take my word for that).
Full details will be posted to the main website as soon as we've confirmed them all.
Pete and Nick confess their mutual short fiction addiction
Posted by Darren on August 10th, 2007 at 14:14
Douglas Cohen - assistant editor at long-running US fiction 'zine Realms of Fantasy - has called for a genre fiction magazine subscription drive to help boost flagging subscriber numbers for print publications in this era of free online content.
This sounded like something that we here at PS should definitely get behind; speaking as the publishers of an award-winning short fiction 'zine ourselves, we're quite obviously all in favour of anything that boosts the circulation and popularity of fiction 'zines in general. The more, the merrier, quite frankly.
So I chivvied Pete Crowther and Nick Gevers - our two in-house editors, who between them are responsible for selecting and polishing the literary gems that feature in our very own Postscripts - out of their Friday afternoon lunchtime reveries and asked them to jot down a few thoughts on the subject of their own life-long love of short fiction in all its forms. And here's what they had to say for themselves:
Pete
"I'm a short story nut, always have been. F'rinstance, this note is being penned just one week after my buying a full run of my favorite mag (F&SF) in order to upgrade some issues and fill a few gaps (anyone want to the buy 612 issues I now have spare?).
"But that's just one title; in addition to that, I love the old pulps (Weird Tales, Fantastic, Amazing, Planet and so on) and, of course, digests such as Astounding and Asimov's, EQMM and Alfred Hitchcock's, Andy Cox's incarnation of Interzone and his absolutely superb (but criminally irregular) Crime Wave.
"The thing is that 'small' is beautiful. And all of the big novelists of today cut their teeth between the pages of the mags... so it follows that tomorrow's 'household names' will be already making their presences known.
"Make sure you're not losing out: go get in on the vanguard of genre fiction. Take a copy of Asimov's or F&SF or Crime Wave or even Postscripts to bed and I'm betting you'll have a ball.
"Better still, subscribe! Magazines like these rely on commitment, not on a once-in-a-while purchase because you happened to see a copy in the racks when you went in to buy a chocolate bar or you needed change for the bus! You've been warned. I won't tell you twice."
Nick
"My love of fiction zines began twenty-five years ago, when I bought a lot of Campbell-era Analogs second-hand and read them like a Great White binging on seals.
"Later, it was Asimov's (edited by Gardner Dozois) and Interzone (edited by David Pringle) that were my subscriptions of choice and my inspiration - what extraordinary publications they were, full of innovation and excitement; those led me to where I am today, gorging on SF/F magazines and anthologies ostensibly in order to have material for my Locus short fiction columns...
"There are superb magazines currently running that deserve our, your, everybody's support, as paying subscribers. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, brilliantly edited by Gordon Van Gelder; Asimov's, the domain of Sheila Williams; Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, and (humbly, humbly) our own Postscripts.
"And the quirky, magnificent small press zines, like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Flytrap, and Say... These are the places where speculative fiction is made; the novels only catch up later. Often a lot later..."
Thanks, chaps. You can go back to the pub work now...
Greatly anticipated Tim Powers book ‘Secret Histories’ progressing nicely…
Posted by Peter Crowther on August 8th, 2007 at 18:41
Just a few minutes ago I received the ARCs for John Berlyne's Secret Histories book; a 750-page complete overview of the work of Tim Powers, with literally hundreds of pen-line illustrations by Tim, scores of book covers, articles, introduction, unpublished work and, of course, a no-holds-barred bibliography. And all in full colour.
John will be heading off to see Tim in Norway tomorrow morning (Tim's at a convention over there) and they'll be going through this first draft. (At least, John tells me it's first draft, saying it like he expects there to be lots of changes, but I have to tell you that it looks pretty finished to me.)
We've already finished work on the special short novel that'll be going out with the deluxe edition but there's still a fair bit of tidying up to do. The current publication date is now Spring 2009... which gives us plenty of time to come up with a few little extra bells and whistles. Full publication details will be added to the main website in due course. Watch this space.
Stephen King’s ‘The Colorado Kid’ to be stocked by Waterstone’s
Posted by Peter Crowther on August 8th, 2007 at 18:35
In a first for PS, we've arranged for copies of the unsigned hardcover edition of Stephen King's The Colorado Kid to be sold through the 300+ branches of Waterstone's Booksellers here in the UK. So if you want to see what the three books look like, now's your chance! Nip into your local Waterstone's and check them out.
Just six thousand copies of the unsigned hardcover (2,000 of each artist-edition) were printed in total. The slipcased and traycased editions are, of course, all gone, but we do have around 100 or so of each artist's artist-signed edition left in stock at the present moment. There are no plans to reprint the hardcover edition.
PS Publishing scoops five BFS Award 2007 shortlist nominations
Posted by Darren on August 7th, 2007 at 14:06
Here at PS Publishing we're extremely pleased and proud to have heard - just this morning - that we have been nominated in no fewer than five categories of the British Fantasy Awards for 2007.
Our nominations this year include:
Best Novel
The Face of Twilight by Mark Samuels
Best Short Fiction
'The Veteran' by Conrad Williams, published in Postscripts #6
Best Small Press
Peter Crowther, PS PUBLISHING
Best Artist
Les Edwards*
Best Non-Fiction
Cinema Macabre, edited by Mark Morris
Pete is, naturally, chuffed to bits, and had the following to say on the subject: "The announcement of this year's BFS Awards shortlists prompted the usual run of good-natured badinage about PS being up for the Best Small Press Award for the umpteenth year (Tim Lebbon even quipped that there were moves afoot to change it to the PS Publishing Award! What a fine idea!)
"But all such banter aside, I'd just like to say this: Award nominations put forward by the great book-buying public - and the BFS Awards are exemplary in this respect - are the only measure by which a publisher - or, indeed, a writer, an editor or an artist - can guage the esteem in which his or her work is held and the entertainment quotient that such work promotes. Of course I want for PS and PS books and stories to win, but I have to say that looking through recent years' shortlists (and this year's is a particularly fine example), it really is enough just to be nominated.
"For instance, in the actual Best Small Press category, we're up against Andy Cox's TTA, Andrew Hook's Elastic, David Howe's Telos and Chris Teague's Pendragon. I'm honoured for PS to be considered an equal of those imprints.
"And whoever picks up the Award on the day, there'll be drinks to be had and old friends (as well as new ones!) to spend some time with. Maybe we'll see you there..."
Looking forward to it immensely, meself...
*Okay, we might be stretching it a bit to claim Les Edwards as a fifth PS-specific nomination, but we do like to think of him as most definitely one of ours. In fact, it's not particularly widely-known, but Les actually resides in a dank cellar here at PS-HQ, where we keep him chained to a radiator with little more than a sketch pad and easel within arm's reach; only occasionally letting him out (suitably electronically tagged, obviously) to do bits and bobs for other publishers... :)
New chapbook acquisition: ‘The Situation’ by Jeff Vandermeer
Posted by Darren on August 3rd, 2007 at 11:46
As announced by Jeff Vandermeer last week, we will indeed be publishing his 10,000 word (approx.) novelette, The Situation, with cover art by one of Jeff's very favourite artists: Scott Eagle.
I checked with Pete to see if there was any additional info we can release at this stage and he told me: "It's going to be a standalone chapbook à la the Christmas chapbooks we send to all Postscripts subscribers.
"We're not yet sure of prices but they'll probably be in the region of £7.50 / $15 for the standard, un-jacketed Hardcover (300 copies) and £15 / $30 for the jacketed hardcover (100 copies only)."
So, there you have it, all the provisional info we know of at this early stage. We'll post full details here in the News Room and on the main website as and when we've confirmed and finalised them.
In the meantime Jeff has posted an excerpt from the tale to whet your appetite, over on his Ecstatic Days blog.
Finished Cover: ‘Starship Summer’ by Eric Brown
Posted by Darren on August 2nd, 2007 at 16:59
Our chief designer Robert Wexler has just completed another fine-looking piece of work - this time it's the finished cover for Eric Brown's forthcoming novella Starship Summer. Once again the artwork is by the frankly quite ridiculously talented Tomislav Tikulin...
