"If you don't mind too much," said Maddie, "I'll be sleeping through the fireworks this year."

Once again, the Fifth Street Militia bring you a pictorial record of this year's fireworks extravaganza. Enjoy!





( More things that go boom behind the cut! )

We've been busy at NSB lately, bringing more than twenty titles to print over the last couple of months. Between this, the recent sale, and our need to move a large amount of inventory off-site and into storage, I've been positively swamped. But hey, at least it's positive.

Anyway, here's a quick run-down of our recent arrivals (available NOW at better bookstores near you):


The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Four: The Maze of the Enchanter
The Shadow Pavilion, by Liz Williams
The Lees of Laughter's End, by Steven Erikson
Mall of Cthulhu, by Seamus Cooper
Bar None, by Tim Lebbon
Prador Moon, by Neal Asher
Precious Dragon, by Liz Williams
The King's Daughters, by Nathalie Mallet
Moon Flights, by Elizabeth Moon


Mass Market Paperbacks!
Implied Spaces, by Walter Jon Williams
Passage at Arms, by Glen Cook
After the Downfall, by Harry Turtledove
Balefires, by David Drake


All our Mass Market Paperbacks to date (spines up):
Ice, Iron and Gold, by S. M. Stirling
Lightbreaker, by Mark Teppo
The Demon and the City, by Liz Williams
Snake Agent, by Liz Williams
Balefires, by David Drake
Passage at Arms, by Glen Cook
Implied Spaces, by Walter Jon Williams
The Princes of the Golden Cage, by Nathalie Mallet
The King's Daughters, by Nathalie Mallet
Moon Flights, by Elizabeth Moon
Precious Dragon, by Liz Williams
Prador Moon, by Neal Asher
After the Downfall, by Harry Turtledove


The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan
Incandescence, by Greg Egan*
The Swordbearer, by Glen Cook


"So what are you waiting for?" wonders Maddie. "Go buy some books!"


---
* Wow, I posted about the hardcover release of Incandescence exactly one year ago. This Trade Paperback edition features all-new cover copy, and we were able to fix a couple of the hardcover's glitches.

New Yorker Pizza and a Stone 13th Anniversary Ale, which paired nicely. And no, it wasn't really breakfast.

And to balance out the beer, a bear.



And more found objects:


Alien on a windowsill.


Spotted in Wickersham Park: The ring of books.

Maddie's all ready for Independence Day...


...and so are we!



8.5 hours to go... and counting.

Between 2003 and 2007, a strange thing happened; a handful of shared-world, shared-character stories based on my observations and experiences playing in punk rock bands in the early '90s began to transform into something else: a book-length manuscript. This manuscript--I hesitate to say "novel," as it's just a tad shy of a novel's forty thousand word requirement (now obsolete)--evolved into Chick Bassist: A Rock and Roll Fantasy, a literary exploration of sex, race, gender, violence, point of view subjectivity, and rock and roll as a unifying common book mythology. Along the way, characters developed their own agendas, plots veered away from where I'd planned, revisions got revised, and the whole ride became far wilder than I'd ever imagined. In May of 2007, I submitted Chick Bassist as my Master's Thesis in English/Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, describing it as punk rock noir, or Rashomon in a rock-and roll band. Needless to say, it was accepted, and copies of the work were signed, bound, and shelved. Although a handful of excerpts have been published as stand-alone stories, the manuscript as a whole hasn't exactly set the publishing world alight, so Chick Bassist has spent the better part of the last year sitting on a shelf, gathering dust while I worked on other projects.

Until now. Inspired to do so by a pair of authors* I enjoy, starting this Wednesday, I will be serializing Chick Bassist on the Web, uploading a chapter a week to the LiveJournal community chickbassist (http://chickbassist.livejournal.com). I will also be posting commentary, discussing decisions I might make differently today, sharing anecdotes, pictures, and behind-the-scenes insights, and generally making a fool of myself. And, of course, you are welcome to post comments.

So come on by, check out Chick Bassist, and add it to your communities list or RSS feed. And if you enjoy what you read, tell a friend or drop a little loose change into the tip jar.



---
* Who? Catherynne M. Valente and Tim Pratt, of course.

Yeah, it's time once again to round up all my recent (and less than recent) posts to los_faces. Here you go...


"B-b-b-but I'm too cute to eat," said Sammy the Sandwich, shortly before he realized exactly how harsh and uncaring the world is.

( More of the faces that abound around us appear behind the cut... )

Maddie's having a long, slow day at Our Best Friends. "Where is everybody? Hiding from the heat? Somebody come buy something, quick!"

Are we really sure he's not gonna get up and moonwalk?
























/Too soon?
(Apparently not.)

"Happy Birthday Violet"
Mixed Media: Watercolor on paper, tree, thumbtacks
Found in Wickersham Park, June 14, 2009

Which reminds me. It's also my sister's birthday. So happy birthday to Alexis in Texas.


Bonus pic: Maddie likes the piggy noses.

Maddie found a fossil near Walnut Park yesterday. Or maybe it's a gyroid. Got your shovel handy?





---
Don't get it? Then you obviously haven't been playing enough Animal Crossing: City Folk.

This weekend, I had a chance to sit down and chat with the Bunny Magus himself, Night Shade author Mark Teppo, about his recently-released novel Lightbreaker, its forthcoming sequel Heartland, Urban Fantasy, Western Occultism, industrial music, and Mark's appearance this coming Tuesday at San Francisco's Borderlands Books. So click on through (or on the artwork below) and check out the inaugural episode of The Night Shade Interview: LIGHTBREAKER's Mark Teppo.

My desk, circa now.

New machine, netbook, NSB machine. Tiki gods, reference books, Moleskines. Multiple mice and magnetic monkeys. Plastic pirates, convention badges, and a well-thumbed Tales of the Dying Earth. What's your workspace look like?

The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 4: The Maze of the Enchanter will be shipping right around the end of June, continuing our five-volume Collected Fantasies series. Today, the Bard of Auburn is best known as a writer of weird fiction, one of Weird Tales' most prolific contributors, and a contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. But he was also a poet (one reviewer dubbed Smith "the Keats of the Pacific"), sculptor, and painter, in short, a twentieth-century renaissance man. To learn more about Smith (and see photographs of his art), we encourage you to visit Boyd Pearson's excellent website, The Eldritch Dark. The Maze of the Enchanter includes, in chronological order, all of Smith's stories from "The Mandrakes" (February, 1933) to "The Flower-Women" (May, 1935), extensive story notes by editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, and an introduction by the inimitable Gahan Wilson.

And remember, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 4: The Maze of the Enchanter is just one of the many titles eligible for our annual 50% off sale, which runs through June 17. Just add four or more books to your shopping cart, then enter coupon code 50NSB2009 at checkout, and we’ll knock your final price in half! If you've been looking for an excuse to order the entire five-volume Clark Ashton Smith series, now is the time!

At long last, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 3 has a cover! And with Fred Gambino's beautiful artwork and design by Eugene Wang, what a great cover it is! With all of my favorite short stories from the last year (Seriously, Jonathan Strahan has picked out an amazing collection of stories here. Lots of editors know what stories you'll enjoy reading; Jonathan Strahan, on the other hand knows the stories you NEED TO READ!), including ones by Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Holly Black, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, and Kelly Link (not to mention some guy from Maine that you might have heard of), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 3 shows why Night Shade Books has, in my totally unbiased* opinion, the must-buy "best of" of the year. Seriously, if you aren't reading Bacigalupi, Bear, Chiang, and Link, you might as well not be reading at all.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 3 is headed to the printer this week, so it will be shipping right around the end of June (and showing up at better bookstores near you in early-to-mid July). But do you know what's even cooler that that cover? The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 3 is just one of the items included in the annual Night Shade Books 50% off sale! That's less than thirty five cents per story! Just order the book along with three other titles, then put in coupon code 50NSB2009 at checkout, and we'll knock your final price in half! How easy is that?

Not completely convinced? Then read the jacket copy and lineup:

An alien world with an argon atmosphere serves as the stage for the ultimate self-examination; an African-American scientist dissects a Lovecraftian slave race while fascism rears its head on the other side of the world; an elderly Jewish artist attracts a celestial muse; a doomed village of scavengers discovers the scattered pieces of a metal man; a stalwart reporter gambles on an interview with the power to alter the world; a steel monkey defends a young girl from a rival family's assassins; a 19th Century country gentleman's curious daughter meets the enigmatic Dr. Viktor Frankenstein; a rivalry between brothers complicates the interpretation of a message from the stars; two girls discover that the cruel social rituals of adolescence apply differently in fact than fiction...

The depth and breadth of science fiction and fantasy fiction continues to change with every passing year. The 29 stories chosen for this book by award-winning anthologist Jonathan Strahan carefully map this evolution, giving readers a captivating and always-entertaining look at the very best the genre has to offer.

Jonathan Strahan has edited more than twenty anthologies and collections, including The Locus Awards, The New Space Opera, and The Jack Vance Treasury. He has won the Ditmar, William J Atheling Jr. and Peter McNamara Awards for his work as an anthologist and reviewer. Strahan is currently the reviews editor for Locus.


Contents:

Introduction - Jonathan Strahan
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Shoggoths in Bloom - Elizabeth Bear
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel - Peter S. Beagle
Fixing Hanover - Jeff VanderMeer
The Gambler - Paolo Bacigalupi
The Dust Assassin - Ian McDonald
Virgin - Holly Black
Pride and Prometheus - John Kessel
The Thought War - Paul McAuley
Beyond the Sea Gates of the Scholar Pirates of Sarskoe - Garth Nix
The Small Door - Holly Phillips
Turing's Apples - Stephen Baxter
The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates - Stephen King
Five Thrillers - Robert Reed
The Magician's House - Megan McCarron
Goblin Music - Joan Aiken
Machine Maid - Margo Lanagan
The Art of Alchemy - Ted Kosmatka
26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss - Kij Johnson
Marry the Sun - Rachel Swirsky
Crystal Nights - Greg Egan
His Master's Voice - Hannu Rajaniemi
Special Economics - Maureen McHugh
Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment - M Rickert
From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled... - Michael Swanwick
If Angels Fight - Rick Bowes
The Doom of Love in Small Spaces - Ken Scholes
Pretty Monsters - Kelly Link

Trade Paperback 978-1-59780-149-2
479 Pages $19.95

Still here? Go buy the book, already.


---

* Okay, sure. Maybe I'm just a little bit biased. But only a little bit.

Sale: 50% off all in-stock and forthcoming Night Shade titles

It's that time of year again, sale time at Night Shade Books. We've got a lot of big new titles coming in, and we need to clear space in a big way (and pay off a few print bills)! So for the next two weeks, from Wednesday, June 3 until midnight on Wednesday, June 17, we're offering 50% off all in-stock and forthcoming* Night Shade books, with a four book minimum order. Just use the coupon code 50NSB2009 at checkout, and we'll do the rest!

Recent releases that we know you're going to like include Mark Teppo's Lightbreaker, Glen Cook's An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat, The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 5: The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions, Laird Barron's The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse 2, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Fast Ships, Black Sails. And arriving shortly, mass market paperbacks of Liz Williams's Precious Dragon, S. M. Stirling's Ice, Iron and Gold, Elizabeth Moon's Moon Flights, Neal Asher's Prador Moon, Nathalie Mallet's The King's Daughters, Glen Cook's Passage at Arms, Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces, David Drake's Balefires, and Harry Turtledove's After the Downfall, not to mention Steven Erikson's The Lees of Laughter's End, Liz Williams's The Shadow Pavilion, and The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 4: The Maze of the Enchanter, which will all be arriving (finally!) over the course of this month. Later this year, we'll be bringing you Glen Cook's Swordbearer and Darkwar, and publishing two brilliant debut novels, John Langan's House of Windows and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

Don't forget this year's forthcoming anthologies: John Joseph Adams's By Blood We Live and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 1, and Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 3 and Eclipse 3.

And coming next year (and now available for preorder): Glen Cook's Starfishers Trilogy: Shadowline, Starfishers, and Stars' End, Ellen Datlow's Tails of Wonder (Cats!), Tim Pratt's Sympathy for the Devil, Jonathan strahan's Wings of Fire (Dragons!), Walter Jon Williams's The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories and The Best of Fritz Leiber!

Order up, so that we can keep bringing you the best in SF, Fantasy and Horror! Once again, just enter the coupon code 50NSB2009 at checkout, and we'll take 50% off your order of any four or more Night Shade Books!

---
* Preorders will ship as published. Estimated publication dates are subject to change.

"Now this—this is beautiful. St. Peter’s. The church, the square, marble everywhere, sunlight blinding you like the flashlight of God."
— from "Hit" by Bruce McAllister, appearing in By Blood We Live, coming this fall from Night Shade Books.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Michael Chabon's Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands collects sixteen essays with one idea in common: that entertainment, above all, is at the heart of the literary art. From Sherlock Holmes to comic books; from Yiddish phrasebooks to gruesome golems to great ghost stories, Chabon's analyses are multifaceted, lighthearted, and always entertaining.


View all my reviews.

Apeshit by Carlton Mellick III

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Friday the 13th meets Visitor Q" promises the back cover copy of Carlton Mellick III's Apeshit, and that's exactly what the book delivers; this is the literary equivalent of a Takashi Miike slasher flick, reveling in the conventions of B-movie horror, yet layering on enough gore, gristle, and grotesquerie to make even Kane Hodder squeamish. At the heart of the novel's plot is the requisite group of horny teenagers, heading out to the requisite isolated cabin in the woods for the requisite weekend of partying and debauchery. But this is Bizarro territory, so this cast of teens includes a Mohawked cheerleader covered in full-body butterfly tattoos, an obsessive tooth-brusher with a vagina dentata, and an abortion porn aficionado. Yeah, it's that kind of book. Characterization is a bit uneven*, and many of the protagonists become downright unlikable over the novel's course, but then again, the fact that the aforementioned horny teens are monsters themselves is kind of the point. Apeshit is, at turns, strange, disgusting, surprising, disturbing, and riotously funny.


View all my reviews.


---
* Particularly with regards to Buddy the Lobster Boy, Apeshit's killer mutant. While Buddy does appear to share some literary DNA with John Gardner's Grendel ("It sees lights in the distance. Lights in a place that is usually dark. There is something bad about these lights. Something evil. It has to make the lights go away. It has to make the evil, all evil, go away."), ultimately, Buddy is underdeveloped and underutilized as a character, making his transition from villain to victim far less satisfying than it might otherwise be.

Recently, at Our Best Friends...

During a lull in the action, I’d excused myself to run the afternoon’s mail back to the folks in the back of the building, leaving Maddie to watch the store. But when I made it back up front a matter of minutes later, she wasn’t on the couch where I’d left her. I glanced behind the counter, looked in the office, and checked the beds before scrutinizing the very front of the store.



“Hey,” called Maddie as I walked near the front door. “Do you wanna buy a book? We’ve got a bunch of good books, and we’re making crazy deals.” She’d stationed herself beneath the front sale table, comfortable on the We Eat Like Pigs welcome mat underneath. “You buy one book at full price, and you get the second one for free. Free! How could you resist a bargain like that? And we’ve even got a cool sign.”



“It’s only me, Maddie.” I bent down to her level. “But that was a pretty good sales pitch. Are you comfortable?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “It’s comfy. And it’s hard to tell from just legs. But now that you mention it, I should have recognized your boots. They need polishing.”

I shrugged. “Any customers while I was in back?”

“Just one. A police dog, Officer Rex. He dropped off a flyer.” She yawned, then nodded toward the counter. “We got started talking, and I was telling him about your other job. He seemed real interested.”

I scratched my chin, pensive. “Maddie, what did you tell Officer Rex that I do?”



“I said you were a bookmaker. Like I said, he seemed really interested…”

“Maddie.”

“What?”

“I’m not a bookmaker.”

“What, you make books, right? I mean, you do other stuff, too, but mostly you guys make books, right?”

“Well, sure, but that’s not the right word. I’m an editor, for a book publisher. Not a ‘bookmaker,’ that’s something else entirely.”

“Oh,” said Maddie, thoughtfully scratching an ear. “So what’s a bookmaker do?”

“A bookmaker is a betting agent. They’re also called ‘bookies.’ If somebody wants to gamble on, say, a horse race, they would place their bet with a bookie.”

Switching ears, Maddie said, “My bad. But why was Officer Rex so interested then?”

“Because with a handful of exceptions, bookmaking is illegal.” I thrust my hands into my pockets. “Oh, boy,” I sighed, then sat down with my head in my hands. “Now I’m going to have to explain myself to a German Shepherd.”

“That’s okay,” said Maddie. “I already took care of it.”

“What’d you do?” I asked, mentally working on my alibi.

“Well, he said something about ‘backup,’ so when he was leaving, just as he was heading out the door, I got a hold of his back leg, kinda like this.” She grabbed the cuff of my pants with her teeth, then stepped backwards, tugging.

In my head, I scratched out one alibi and started working on another. “Maddie--”

She let go of my cuff. “And then you know what I did next?”

I knew the answer couldn’t be good. “What?”

“Once I had a good grip on his leg, he yelped, so I pulled it. I pulled it hard... Just like I’m pulling yours.”



A moment passed. Maddie grinned up at me. “I really had you going, didn’t I? Too bad I don't know any bookies, I'd have won big if I'd bet you'd buy that hook, line, and sinker.”

I shook my head, relieved. “Okay, you got me.”

Maddie chuckled. “That was funny. I'm funny. Maybe I should write a book.”

“Would you give me one for free?”

“I'll make you a deal,” said Maddie, “You buy the first one at full price, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”