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Archive for July, 2009
Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #20 to launch at Fantasycon, featuring many PS alumi
Posted by Paul Raven on July 30th, 2009 at 12:12
Hey there – going to FantasyCon this September? Fan of great horror fiction? The folk from Constable & Robinson Publishing have got your back, then – the twentieth anniversary issue of their annual anthology The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror will be launched on the Saturday afternoon at FantasyCon.
Better still, a number of the contributing authors will be there to sign copies of the book and generally mingle and schmooze. Among those authors are a handful of folk we’ve published ourselves – the inimitable Ramsey Campbell, Tim beer-lovin’ Lebbon and the lovely Miss Sarah Pinborough – and PS Publishing head honcho Pete Crowther himself. Even Vinnie Chong, one of our favourite cover artists, will be there.
Still not convinced? Well, apparently there’s a free glass of wine with every copy of the book you buy…
… yeah, I thought that might raise your interest. ;) You can download and print out this PDF flyer for the event to remind you nearer the time.
Wednesday reviews round-up for 29th July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 29th, 2009 at 13:04
Once again, it’s that time of week when we look at what people have been saying about our books. So, without further ado, let’s get on with it!
First of all, Zoran Živković’s Impossible Stories II has made quite an impression on Anil Menon over at Strange Horizons:
It takes a writer with considerable chutzpah, therefore, to offer us a collection of dreams that are also suicide notes. It takes a writer who would climb Everest not because it is there but because it is not. Zoran Živković is such a writer, and his Impossible Stories II is an elegant, perhaps even joyful, meditation on the existentialist’s main concern: if darkness shrouds the past, and darkness lies ahead, then what is the best response to this brief interval of light? Živković’s characters—all of whom with one exception have chosen, as the poet George Oppen wrote, “the meaning of being singular”—face their exits with curiosity and courtesy, with decency and clean clothes, with patience, and food morsels on forks raised to their living, breathing mouths.
[...]
The collection has the bauplan of a tri-partite insect, perhaps that of a scarab, with the soft flesh of fourteen short stories interspersed between three novellas. This arrangement is not accidental; as is to be expected, very little appears to be accidental in this work. Živković’s characters are as spare as Giacometti figurines, their interactions as orderly as Feynman diagrams, and his plots move from mystery through the commonplace of the fantastic back to mystery again.
I think we can safely say he liked it – as did Ray Olson of Booklist:
Tonally, Živković’s new collection naturally succeeds his previous, 12 Collections & The Teashop (2007). The stories are consistently humorous yet concerned with a fairly grave subject, the afterlife. The story sets “Four Stories Till the End” and “Amarcord” seem cast from the same template. In each component of the former, a narrator situated in a particular kind of compartment (prison cell, hospital room, hotel room, elevator) is interrupted by loquacious visitors who each relate a dream in which the narrator is the protagonist. The narrator moves on at the end of each story into an unknown space. “Amarcord” consists of 10 incidents named after famous novels that constitute a chain of puzzling
encounters resolved when, in “Fahrenheit 451,” everyone walks toward an invisible door. “Compartments” proceeds similarly as a conductor attempts to settle the narrator into four successive compartments on a passenger train. In “The Square,” four disparate people in the same town find release from the mundane into wonder. Only Peter S. Beagle’s work dazzles like Živković’s.
Back at Strange Horizons again, Andy Sawyer – librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation’s collection, and himself a Liverpool habitué – finds much to love in Spook City, our triple-author anthology of horror stories set in the city best known as the home of The Beatles:
Every city has its undercurrent, and Liverpool’s hard-bitten mixture of desolation and anarchic creativity is perhaps more ambiguous than most. Jung’s “pool of life” is perhaps as much as much a cliché as the rock and roll scousers of the Beatles myth (Jung never went to Liverpool, he merely dreamed of it), but it exists because it’s there, because people want it to exist, and maybe because Liverpool’s dreams are darker, more troubled than most. The city looks outwards to other locations and mental states as easily as it turns inwards.
[...]
It’s Campbell who is the master of locality, of particular space. It’s true that I know his localities more than those of either Atkins or Barker, but it seems to me that fine as those two writers are, of the three Campbell best evokes the reality of the Merseyside region, thanks to his technique of unsettling with wry humour as much as horror. Despite this regionalism, it also seems to me that Campbell is a more universal writer that Atkins or even Barker, simply because he has got under the skin of the city, or the city has got under his skin, in a way that the other two only achieve in flashes (Clive Barker with “The Forbidden,” for example). Nevertheless, this can hardly be a criticism, because one of the underlying strengths of Spook City is the very different ways using the dark fantastic to explore the uneasy spirit of a place can be brought into being.
Sadly, the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer is not so impressed, suggesting that editor Angus Mackenzie “attempts to draw deeply from a shallow well”. Perhaps you have to know Liverpool intimately to really appreciate the locality of the stories, though we like to think that existing fans of Peter Atkins, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell – and British horror in general – will still find much to enjoy in Spook City.
And finally we have more unequivocal praise for Sarah Pinborough’s The Language Of Dying, this time from one W D Prescott:
In short: Brillant!
In long: One of the great things of being a reader is to watch a writer you admire grow with each publication. Usually, with books coming out between biannually and semiannually, the change is subtle. But every so often, a writer finds a story, or needs to write a story, that goes beyond the subtle. It is a story that take the writer to a new place in their craft, which every story after it will be affected by it. The Language of Dying is Pinborough’s landmark tale.
As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!
Wednesday reviews roundup for 22nd July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 22nd, 2009 at 12:28
Heads up, fiction fans – it’s time for our weekly collection of reviews!
First of all comes further proof (if such were needed) that Zoran Zivkovic is what we Brits might call “a Marmite writer” – you either love him or loathe him. Ben of the Speculative Fiction Junkie blog clearly falls into the “baffled” camp with his response to The Last Book, but Publishers Weekly is effusive about the forthcoming Impossible Stories II, awarding it a starred review (scroll way down to the genre fiction section):
Zivkovic masterfully filters memory and art through absurdism in this limited edition collection. “Compartments” follows an unnamed man as he is escorted through six rooms on a train, encountering odd travelers who tell him about a mysterious muse-like woman. “Four Stories Till the End,” the pinnacle of both storytelling and strangeness, features four people, each interrupted in turn by guests who tell art-themed stories with delightful digressions on the horrible crimes prevented by circus detectives and the need for any top hotel to have a weapons factory. “Amarcord,” named for Fellini’s 1973 film, comprises 10 short stories wherein various people buy, sell and lose their memories. Two shorter pieces round out the collection, which neither has nor needs mainstream appeal; fans of Zivkovic’s unclassifiable quirkiness will quickly snap up all 500 copies.
Meanwhile, over at Strange Horizons, Matt Denault tucks in to the surreal metafiction that is Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Painting And The City:
The Painting and the City is not a novel of understanding events or of coming to conclusions. It is notable not so much for accurately representing complexity – trying to read the book that way lies madness – as it is for refusing to make sense, refusing to untangle Lerner’s often contradictory and gap-filled progression of artistic ideas into something that we can point to as containing answers or even a conceptual framework for answers. And what it does represent is an imprint of human feeling: of power and responsibility, knowing and misunderstanding, complacency and fragility.
In the wake of 9/11 many people described the day’s events as surreal; what now stands out is how real the world became that day. But how strange and surreal must the months before the attacks appear now in retrospect to those who lived in New York for any length of time? That is the surrealism of The Painting and the City.
In case you wanted to know a little more about Robert, the ever-genial Charles Tan has an interview with him at his Bibliophile Stalker blog.
There’s more praise for Sarah Pinborough‘s novella The Language Of Dying at the Epic India webzine:
The story itself is short and simple – a dying father, and the children gathering around. One daughter has been caring for him ever since he realised he was dying. The narration is in first person, from her perspective, as is she is talking to her father who is confined to his bed and fast sinking. This right away establishes the bonding between the two. Her father through her eyes – her love for him and the kind of person he was – makes you realise her pain at his imminent death. Her longing to see the real him just once before he sinks forever runs like an undercurrent, as if by talking to him, she can rouse him from the slumber.
I just couldn’t stop reading the book. From the word go, the author manages to stir emotions. By keeping it short and tight, she ensures that the reader is gripped by the unfolding tale.
The latest issue of Locus Magazine features a review of Sebastien Doubinsky’s Babylonian Trilogy:
The Babylonian Trilogy – a slim volume made up of three novellas that share a setting, some characters, and a darkly poetic vision – is [Doubinsky's] first novel published in English, and it showcases not only his fluency in the language but a kind of gritty, surreal, post-Kosovo sensibility that is at once cynical and romantic, and finely attuned to the various paradoxes, absurd and tragic, surrounding the War on Terror. It’s a potent combination, a book whose images and characters seduce you one minute, then sucker-punch you the next.
[...]
What each of Doubinsky’s characters seeks, whether they know it or not, is escape – escape from Babylon, or from the suffocating sameness of their lives, the constraining detritus of failed hopes and guilty regrets penning them in like the streets and buildings of the city. Some find that escape in violence, others in sex, others in poetry. Yet Babylon is as much a state of mind as it is a place, and that – for readers, too – may prove far more difficult to escape.
And finally, Joel Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone also gets an examination in Locus:
A contemporary refurbishment of a classic horror story form would be a significant enough achievement, but Lane is playing for bigger stakes in The Witnesses Are Gone. From its opening chapter, he alerts readers that the stroy’s events are unfolding at the height of America’s war with Afghanistan and Iraq [...] These well-documented instances of manipulated reality in or world resonate powerfully with the disintegrating reality Martin experiences in the world of the novel. they’re a powerful inducement for our willing suspension of disbelief in the story’s incredible events, and by its end they suggest, uneasily, that Lane’s tale is more a mirror held up to our own world than we might want to acknowledge.
As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!
Two more Catastrophia acceptances
Posted by Paul Raven on July 21st, 2009 at 11:21
Here’s the latest skinny from Allen Ashley on the Catastrophia anthology editing process:
I can now confirm two further acceptances for the Catastrophia anthology. Both stories are around 5000 words long. The first is “In the Face of Disaster” by British-based author Ian Sales, who is represented by the prestigious John Jarrold Literary Agency.
The second is called “Crashes” and is by another British-based author, Stuart Young, who won the British Fantasy Society Award in 2006 for Best Novella. These are acceptances numbers eleven and twelve, so the book is getting close to full.
To confirm, Catastrophia is closed to all further submissions. The rest of the anthology’s content will be chosen from the stories I am currently holding for further, thorough consideration.
We’ll keep you posted with further developments!
Wednesday reviews round-up for 15th July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 15th, 2009 at 19:10
Wednesday again? Already?
Perhaps it’s the result of three days trying to work on a wheezing computer so old I have to hand-crank it to get a web connection (the main workhorse died, so the back-up machine is out of retirement until it gets fixed), but I’m sure it should only be Monday afternoon by now. Tuesday morning at the latest.
But enough of my waffle – there’s plenty of fresh reviews to show off this week, so let’s get to it!
First up, Horror Drive-In showers praise on Sarah Pinborough for the soon-to-be-shipped The Language Of Dying:
Sarah Pinborough’s The Language of Dying — which tells the story of a father’s slow deterioration while his family tries to come to grips with his inevitable passing – tackles the topic of death with a truth and sensitivity I’ve rarely seen before. The story centers on the narrator – the middle of five children – and her efforts to not only make her father comfortable during his final days, but also bring her dysfunctional family back together again so they can all say their goodbyes. It is through each of the siblings and their personalities that Pinborough effectively tackles all of the different emotions people go through at a time like this…
Meanwhile, Amy Dodge of Mass Movement Magazine has been digging into a handful of recent PS titles. First up, Val/Orson by Marly Youmans:
I was quickly sucked into the modern world Youmans created, a world where giant Californian redwood trees would be extinct already were it not for the main character, Val, and his fellow tree sitters.
[...]
I do not know how similar this novella is to its source of inspiration, but I intend to seek out the original to see. Youmans’ tale ends happily, but not too sentimentally. This is a welcome addition to the library of readers of fantasy, fairy tales, and wildlife conservation stories.
Next, Joel Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone:
… a bit more than 60 pages of great reading. While reading this release from PS Publishing, a subtle tension seeps into your mind, forcing you to turn the pages, no matter what time it is or what your other responsibilities may be.
[...]
The author does an amazing job of weaving in poetic-sounding prose while not sounding contrived. The main character, Martin, is as real as you or I. In fact, at certain points you wonder if this really is fiction! Although the last few lines were a bit too philosophical for me, I would certainly recommend this story to anyone who enjoys psychological tension, the demon just slightly out of view.
And also Alex Irvine’s Mystery Hill:
Odd roadside tourist trap? Check. Cynical Vietnam vet? Check. Local teenagers raising hell by doing things a middle-aged guy doesn’t understand? Check. Unusual locals? Check. Attractive female scientist investigating alternate dimensions? Check.
Not your stereotypical sci-fi thriller, Mystery Hill does a good job of keeping you on your toes while entertaining you with believable characters.
Elsewhere, the Chicago Centre for Literature and Photography has great things to say about The Painting and The City by our very own Robert Freeman Wexler:
… this is a perfect example of why this book should ultimately be called “Wexlerian” [...] because instead of the zippy action thriller that most authors use this kind of milieu to deliver, Wexler turns in a much more slowly-paced, contemplative novel, one that uses these explosively visual images to examine much headier issues like identity, fate, and especially the way that our surroundings actively influence our beliefs and decisions about life. In fact, for those familiar with it, you can see this book much more in the tradition of John Crowley’s phenomenal old “Aegypt” series…
[...]
The Painting and the City can be enjoyed by anyone, but is especially a treat for the most well-read out there, those who usually fly through genre novels and are not intimidated by writing that occasionally gets quite dense [...] it’s also one of those books that has the possibility of getting really under your skin depending on who you are, one of those titles that continue to pop up randomly in your mind for years after you finish it.
Rodger Turner of SF Site has finally finished ploughing through Powers: Secret Histories, and is still unstinting in his commendation thereof:
I have spent a lot of time paging through a variety of bibliographies. In them, I discovered a variety of tidbits that sent shivers up and down my spine. But I must admit that I think those bibliographies pale in comparison to Powers: Secret Histories by John Berlyne. This book has details no other of its type will contain. If you like Tim Powers’ writing, you’ll need a copy. Order a copy today. Don’t wait until tomorrow, do it now.
Finally, Matt Cardin of Dead Reckonings commends the latest brace of PS Showcases. First, Showcase #4 – Mark Samuels’ Glyphotech:
… by this point in his career Samuels is poised to enter the coveted ranks of those authors who “need no introduction” [... Glyphotech] demonstrates again the qualities that aroused such enthusiasm among reader of The White Hands: a fully-realised understanding of and sensibility for what might be called the “deep nature” of weird horror fiction, and a fertile imagination and able prose style that enable him to channel this understanding into stories of great merit.
And then #5, Douglas Smith’s Impossibilia:
… as a number of other reviewers (and also noted fantasist Chaz Brenchley, in the book’s introduction) have suggested, both thematically and stylistically these stories sometimes recall the work of better-known authors, such as Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury. But Smith puts such a personal stamp on his stories, and invests them with such depth of feeling, that they transcend the dangers of shallowness, triteness and imitation, and emerge as something wholly original.
As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!
Catastrophia anthology update
Posted by Paul Raven on July 13th, 2009 at 12:47
Here’s Allen Ashley’s latest update on the Catastrophia submissions pile:
I have been working my way through the backlog of submissions and can now report that I have read everybody’s stories at least once and, in some cases, several times. Everybody has now heard back from me: with either an acceptance, a rejection or a holding email. At present, I still have 10 definite acceptances for the book. However, I am also holding another twenty or so for further, detailed consideration. I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up unnecessarily but I expect to take a few of this latter group, possibly subject to a slight rewrite. So, thank you for your patience, it is very much appreciated. I will post again when I have more news.
We’ll post further updates as they arrive! Just to preclude any queries, though: the submissions window has been closed for some time, and if you’re waiting on news about your story you’ll need to wait for an email from Allen. I am but the conduit! :)
Wednesday reviews roundup for 9th July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 8th, 2009 at 12:52
It’s Hump Day once again, so let’s take a look at what people have been saying about PS Publishing titles in the last week or so…
The plaudits for Joe Hill’s Gunpowder keep rolling in (despite the book having long since sold out); Mark Graham at Tor.com names it as his candidate for best novella in the BFS Awards (and in general).
When I read the title, I was prepared for a weird western in the tradition of Joe Lansdale or Nancy Collins, and I do like weird westerns. But although the setting is a desert planet, there are no zombie cowboys or Apache werewolves here. Think more John Hersey’s The Child Buyer on steroids meets William Golding’s Lord of the Flies with a touch of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan thrown in—all this on a distant planet unfit for human habitation.
[...]
This is top-notch science fiction story, not a wasted word. It’s my pick for best novella of the year, and, in case you hadn’t guessed, I really like novellas.
Keeping to the theme of what goes on inside the minds of young children, Jennifer Marshall of Epic India Magazine takes on Billy’s Book by Terry Bisson:
Sometimes I wish I could read my sons’ minds but if Terry Bisson’s novella, Billy’s Book, is anything to go by, I should probably be thankful that I can’t always tell what they’re thinking. Terry Bisson brings me about as close as I would hope to get to the fantastical world of war, revenge and world domination inhabited by the minds of little boys.
[...]
This book very cleverly and convincingly explores a young, imaginative mind in all its savage innocence and glory. Billy’s relentless determination and undying spirit are admirable qualities to which young readers might aspire and Billy’s pragmatic approach to surreal mishaps encountered with all manner of fantastical creatures re-awakened my own sense of infinite possibility in a grown-up world.
Moving from India to Europe, here’s a French review of Sebastien Doubinsky’s The Babylonian Trilogy. Sadly my long-forgotten GCSE in French is not helping me much here, but an online translation service suggests it’s a very positive mention indeed:
“… [an] ingeniously built, amusing kaleidoscope where all seems weighed, thought, calculated; [...] dystopia, allegory, whodunnit, poetry, intimate dramas of [the] human condition and what could pass for realism (but which is not, [the] author remaining prudently on this side, in an at the same time familiar world and yet deliberately shifted). A highly advisable reading.”
To find out more about the charming and garrulous Monsieur Doubinsky, you might want to read Charles Tan’s interview with him.
Speaking of Charles Tan, here’s his take on Mystery Hill by Alex Irvine:
What I want to focus on is the humor because as the story progresses, it’s handled with more finesse and subtlety rather than the direct commentary he employs early on.
Aside from that, Irvine is a competent writer: the pace is quick, the language is simple and functional, and at the heart of Mystery Hill is an intent to entertain.
And finally, David McWilliam at no less a venue than Strange Horizons takes a look at our extra special edition of The Very Best Of Gene Wolfe:
[The PS Publishing edition] includes not just an additional story (“Christmas Inn”) but also a thorough introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson that significantly augmented my enjoyment of the book. Robinson’s boundless enthusiasm for Wolfe is infectious [... his] articulate championing of the nuances of Wolfe’s style, mixing biographical details with literary analysis, makes the introduction a valuable addition to the collection.
[...]
… as a standalone volume, The Very Best of Gene Wolfe will cement its author’s reputation as a very fine writer of short fiction.
Indeed it will – not that Wolfe needs much help on that front, of course! This sumptuous collection should be shipping out from PS HQ this week and has been selling at a phenomenal rate as pre-orders, so click on through to secure yourself a copy right away to avoid disappointment!
As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!
Wish Pete Crowther a happy sixtieth birthday!
Posted by Paul Raven on July 3rd, 2009 at 17:00
Hey there, PS fans – a word in your shell-like, if I may.
Tomorrow is July 4th, and Independence Day for those of you in the States. Appropriately enough for a great lover of American culture and fiction, it’s also Pete Crowther’s birthday. This year is his sixtieth.
I’ve not known Pete personally for that long – about a year and a half now, since I started working for PS – but I knew him by repute long before then. A lauded writer, a fearless publisher… there’s no shortage of professional plaudits for Pete’s work. But what stood out was the genuine personal affection so many people have for him.
Nowadays I’m lucky enough to know why that is. Pete really is a top character, the sort of guy who’d give you the shirt from his back while asking whether you’re sure that you don’t need the trousers too. And in an industry packed with obsessives, Pete stands out as someone who pretty much gave his life over to genre fiction as early as he could conceive of doing so. His home is literally lined with books and magazines stretching back to the fifties, collections of now-defunct genre publications so complete that they’d make an archivist green with envy, paperbacks and hardbacks and comics and more.
And he knows where each and every one of them is, where and when he got it, what he felt when he read it the first time. When Pete talks to you about fiction (and if you ever meet him, you can be assured that he will talk to you about fiction!) you’d be hard-pressed to imagine he was a man about to turn sixty. The light in his eyes is rare to see in people outside their twenties; genre literature is Pete’s own elixir of youth, maybe.
And even leaving that aside, he’s a man of incredible energy. If you knew the amount of time he puts into running PS (with Nicky’s equally tireless help), plus the time he spends writing his own fiction and editing anthologies elsewhere, you’d wonder how he finds the time to eat and sleep. I’m still in awe of it, frankly; I’ve seen him eat, but I’ve not seen him sleep yet. Maybe he doesn’t…
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that tomorrow is a special day for Pete, but he’s too bloody modest to make a big deal of it. But I’m damned if I’m not going to, and so I’d like to ask all of you loyal PS fans, customers and supporters to drop him a line and wish him a happy sixtieth birthday. You can leave a comment here, or you can send an email direct to editor[AT]pspublishing[DOT]co[DOT]uk – either will make his year, I’m sure.
Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend yourselves. :)
Free fiction samples now available online from PS Publishing!
Posted by Peter Crowther on July 2nd, 2009 at 20:00
Hi, folks;
Well, it’s all go here at PS HQ, as always! Here’s a quick look at what’s been happening lately.
Free fiction samples online
Those of you who regularly poke around in our catalogue may already have noticed a little something extra on a few titles.
We decided it was high time we let you try before you buy, and so the PS internet monkeys are gradually adding free fiction samples to the catalogue – a single story from collections and anthologies, and a chapter or extract from longer works.
There’s many more to come – we intend to have a sample available for every title we’ve released this year by the time Christmas rolls round, God willing – but for now you can test the flavour of the following titles for free:
- The Babylonian Trilogy by Sebastien Doubinsky
- Camp Desolation and an Eschatology of Salt by Uncle River
- Everland and Other Stories by Paul Witcover
- Harsh Oases by Paul Di Filippo
- Mystery Hill by Alex Irvine
- The Painting and The City by Robert Freeman Wexler
- Postscripts #18: This is the Summer of Love
- Random Walk by Lawrence Block
- Starfall by Stephen Baxter
- The Bridge by Zoran Zivkovic
- The Writer, The Book, The Reader by Zoran Zivkovic
- The Witnesses Are Gone by Joel Lane
Enjoy – and please tell your friends!
Works in progress: Postscripts #19, Urbis Morpheos and Timeswitch
Production continues apace on Stephen Palmer’s Urbis Morpheos, John Gribbin’s Timeswitch and Postscripts #19: Enemy of the Good; the signing sheets are on their way out to the authors, and the books should be ready in a few months at most.
So, all the more reason to jump in now and take advantage of the free delivery offer on any titles pre-ordered before publication – buy the book before we have it printed, and we’ll send it out for free! Click through below to avoid missing out:
- Urbis Morpheos by Stephen Palmer
- Timeswitch by John Gribbin
- Postscripts subscriptions
Imminent releases: Gene Wolfe, Sarah Pinborough and more
The following titles are very nearly ready to ship, so if you’ve ordered any of them you should have less than a month to wait.
- Blue Canoe by T M Wright
- Glass Coffin Girls by Paul Jessup
- The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough
The Very Best Of Gene Wolfe is ahead of the pack and will be rolling out next week.
Do bear in mind that some of these titles – The Very Best of Gene Wolfe in particular – have been selling very swiftly indeed as pre-orders. So to avoid missing out on a favourite, click through to the catalogue right away. Once they’re gone, they’re gone!
Gift box upgrades and June’s giveaway winner
This month we’re adding two new titles as our giftbox upgrades. The novella sets will come with the appropriate edition of Marly Youman‘s Val / Orson, and the novel sets will include The Painting And The City from our very own Robert Freeman Wexler.
A great way to grab ten quality books at a knockdown price, if we do say so ourselves…
- Ten trade novellas, including Val / Orson – £40 [ US$60 approx. ]
- Ten jacketed hardcover novellas, including Val / Orson – £100 [ US$150 approx. ]
- Ten trade novels, including The Painting And The City – £100 [ US$150 approx. ]
- Ten slipcased novels, including The Painting And The City – £200 [ US$300 approx. ]
Meanwhile, Kai Charles of Canoga Park, California was the lucky winner of a slipcased copy of Sebastien Doubinsky’s Babylonian Trilogy.
Bravo, Kai – hope you enjoy it! This month, two randomly selected people from the PS Publishing newsletter mailing list will receive exclusive ARC copies of Spook City, our forthcoming anthology of Liverpudlian horror fiction – so keep an eye on your inbox!
Phew – there’s still loads more to talk about, but it’ll have to wait until next time. So until then, look after each other – and happy reading!
Best
Pete
Wednesday reviews roundup for 1st July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 1st, 2009 at 18:58
Hey there – enjoying the weather? I certainly have been… but there’s work to be done as well! So, let’s take a look in the reviews in-tray.
First up, Karen Burnham at SF Signal struggles with Zoran Živković‘s The Bridge, despite having enjoyed some of his other titles:
I’ve never had this problem with Živković stories before. I absolutely loved the other books of his I’ve read; The Book, The Writercontains a story that every reader should read, while The Last Book was just allusive enough to make me feel smugly educated while still entertaining with an enjoyable genre plot. However, stories like those in The Bridge just aren’t my cup of tea. I almost certainly apply the wrong ‘reading protocols’ to books like this–I want them to resolve into a world-picture that makes sense, like fantastic and science fictional worlds do. I’ve never been a fan of Kafka, particularly not his novels (I have appreciated some of his short fiction). I prefer to have at least some guidance or entry point from the author as to how they intend a piece to be read. In short, stories like this make me feel like an idiot, like I’m missing something that if only I were smarter and more sophisticated would be obvious. (Although I’m confident enough now as a reader to suspect that isn’t so.) However, if you enjoy this kind of literary ambiguity, the sort of story that allows more or less infinite interpretations, this is a short and well written example of the form.
Well, you can’t please everyone all the time! The good Mr Živković is a singular writer, that’s for sure – but he’s a very skilled one, too. Maybe you’ll luxuriate where Karen lost interest?
Continuing the recent flurry of unlinkable but prestigious print reviews, Bev Vincent takes on Joe Hill‘s long-since-sold-out novella for Dead Reckonings and finds Gunpowder to be a fine story, though she holds it’s not truly science fictional:
Gunpowder is a work of rich imagination. The relationship among the boys, and their individual characters, are well developed and ring true. Once the repercussions of the threat of war infiltrate their insular world, the pace picks up rapidly, and many of the things the boys have created come into play in ways Elaine could never have imagined.
Meanwhile, Locus Magazine reviewer Faren Miller finds much to love about The Painting And The City by our very own Robert Freeman Wexler:
Leaving epic realms for something like the brink of our current hard times in the contemporary US, Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Painting and the City uses a work of art from the 1840s as a modern New Yorker’s mysterious path back to a Manhattan Island both earlier and different from the one we know. From the moment he first sees it at a friend’s home, sculptor/art teacher Jacob Lerner is obsessed by its lovely ‘‘Madame Burgundy,’’ the sinister man who seems poised to do her harm, and the artist himself – an obscure Dutch-English fellow called Philip Schuyler.
A description of Lerner’s own methods might equally suit Wexler’s prose, though it ends with a wry aside. His work ‘‘depended on being able to transport the viewer outside their conscious, rational self’’ and ‘‘didn’t fit into a category that could be reduced to a blurb. So he produced it. Produce instead of reduce, he said, until his friends tired of hearing it.’’
[...]
The Painting and the City explores the artistic/writerly temperament even as it moves deeper into the fantastic of both the 1840s and a 21st century that has nearly reached our current age of ruined greed and glorified Green. [...] But there’s more to this than satire, for Wexler also gives his modern protagonist an ability to move through time and among many worlds – portrayed with a genuine sense of wonder, as well as the grotesque.
You can’t ask for much more than that!
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