This is a list of almost all the Small Beer Press books in print.
Zines and chapbooks are available on our website.
July 6th, 2021: Our latest title is Jeffrey Ford's new collection Big Dark Hole.
A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it's an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it's a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore.
Nineteen sparkling stories that weave between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead. Spirits Abroad is an expanded edition of Zen Cho's Crawford Award winning debut collection with nine added stories including Hugo Award winner "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again." A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian.
"Am I dead?" Mebuyen sighs. She was hoping the girl would not ask. Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap's debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new novella, "A Spell for Foolish Hearts" to the terrifying tension of the urban legend "Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.
At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details -- as well as the magic -- of women's lives in the old west.
In Reconstruction, award-winning writer and musician Johnson delineates the lives of those trodden underfoot by the powerful, and how they rise up. Meet the humans who serve a coterie of vampires in Hawai'i, explore the taxonomy of anger with Black Union soldiers and the woman who travels with them during the American Civil War.
Shirley Jackson Award Winner
“Blends humor, emotional clarity, and wild imagination to bring life to stories about identity, power, and human nature.” — Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed
WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER’S AWARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER’S INDIGENOUS WRITER’S PRIZE 2018
WINNER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD 2018
WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARD FOR INDIGENOUS WRITING 2019
In the world in which Lizbet Lenz lives, the sun still goes around the earth, God speaks directly to his worshippers, goblins haunt every cellar and witches lurk in the forests. Disaster strikes when Lizbet's father Gerhard, a charming scoundrel, is thrown into a dungeon by the tyrant Hengest Wolftrow.
ALA Rainbow Book List.
Georgia Peach Book Award Nominee.
Florida Teens Read Award Nominee.
Bank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year.
ABC Best Books for Young Readers.
A Junior Library Guild selection.
Mythopoeic, Hugo, & Locus award finalist.
Shipping copies with a signed bookplate.
World Fantasy Award finalist
British Fantasy Award finalist
Locus Award finalist
Reading John Crowley's stories is to see almost-familiar lives running parallel to our own, secret histories that never quite happened, memories that might be real or might be invented. In the thirteen stories collected here, Crowley sets his imagination free to roam from a 20th century Shakespeare festival to spring break at a future Yale in his Edgar Award winning story "Spring Break".
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Praise for Elizabeth Hand:
Fiercely frightening yet hauntingly beautiful.--Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl
A sinful pleasure.--Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
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Locus Recommended Reading
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In these collection, you will find stories that range from the mythic to contemporary fantasy to science fiction. You will find a troll, gryphons, a beloved dog, the Land of the Dead, an owl, a minotaur, and a very alien Cat. Earth and Air is the third and final book in a trilogy of shared collections connected by the four classical elements.
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"Peter Dickinson is my own chosen demigod in the pantheon of crime fiction."
--Laurie R. King
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In these collection, you will find stories that range from the mythic to contemporary fantasy to science fiction. You will find a troll, gryphons, a beloved dog, the Land of the Dead, an owl, a minotaur, and a very alien Cat. Earth and Air is the third and final book in a trilogy of shared collections connected by the four classical elements.
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Nathan Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.
Soon to be an original series, Monsterland, on Hulu.
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Samatar's sensual descriptions create a rich, strange landscape, allowing a lavish adventure to unfold that is haunting and unforgettable.
--Library Journal *starred review*
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Emma is spending the summer with her Scottish cousins--who are wonderful material for her attempt to win the School Prize for most interesting holiday diary. The cousins, lofty Andy, reserved Fiona, and fierce Roddy, are experimenting with their grandfather's dilapidated old mini-submarine to see if they can find a monster in the family loch.
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I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.
"Dickinson's crime novels are simply like no other; sophisticated, erudite, unexpected, intricate, English and deeply, wonderfully peculiar." --Christopher Fowler, author of The Memory of Blood
--Sara Paretsky, author of Breakdown
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Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and radiantly human.--Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
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If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino. . . . You never know what he'll come up with next, but somehow it's always a Waldrop story.--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
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Good intentions aren't everything. Sometimes things don't quite go the way you planned. And sometimes you don't plan. . . . This collection of sixteen stories (and one lonely poem) chart the many ways trouble can ensue. No actual human beings were harmed in the creation of this book.
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A lovely smooth read.--The Washington Post
A witty, affectionately nostalgic masterpiece.--The Columbus Dispatch
As absorbingly readable, as well-written as anything Peter Dickinson has written.--The Times Literary Supplement
Praise for Peter Dickinson's mysteries:
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Chosen for the 2016 Silicon Valley Reads program.
It was morning and the power was not yet on. Zach and Renee lay in the heat of the bed listening to the city wake outside the building's windows.
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Laurie Marks' Elemental Logic series introduced readers to the realm of Shaftal, an intricately imagined land whose people operate within the boundaries of their basic natures--here defined as logics--which sometimes bequeath them with access to magical, elemental powers and sometimes embroil them in unsolvable internal conflicts.
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Praise for Ysabeau S. Wilce's previous books:
This fresh and funky setting is rich with glorious costumes, innovative language, and tantalizing glimpses of history.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
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In her vivid and sly, gentle and wise, long-anticipated first collection, Delia Sherman takes seemingly insignificant moments in the lives of artists or sailors--the light out a window, the two strokes it takes to turn a small boat--and finds the ghosts haunting them, the magic surrounding them.
The second book in the Elemental Logic series, Earth Logic continues the story from the perspective of Karis, a complex character born of magic and now ruler for the country of Shaftal.
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Norton Award finalist
YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults 2016
Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of 2015
Book Riot Best of 2015
Buzzfeed 32 Best Fantasy Novels of 2015
ABC Best Books for Young Readers
Los Angeles Times Summer Reading
Locus Recommended Reading
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Locus Recommended Reading
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Locus Recommended Reading
When Taggert's adopted daughter goes missing he suspects the hand of an old enemy. He gathers friends, family, and even those who don't quite trust that he has left his violent past behind. But their search leads them to an unexpected place, the past, and the consequences of their journey have a price that is higher than they can afford.
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“A vitality to the voice and a weirdness that, while not always controlled or intentional, is highly appealing for just that reason.”
— Charles Yu, New York Times Book Review
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Winner of the Tiptree Award and a Mythopoeic Award finalist, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic fable that invites revisitation.
Praise for Cloud & Ashes:
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Praise for John Crowley:
Like a magus, John Crowley shares his secrets generously, allowing us to believe that his book is revealing the true and glorious nature of the world and the reader's own place within it.--Village Voice
Crowley] transforms the lead of daily life into seriously dazzling artistic gold.--Newsday
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Locus Recommended Reading List
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Praise for Joan Aiken's stories:
Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising . . . should be cherished.--Publishers Weekly
Darkly whimsical stories. . . . Aiken writes with surpassing spirit and alertness, her elegant restraint and dry wit never fail to leave their mark.--Kirkus Reviews
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Four women -- a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite -- are caught up on opposing sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their loyalties and agendas and ideologies come into conflict, the four fear their lives may pass unrecorded. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.
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Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor's daughter's exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain's head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker's dozen of exhilarating visions.
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Georgia Peach Award Nominee - Florida Teens Read Award Nominee - ABC Best Books for Young Readers - Bank Street College Best Children's Books of the Year - A Junior Library Guild Selection - Hugo & Locus award finalist
Winner of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction
Chicago Review of Books Best Books of the Year
Praise for the Dissenters Series:
Millet's prose is lyrically evocative ('the rhythmic scoop and splash of their paddles'). A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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Washington Post Notable Books: A charming and funny sequel to Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.
Shortlisted for the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards
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Four women, soldier, scholar, poet, and socialite are caught up on different sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their families are torn apart, they fear they may disappear into the unwritten pages of history. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.
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NPR Best Books of the Year In the world in which Lizbet Lenz lives, the sun still goes around the earth, God speaks directly to his worshippers, goblins haunt every cellar and witches lurk in the forests. Disaster strikes when Lizbet's father Gerhard, a charming scoundrel, is thrown into a dungeon by the tyrant Hengest Wolftrow.
Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Locus Recommended Reading List
B&N, Year’s Best Collections
Publishers Weekly Top 10 SF, Fantasy & Horror Spring:
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"Among the stories collected in this omnibus, are some of the very first Joan Aiken stories that I ever fell in love with, starting with the title story 'The People in the Castle, ' which is a variation on the classic tales of fairy wives."--Kelly Link
" A] haunting and wondrous book."--Emily Nordling, Tor.com
World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2018
“An extraordinary novel.”
— Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award
Neukom Institute Debut Literary Arts Award shortlist
Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Booklist Top 10 Debut SF&F
Locus Recommended Reading List
NPR Best Books of 2018
Neukom Institute Debut Literary Arts Award shortlist 2019
Nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2019
Shortlisted for the Reading Women Award 2018
Shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2018
Shortlisted for the ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writers 2018
Winner of the Norma K Hemming and the Tin Duck Awards
Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2017
Longlisted for the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction 2018
Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award 2017
Nominated for Ditmar Award 2018
Runner Up for the MUD Literary Prize
Publishers Weekly Big Indie Books of Fall 2018
Locus Recommended Reading List
In the tales gathered in An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories you will meet a Utopian assassin, an aging UFO contactee, a haunted Mohawk steelworker, a time-traveling prizefighter, a yam-eating Zombie, and a child who loves a frizzled chicken--not to mention Harry Houdini, Zora Neale Hurston, Sir Thomas More, and all their fellow travelers riding the steamer-trunk imagination of
"This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker's best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea.
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Otherwise Honor List
Locus Notable Books
"An alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer."--Salon.com (Best of the Year)
"A delightful collection."--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"My favorite fantasy writer."--Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered
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* Philip K. Dick Award finalist
* Locus Recommended Reading
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Philip K. Dick Award finalist Includes the Nebula winning story Creature What if the world ended on your birthday -- and no one came? What if your grandmother was a superhero? What if the orphan you were raising was a top-secret weapon, looked like Godzilla, and loved singing nursery rhymes? What if poet laureates fought to the death, in stadiums?
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* Philip K. Dick Award Winner
* Best of the Year: Locus, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Magazine
* Nominated for the Impac Award
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"Fabulous tales."--The Washington Post
"No unblinkered, gloveless reader can resist the stream of associations unleashed by Ford's story and the rest of Trampoline: influences as disparate as science fiction, magic realism, pulp, and Twilight Zone morality plays."--The Village Voice
This is the first of Argentinean writer Ang lica Gorodischer's nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times.
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"Combines the cruel humor of Candide with the allegorical panache of Animal Farm."--Entertainment Weekly
Carol is the most unappreciated great writer we've got. Carmen Dog ought to be a classic in the colleges by now . . . It's so funny, and it's so keen.
--Ursula K. Le Guin
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Stephen King meets Ibsen. Trust me.
--Neal StephensonWitty, wicked, and wise. Wonderful
--Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book ClubA wonderfully vivid and unexpected blend of magic realism and finely-observed contemporary experience.
--William Gibson
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Now a motion picture: OtherLife.
A New York Times Notable Book, Borders Original Voices selection, and Nebula, Endeavour, and Spectrum Award finalist. Suspenseful and inspiring.--School Library Journal A stylistic and psychological tour de force.--The New York Times Book Review
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William "Dead" Kennedy is in trouble. He's thirty-two, in love with his ex-wife, has lost his job, and he's been dreaming about ghost roads again. Sometimes a guy is haunted for a really good reason.
-- Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist
-- A Book Sense Notable Book
-- Best of the Year: Booklist, Locus, San Francisco Chronicle
-- A Locus bestseller
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-This just absolutely rocks.---Audrey Niffenegger
-Raunchy, funny, and disturbing.---Chicago Reader
-Deeply charming.---The Washington Post
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Insightful, beautifully written debut collection.
Travel Light is the story of Halla, a girl born to a king but cast out onto the hills to die. She lives among bears; she lives among dragons. But the time of dragons is passing, and Odin All-Father offers Halla a choice: Will she stay dragonish and hoard wealth and possessions, or will she travel light?
--Amal El-Mohtar, NPR, You Must Read This
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Best of the Decade: Salon, The A.V. Club
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-Wilhelm really knows students and knows how to teach them to craft a professional story.---The Oregonian
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"If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you."--From the Introduction by George R.R. Martin
Acclaimed cult author Waldrop's stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo.
* Story Prize finalist.
* A Book Sense Notable Book.
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-Unholy fun, and wholly fun . . . an elegant riposte, dazzlingly executed.---Gregory Maguire
-Spiced with humor and spot-on period detail.---Library Journal (starred review)
Sent to live with her uncle, Katherine imagines a rich and luxurious life. Her dreams evaporate when she discovers her uncle wants her to be something never before seen: a swordswoman.
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Praise for the gypt sequence:
With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America's greatest living writer of fantasy. gypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period.
--Michael DirdaA dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique.
--The New York Times Book Review
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The Elemental Logic series continues with its third novel in the series, Water Logic, where the patterns of history are made and unmade.
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Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres--realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political--and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction.
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Selected as a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Book Awards.
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In his second bibliomystery, bookhound Henry Sullivan has a new girlfriend, a new apartment, and a shelfload of troubles.
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Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards.
An exuberant celebration of excess set in a resource-poor but defiantly energetic twenty-first century.--The New York Times
A richly absorbing tale--with a marvelous premise expertly carried out.--Kirkus Reviews
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Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year
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Taggert can heal and hurt with just a touch. When an ex calls for help, he risks the wrath of his enigmatic master to try and save her daughter.
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Nine new stories from a long-time star of the science fiction field including the Hugo Award winner The Erdmann Nexus and Nebula Award winner The Fountain of Age. These stories have been reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Best of the Web.
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Kirkus Reviews: Best of 2011
A Junior Library Guild Selection
Selected for the ABC Best Books for Children Catalog
A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
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World Fantasy Award Winner
Beautifully written and subtly discomforting stories.--Nancy Pearl
Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist
Locus Award shortlist
Story Prize Notable Books
Frank O'Connor Award longlistAn exceptionally versatile author.--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Pride and Prometheus, a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.
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A literary collection of astonishing stories from an award-winning science-fiction writer and satirist.
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Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes, ' by Benjamin Rosenbaum--yes, his name is part of the title--the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours.
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Couch hits on an improbable, even fantastic premise, and then rigorously hews to the logic that it generates, keeping it afloat (at times literally) to the end.
--Los Angeles Times
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Inventive, playful, and erudite Greer Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in her long-awaited novel.
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Ryman] has not so much created as revealed a world in which the promise of redemption takes seed even in horror.--The Boston Globe
"Sweeping and beautiful. . . . The complex story tears the veil from a hidden world."--The Sunday Times
"Inordinately readable . . . extraordinary in its detail, color and brutality."--The Independent
Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.
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hese two short novels bookend Poppy Z. Brite's cheerfully chaotic series starring two chefs in New Orleans. The Value of X introduces G-man and Rickey, who grew up in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and who are slowly realizing there are only two important things in life: cooking and each other.
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Selected as one of the Best Books of the Year in science fiction and fantasy by Amazon.com.
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The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Ch teaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection--the first to be translated into English--introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Ch teaureynaud is France's own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic.
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Geoff Ryman writes about the other and leaves us dissected in the process. His stories are set in recognizable places--London, Cambodia, tomorrow--and feature men and women caught in recognizable situations (or technologies) and not sure which way to turn. They, we, should obviously choose what's right. But what if that's difficult? What will we do? What we should, or . . . ?
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No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor's suit . . . and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, Ben finds that his mother is dead and his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn't enough, he must now find a wife, or he'll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city's oppressive factories.
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"Filled with witty asides, trickster spiders, poets and one very wise woman, 'Redemption in Indigo' is a rare find that you could hand to your child, your mother or your best friend." --The Washington Post
Karen Lord's debut novel won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, the Mythopeic, Carl Brandon Parallax, and Crawford Awards.
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2011 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Collection
Praise for Karen Joy Fowler:
No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness.--Michael Chabon
Fowler's witty writing is a joy to read.--USA Today
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-Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts.---The Times (London)
-Our nearest contemporary equivalent to Blake, our sweetest-natured screwed-up visionary.---London Evening Standard
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A moving lament for lost childhoods and an eloquent tribute to the enduring power of art.--The New York Times
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Praise for Joan Aiken:
Joan Aiken's invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.--Philip Pullman
Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine.
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Cara's mother is still missing. When her brother Jax texts her from smart kid's boot camp in Boston, Cara and her two best friends go to the rescue. But the camp is a front for Cara's mother's organization who are fighting against a force who wants to make the planet over in its own image, which will leave no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human.
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A sparkling debut collection from one of the hottest writers in science fiction: her stories have received the Nebula Award the last two years running.
A Junior Library Guild Selection and Smithsonian Magazine Notable Book for Children.
A literary treasure.--Philip Pullman
My happiest discovery this year.--Los Angeles Times
The complete collection of twenty-four charming and magical Armitage family stories. Includes a prelude by the author and introductions from Garth Nix and Lizza Aiken.