Holly Black (Tithe, the Spiderwick Chronicles) will be joined by Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters) and Cassandra Clare (author of the New York Times bestselling The Mortal Instruments series) for a discussion of . . . and this is where it gets interesting: readers, whether they will be attending or not, are invited to email their questions for the authors to hollycassandrakelly@gmail.com. The three authors will begin with a selection of submitted questions and then take questions from the audience.

There will be giveaways for the attendees. Afterward all three authors will sign their books at the Brookline Booksmith. Refreshments will be served.

The panel discussion as fundraiser was suggested by Holly Black who brought her fellow Amherst author, Cassandra Clare, aboard. Black’s new book, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, is being published by Big Mouth House—an imprint of Small Beer Press, an independent press run by Kelly Link and her husband, Gavin Grant. Link and Grant’s Easthampton, MA, office is in the same shambling old refitted warehouse as Black’s office.

While Black’s collection was in the planning stages (back in February 2009) Link and Grant’s daughter, Ursula was born at 24 weeks and 1 1/2 lbs. Ursula and her parents spent her first five months at Baystate Medical Center, and is now (doing well!) in a pulmonary rehabilitation ward at Franciscan Hospital for Children in Brighton (Boston).

Kelly Link, Cassandra Clare, and Holly Black
A Discussion Panel on Young Adult Fiction with Reader-Submitted Questions
Seating begins at 5:45 PM
6 -7 PM,  Thursday, March 11th
at the Coolidge Corner Theater
(http://www.coolidge.org)
$5 (Buy tickets by calling the store at 617-566-6660

with a signing to follow at the Brookline Booksmith
(http://brooklinebooksmith-shop.com)

Ticket sales and 20% of event book sales will be donated to Franciscan Hospital for Children.

About Franciscan Hospital for Children
Franciscan Hospital for Children, located in Boston’s neighborhood of Brighton, is the leading pediatric rehabilitation center in New England.  The hospital offers medical, behavioral and educational services for children with complex issues requiring interdisciplinary care. For more information on the hospital visit http://www.franciscanhospital.org.

My parents and my own reading tastes only match up sometimes—it would be fun to try and quantify how much/little but I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get them onto LibraryThing or Goodreads. Back when I was in high school my mother suggested I try Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. Sadly for me I put it aside (with other recommendations, woe is me) for years. After all, if my mother liked it surely it wouldn’t be a brain-mangling metafiction set in a world I sort of knew (Scotland) and its mirror underside? It wouldn’t be a modern classic that had been anticipated by those in the know for 20-30 years? Urgh. Should have read it.

A few years later in uni when I got around to it I went straight to the university library and read through what I could find in quick order: I think 1982, Janine, Something Leather, and a fabulous collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Later on I was able to catch up on most of what I’d missed and tended to try and read his books when they came out, including Poor Things, A History Maker, another great collection, Ten Tales Tall & True, and a doorstopper, The Book of Prefaces.

In 2003 when The Ends of Our Tethers came out, Canongate UK was in the midst of rearranging its US set up. I queried on US rights but they eventually decided to distribute their own titles here so there was no Gray title on our 2003 or 4 list. Dum de dum. A few years pass. [Insert montage of Small Beer titles, LCRW covers, chocolate bar wrappers, convention badges, tear-stained spreadsheets, etc.]

Then in 2007 Bloomsbury published Old Men In Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers. My copy was given to me by Kelly—signed by the man himself, amazing—and the copy I’ve been working from, so it may not be quite as pristine as it once was (cough, chocolate stains, cough).

I contacted Gray’s agent in November 2007 and in August 2008, on a trip to Scotland, Kelly and I visited Gray in his beautiful, art-stuffed flat in Glasgow. Things went well and contracts were generated and signed. Yay! Small Beer Press would publish the US edition of Old Men in Love. Inconceivable! Yet, apparently coming more true every day.

After the contracts we were soon in discussions with his agents about how we would put the book out. If you’ve ever seen one of Gray’s books—which he designs and illustrates—you’ll understand why this wasn’t a simple thing. We’ll put a section up on here and Scribd to show it off, it’s a strong style that works really well on the printed page. But oh the files, oi! Also, the UK paperback was being worked on so we would have corrections to include for our edition (not that many, really, but fascinating to see—we have them as scans of handwritten pages) although we could not use the UK paperback files as they are black ink and ours will be printed in blue and black. There was also one small section that Bloomsbury’s lawyers had decided might be actionable so Gray had taken it out but marked where it went with asterisks. On doing a little research it seemed prudent to follow Bloomsbury’s example (they have more lawyers, I suspect, than us) so we will have to leave it that way in our edition, oh well. (British politics in the 1970s was ugly, no surprise.) For the curious, the author reports that his Bulgarian publisher is putting out a translation that will include this part of the original text.

There won’t be an ebook of Old Men in Love, or at least not yet. Gray is taking a cautious approach to the format but we’re still talking with him as we think that DRM-free PDFs would work for this book (whereas html-based formats won’t) as they would hold his design and give something of the feel of the paper book.

Gray did some hilarious things in Old Men In Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers including adding his own piece of criticism at the end of the book (and another as a letter within) taking apart the construction of the novel and criticizing it as a fix-up of his own plays and some other work from the 1970s. As with his earlier novel Poor Things, there is a preface (maybe to be included in future editions of The Book of Prefaces?) by another writer, Lady Sara Sim-Jaeger, a distant cousin of the eponymous John Tunnock who, on receiving Tunnock’s diary and papers after his death commissions Gray to make something of them. The resulting novel brings together Tunnock’s diary from 2001-2007 (there’s a smidgeon of politics in there) and his memoir of being brought up by his two maiden aunts in Glasgow. Tunnock, a retired school teacher, is working on a book titled Who Paid for All This? which goes through various forms until eventually Tunnock decides it is to be made up of three strands: Periclean Athens, Medician Florence, and 19th century Bath, England.

All of these stories come together in Gray’s final edition into a sometimes hilarious, sometimes dark novel that will be beautifully printed in blue and black ink as the author intended it. What fun it all is! At the moment early copies have wung (surely the past tense of to wing isn’t winged?) their way to the trade reviewers and a few others: for everyone else, check it out in April. There’s nothing quite like it (not true, see Gray’s other novels!) and as ever we can’t wait to see what people think of it.

Here’s a little more about the book and here (via Wikipedia) is a video of Alasdair Gray on the BBC talking about the book and how he himself is not John Tunnock:

First we’d like to point out that while Amazon dropped the buy links for all the MacMillan US titles from their site this weekend all of those books are still available on Powells, Indiebound, bn.com, etc., etc.

Amazon has been ok for us with ebooks: they use DRM and the books are tied into one device so it doesn’t seem like the best way to buy a book, but others think differently. At the moment we give them an ebook price (say $15.95 on a new hardcover book) and they pay roughly half of that even if they sell the book at $9.99. No strong-arming there. (Yet? Maybe because we’re not attempting to charge $24?)

We price the ebook editions of new hardcovers at $15.95 then drop them to $9.95 if/when a paperback comes out. If anyone wants to argue about these prices and claim that there are no costs to making ebooks please feel free to come on over and do the work for free. We are a small press and to format and upload different files to Fictionwise/bn.com, Google, Follett, Amazon, Scribd, (& our new site this spring) etc., is not a quick task. Nor is the information gathering for royalties—a bit of a  stinker, that. Although made somewhat easier with our nice generous 50/50 ebook royalties.

But back to the gorilla: Amazon sold a couple of thousand copies of our paper books last year—and we just don’t care. They’ve negotiated horribly high discounts with publishers and distributors so that we, for example, receive about 34%* of the retail price of a book sold on their site. (So $5.44 on a $16 paperback to pay the printer, freight, author, artist, ads, etc., etc. Yep, that math works out well.)

When indie bookstore orders from our distributor we receive about 40% of retail ($6.40 on that mythical $16 paperback). That 6%/$1 a book sure adds up—only a couple of thousand dollars over the year for us (although it would be nice…); it adds up to millions to larger publishers.

Amazon have a pretty typical huge corporation business model: make low low prices happen by twisting the supplier until they break. Then twist some more. Maybe they’re worried that won’t work any more? Maybe they’re worried about their closed-ecosystem ebook reader versus the Apple iPad/iBookstore/Nook/Que/every other reader? Maybe they’re just seeing what the other big houses will do once they see that Amazon is willing to be a weekend berserker? Maybe that’s just the way corporate capitalism is supposed to work? Blink.

(Via many sites! Esp. Gwenda, Kelly, NYT Bits, Scalzi, & more.)

* Since we’re not telling you the split between their discount, their mandatory marketing fee, the “free freight” (i.e. we pay to ship them books), and our distributor’s fee, we are not breaking the NDA’s we signed about discounts.

Coming in June 2010 is Karen Lord’s fantastic and award-winning debut novel, Redemption in Indigo. We like Karen’s book because it’s choc-a-bloc full of magic–trickster spiders, metamorphic spirits, and clairvoyant nuns, oh my!  An imaginative re-telling of a Senegalese folk tale, Redemption in Indigo tells the story of Paama, whose overweight and overbearing husband causes nothing but trouble and embarrassment.  When Paama abandons her husband and returns to her home village, the magic really begins.  Unbeknownst to Paama, she wields the Chaos Stick, a handy device that controls the course of Fate, and the Indigo Lord wants it back…

As you might remember, Karen won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados for Redemption in Indigo–then she just won it again for her novel “The Best of All Possible Worlds.”

If you aren’t impressed yet, Nalo Hopkinson called Karen’s book “The impish love child of Tutuola and Marquez. Utterly delightful.”

We think so, too.  It’s a perfect read for the summer weather (though it’s possible the Chaos Stick is wreaking havoc on our weather patterns here in Massachusetts!).

Updated to add: more coverage of the award in The Barbados Advocate and The Nation.

More news of delightful reads to come…

Stories of Your Life

Working back from January 2011, we’re exceedlingly happy to announce that this October we will bring Ted Chiang’s first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, back into print. The title story alone is a knockout and then there are those seven other stories, which together have received a ton of awards and make this one of the strongest collections ever published.

Stories of Your Life and Others has been out of print for a couple of years so we are very excited to bring it back. Don’t go paying $100 for it now, wait until October and pay $16! Stories will be published in trade paperback and the table of contents is:

Tower of Babylon
Understand
Division by Zero
Story of Your Life
Seventy-Two Letters
The Evolution of Human Science
Hell is the Absence of God
Liking What You See: A Documentary
Story Notes

And for those readers (us!) waiting for new stories from Ted, the good news is that he just handed in a longish story to Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press. So, two books to look forward to!

It’s time we announced some of the books we have lined up for 2010 (and ‘11) — we’re going to be hard to keep up, we’re moving so fast, shining so bright. (Now, where are my slippers?)

First up (although not in calendric order): a reprint of Solitaire by fabby writer and editor Kelley Eskridge, a novel we really enjoyed when it first came out which we jumped at the chance to reprint. Who else likes it? One of our favorite people:

“Solitaire brilliantly explores…the dubious boundary between ‘virtual reality’ and the act of imagination—all in the ageless story of a bright, risky kid trying to find out who she is and where her freedom lies.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin

and, me!

Solitaire is coming your way in January 2011: a year away—which seems like tomorrow in publishing terms. Better get on that cover and see what Kelley likes!

We’ve just signed up a bunch of books, more later. (It’s time for tea, you know.)

First (was it first? Not sure if there are others) it was Liar by Justine Larbalestier, now it’s Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. (via Jezebel and every other site in the world)

Your task this week: buy a book with a person of color on the cover.

Daniel keeps a blog where he interviews artists and writers, reports on readings (and what he’s reading) and what he and his wife, wood carver Deborah Mills, are up to so it only seemed fair to put him on the other side of the paper:

Let’s start with the basics: how long did it take you write The Choir Boats?

Bits of The Choir Boats come from my journals and sketchbooks going back as far as junior high school. Then, one Sunday in May, 2002, I sat down to write my brother a letter and instead Barnabas, Sanford, Sally and Tom appeared in the house on Mincing Lane… quite unforeseen, I must tell you, but very welcome!   I delivered final edits on the manuscript in May, 2009, so I needed seven years for The Choir Boats.

You live in NYC, why did you set the novel in London?

Ah, a great question…I think of NYC and London as half-twins: we have a Chelsea and a Soho, they have a Chelsea and a Soho, and so on (alike, and yet so very different).  I have spent about a year in total in London over the past few decades: on business in the City, researching at the British Library, visiting friends, spending hours in the Charing Cross bookstores and at the V & A…and always tramping around the quirkiest precincts I can find– small streets in Lambeth or Maida Vale, a prospect from Chalk Farm, lanes in Whitechapel, and so on.  Always I find in London a sense of secrets– some good, some less so– marshalled behind the facades, tucked away just around the corner of the mews…whereas here in NYC, what you see is usually what you get, for better or worse we are much more “in your face.”  For me, fantasy is about sensing and pursuing the hidden, the secretive, so London feels much the better fit for converse with Yount.  (Also, I fell in love in London with my wife and creative partner, Deborah Mills, who was at the time studying there.)   Having said that, NYC makes a cameo appearance in The Choir Boats (as a waystation for Maggie and her mother), and might just play a more central role in later books about our world and Yount.  Delia Sherman has certainly shown how effectively NYC can serve as a portal for fantasy in her Changeling books!

What kind of research did the novel involve?

I earned my PhD in modern European history…the research for The Choir Boats stems largely from my doctoral work on 18th- and 19th-century merchants in northern Europe.  I often feel like Pierce Moffett, the idiosyncratic historian in John Crowley’s Aegypt Cycle, asking whether the world has more than one history.  Or the protagonists in the works of Umberto Eco and of A.S. Byatt, hunting for clues in a rebarbative and ever-branching history.

You obviously love playing with language. Who are your favorite writers and what stream of fiction do you think influenced your novel?

Austen,  Blake, Dickens, Hesse, Borges and Mann are deep influences, as are Meryvn Peake and Ursula K. Le Guin.  Pope, Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore, Hughes, Heaney.  Lately I have been reading Z. Z. Packer, Elise Paschen, Sarah Lindsay, Alice Oswald, Nathaniel Mackey, Andrea Barrett, Nnedi Okorafor.  I especially like the writers I loosely call ‘the New Stylists”: Theodora Goss, Cat Valente, Sonya Taafe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Sandra Kasturi, Naomi Novik, Susanna Clarke.  “Neo-Romanticists” might be a better label, as their various uses of language evoke Endymion, Alastor, Tieck’s Fantasus and Novalis’s search for the blue flower.  Greer Gilman and Ellen Kushner are the pioneers here, their wordplay (simultaneously lush and incisive) an inspiration to the most recent cohort.  Sarah Micklem and D.L. Cornish are two other writers whose prose sings to me.

As the book goes on you include an increasing number of literary characters and play more with the idea of stories. Will these characters ever cross over from story to our world?

Yes, though precisely how is still being marinated in my night-kitchen.  I do know that a certain Elizabeth Darcy (born Bennett) will play a minor but necessary role in The Indigo Pheasant, or, A Tax from Heaven, the sequel to The Choir Boats. Careful readers will recall that Elizabeth is a friend of Sally’s through Elizabeth’s City relatives.

What beverage and snack should readers have ready to read your book?

A rich black tea with lots of milk and sugar, and gingerbread or almond cookies.  The Dutch and Flemish make a ginger-cinnamon-nutmeg cookie for the winter holidays called speculaas that would be particularly appropriate.

Mmm. Thanks Daniel!

Of course my backup system, a hodgepodge of very careful and not so careful is now coming back to bite me. Hilariously I had just bought Snow Leopard so that I could automatically continuously back up our laptops. Ha.

I’d been running OS X 10.4 and I’d cloned the 80GB hard drive onto a backup drive (a Time Capsule, but not using Time Machine as it does not work with 10.4). I upgraded it to Snow Leopard (10.6.2) and it ran for a day or so then cra-cra-crashed. I ran it along to the Apple store in Boston who, telling me this was a known issue for that drive and this laptop replaced the drive with a new one (for free) and were going to recycle the drive. Today I went in and rescued the old drive as the cloned hard drive is either corrupt or not working (or I did it wrong) and can’t be opened.

Some of my files are on the office machine, some are backed up using SugarSync but there is some stuff on this dead drive that, if the clone is really useless, I’d love to get at.

The Apple guy here suggested buying a disc enclosure at Best Buy and some data recovery service. I’m thinking I will get a disc enclosure, take it home, see what happens—which will take care of the next couple of hours. I’m in Boston tonight, will be in Easthampton seeing what’s on the backup drive there tomorrow.