http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019015

The English translator of the superb HHhH writes about the indirect road he took to becoming a translator of a language he was resistant to learn.

While it is undoubtedly an advantage to spend time in the country of your “source” language (France, in my case), living there full-time can have a deleterious effect on your “target” language (English), because French expressions and ways of phrasing can come to sound natural when they are, in fact, slightly strange in English.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019014

In a revelation that should surprise absolutely no one, it turns out that Orlando Figes is the subject of an investigation at the Nation for falsehoods and fabrications in his book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. It's not the first book to come under suspicion, and as he is now maybe most famous for Amazon.com review shenanigans -- that he first tried to pin on his wife -- you have to wonder about his latest book about life in the Gulag, released just this week. (Also, why he isn't publishing poison yet.)

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019013

"So they have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds."

That's from Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl, and the basis of this week's Kind Reader column, about living alone for the first time.

crossedgenres [cgmod]

To support and encourage pledges to the Crossed Genres Kickstarter, many of our wonderful friends have donated signed copies of their books for us to give away!

To win a book/books, all you have to do is pledge at least $10 to the Kickstarter by Friday, June 8! That puts your name in the metaphorical hat. Each $10 pledged puts your name in again, so the more you pledge, the better your chances of winning a signed book! Of course, this is in addition to the reward you’re promised from pledging.

NOTE: This is retroactive! If you’ve already pledged $10 or more, your name is already in!

Here are the books you could win. Remember, these are all SIGNED:

• Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight by Cat Rambo
• The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting by Jennifer Brozek
• Rogue Mage series: Bloodring, Seraphs & Host by Faith Hunter
• Jane Yellowrock series: Skinwalker, Blood Cross, Mercy Blade & Raven Cursed by Faith Hunter
• Theirs Not To Reason Why ARC bundle: A Soldier’s Duty & an Advance Reading Copy of An Officer’s Duty (coming 7/2012) by Jean Johnson
</li>
• Theirs Not To Reason Why bundle: A Soldier’s Duty & An Officer’s Duty (coming 7/2012) by Jean Johnson (5 available!)
</li>
• The Siren and the Sword by Cecilia Tan ♥
• Best Erotic Fantasy & Science Fiction (anthology) Edited by Cecilia Tan ♥
• Bites of Passion: Erotic Vampire Stories (anthology) Edited by Cecilia Tan ♥
• When in Rio by Del Dryden ♥
• Harmonica + Gig by RJ Astruc
• Cobalt City package: Cobalt City Blues (novel) by Nathan Crowder / Cobalt City: Dark Carnival (anthology) Edited by Nathan Crowder / Cobalt City Adventures Unlimited (Parsec Award-winning podcast script, signed by cast & producers)

(♥ = erotica)

Pledge at least $10 in the next two weeks and one of these books could be yours! (And if you pledge $25 or more you can still get in on a free year of CG Magazine ebooks too!)

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019012

Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore. He was 88.

I was gifted Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory not too long ago. Amazing piece of work.

yuki_onna

Ten years ago, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh.

It wasn’t Platform 9 3/4, but it might as well have been. My life changed the moment that train pulled out of the brick archways and into the rolling green countryside beyond London–it was just beginning to be autumn then, and the trees were full of crows. I remember thinking about bird magic, auguries, every story I’d ever heard about England and Scotland. I was a tiny thing, a maiden in all but the technical sense. I knew, as the old novels say, nothing of the world. My EuroRail photo looked absurdly, hilariously, preposterously like an illustration of Snow White. I had a bacon sandwich. My mother was with me, a psychopomp in knock-off Prada sunglasses, bearing me across the wall and into the life I didn’t yet know I was in for. It was the first time I wanted something with that desperate, pure fire–and made it happen, by myself, with will and work. After all, if you grow up loving fairy tales and King Arthur and saints who battle monsters, you want the British Isles the way some kids want boyfriends. Edited to add: is that a silly reason to want to go to a country? Yep. Is it a direct outgrowth of the complicated relationship of American culture to British culture? Yep. Was I 21 years old, pretty silly, fully of inchoate dreamy nonsense and trying to learn how to be a real person? Absolutely. In fact, a big part of that growing up was going to a place I'd dreamed about and figuring out what reality there was like.

I lived there for something over a year. I came back to America for stupid reasons–but that’s what you do in your twenties. Make stupid decisions while meaning so earnestly well.

My interviewer in Finland asked me: you’ve written about everywhere you’ve lived but Edinburgh. Where is Scotland in your books?

I laughed a little, pressed my lips together as I always do when I’m thinking, looked out the window of our car at the swans nesting in the golden Nordic estuaries. This is what I told her:

A poetry professor once told me that you can never name the thing you’re writing about. If the poem is about death, you can’t say the word death. Poems about memory shouldn’t go on about the thing itself. If you’re writing about grief, you can’t actually say grief, or sadness, or even tears. If you want to talk about love, love is the one word you can’t use.

Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.

Today, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh. It was Platform 7. It’s just beginning to be summer now, and the fields are full of chartreuse flowers. The old churches spring up out of them like strange, huge blossoms. The train rushes over a stream so full of swans the current is pure white.

I think about bird magic again. Auguries.

I am no longer small. I know something of the world. Maybe not much of a something, but something. I have made things with my hands and heart. I look a bit pugnacious in my passport photo, like I still have something to prove. I had a bacon sandwich. My husband is with me and this time I am bearing him across the wall, to show him this object that sits at the bottom of my mind, a grey stone city with a castle and a mountain, a place that was once wholly full of fairy fruit and temptation and the rich mess of becoming bigger, becoming grown. That fairy fruit made everywhere else look dimmer for awhile. My goblin city, that swallowed me whole. I think it took falling in love with Maine to fix me–before then I always had the idea that of course I’d go back, that somehow, somehow, this was where I’d live when I could choose.

I’ve been near tears most of the morning, riding north through sheep and cattle and chapels and flowers. When you love a place, it’s hard to leave, and harder still to come back. You hope it will be proud of you, of all you became when you left to seek your fortune.  You hope it will be as you remembered; you hope you are still as it knew you.
You hope it will forgive you long neglect, lines in your once-clear face, a hard blue edge of cynicism.

O goblin city, I hope you will forgive me for never writing a book about you.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019011

Strangely, the preview I was worried about is not the one causing my current conniption fit. Trailers have been released for adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Henry James's* What Maisie Knew. If both cause distress, wash it down with a little totally-not-about-L. Ron Hubbard Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master.

* I mean, I'm assuming it's loosely based on the Henry James, at least has some strands of his DNA in there? Although the soundtrack alone would have made his blood curdle.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019010

Berfrois has a good review of Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman's Bosnia Remade, one of those books I long to read but know I will never have the time to sit with it. Probably. I would like the electronic add-on to my brain now that allows me to download huge amounts of information from nonfiction texts directly into my consciousness. Thanks. That's gotta be just six months away by now, right? Until that happens, detailed reviews of books I will probably never read offer the best substitute.

But while we're on the subject of the Balkans, probably best to note that the Atlantic website, bless their corrupt little hearts, has huge excerpts from Rebecca West's masterpiece on the region, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Even so, it's probably only about 10% of the full book, as it's 900+ pages. And every single one worth reading!

http://www.librarything.com/blogs/librarything/2012/05/may-author-interviews/

http://www.librarything.com/blogs/librarything/?p=3313

</a> This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, is on its way to your inbox. You can also read it online. It includes author interviews with Hilary Mantel, Naomi Novik, Jonathan Gottschall, and Melissa Coleman.

I talked to Hilary Mantel about her new book Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, published this month by Henry Holt.

Originally, you’ve said, you planned just “one enormous book” on Thomas Cromwell, but now we’re looking at a trilogy. When did you realize first that his story needed two books, and now three?

I think that fiction, even historical fiction, is inherently unpredictable. You know what the story is, but you don’t know until you tell it where its power is located, where
you will place the focus and how you need to shape it. I did originally imagine there would be just one book, but as I began to tell the story of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, I realized that it needed to be played out properly, that it couldn’t be hurried: that it was, in fact, the climax of a book, not an episode in a book. At that point, I decided that Wolf Hall would end with More’s death, and the royal party heading for the house named in the title. With Bring up the Bodies, the process of discovery was virtually the same, though it still caught me unawares. I came to write the end of the Boleyns, and realized that I already had a book; the buildup to that tragedy is so stealthy, the climax so horrifying, that I thought the reader would want to pause, close the book, take a breath.

So the whole project reshaped itself for a second time, and very swiftly; in each case, the process of realization took a split second; and the second after that, it seemed obvious. To some readers it might sound as if my method of work is very disorganized. I’d prefer to think of it as an organic, evolving process: sudden discoveries and sudden demands breeding changes of tactics. I like to gather my material, think for a long time, but make the business of writing itself as spontaneous and flexible as possible. If I can I like to take myself by surprise.

What was it about Thomas Cromwell that initially drew you to him as a way to write about the Tudor period?

It appealed to me because his character had never been explored properly in fiction or drama. Cromwell was the son of a blacksmith and brewer, and this stratified, hierarchical society, he rose to become the king’s right-hand man and eventually Earl of Essex; you have to ask, how did he do it? Luck? Calculation? Both, surely, but what combination of the two? And what drove him? When you worked for Henry VIII, the stakes were so high. One slip and you were dead. I wanted to try to work out what combination of ambition and idealism motivated Cromwell. In what ways was he typical of his time, and in what ways unique? And as I was asking myself, as I always do when I write I historical fiction, how did this man’s life feel, from the inside?

When you stand in Cromwell’s shoes, familiar events are defamiliarised. The story, which is irresistible in itself, comes up fresh and new.

Read the rest of our interview with Hilary Mantel.

I also talked to Naomi Novik, the author of the fascinating Temeraire fantasy series. The latest volume, Crucible of Gold, was published in March by Del Rey. Some excerpts:

On your website, you offer a few “deleted scenes” from the Temeraire books, and you note there “I tend to write fast and revise heavily, and I cut liberally.” Tell us a bit more about your writing process: when do you do most of your writing? Where? Do you compose in longhand, or use a computer?

I have no rules other than that I tend to change my rules fairly often. Each book has worked differently. My life has changed quite a lot over the course of writing the series—I have a new baby now, so I write from 9:30 to 4:30 because that’s when I have child care. My natural state of writing is really more writing from 11 in the morning to 3 a.m.; that’s my intuitive style. I do generally like to work at a fairly fast pace—when it’s flowing I’m getting two to three thousand words a day. I still like to get the skeleton down and then polish it. My single biggest trick for when I need to focus and get productivity is to go somewhere where there isn’t internet, so I’ll go to a café with a laptop and just write there. It’s actually getting increasingly hard to avoid the internet, though. I don’t really write longhand unless I get stuck; if I get stuck, then what I do is grab a journal and start writing some longhand, and that loosens things up a bit. Once I’ve started, I like so much having the freedom to revise heavily and save different versions that I always really want to be on the computer.

Anything you’d like to tell us about the next Temeraire volume (the eighth)? Have you selected a title yet? Any hint of where Laurence and Temeraire might be off to next?

My working title for it is “Luck and Palaces,” and I suppose I can give a hint, which is that that is from a translation of poems by Wisława Szymborska, and the line is about the city of Kyoto. So that’s my little hint. The other clue I will give is that it’s the year 1812.

Read the rest of our interview with Naomi Novik.

I had the chance to talk with Jonathan Gottschall about The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, published in April by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

If you can give us the nutshell version, what is it about stories (whether it be fiction, or drama, or televised sports, or dreams, or computer games) that makes us as humans so attracted to them, and gives them such a powerful hold over us?

Homo sapiens is this weird sort of primate that lives inside stories, and we don’t know why for certain. I cover several competing ideas in the book, but they all break down into two big categories. 1) We like stories because they have hidden evolutionary benefits. 2) The mind isn’t designed for story, it has a glitch that makes it vulnerable to story. In the latter view, fiction is like porn—a mere pleasure technology that we’ve invented to titillate the pleasure circuits of the brain. I argue that story addiction is mainly good for us: story is a whetstone for the mind, and it acts as a kind of social glue—helping to bind individuals together into functioning societies.

It was an experience with a song that prompted you to write this book, as you note in the opening pages. Tell us about that moment, and do you see significant differences in the way humans are affected by stories in different media (print, song, video, &c.), or does the impact tend to be similar?

One day, I was driving down the highway and happened to hear the country music artist Chuck Wicks singing “Stealing Cinderella”—a song about a little girl growing up to leave her father behind. Before I knew it, I was blind from tears, and I had to veer off on the road to get control of myself and to mourn the time—still more than a decade off—when my own little girls would fly the nest. I sat there on the side of the road feeling sheepish and wondering, “What just happened?” I wrote the book to try to answer that question. How can stories—the fake struggles of fake people—have such incredible power over us? Why are we storytelling animals?

And yes, different forms of storytelling affect us in different ways. Most popular songs are stories set to music, and they evoke powerful emotion. The same goes for films. People respond so intensely and authentically to film, that when psychologists want to study an emotion, like sadness, they subject people to clips from tear-jerkers like “Old Yeller” or “Love Story”.

Read the rest of our interview with Jonathan Gottschall.

Last but not least, Lisa Carey interviewed Melissa Coleman about her book This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak, now out in paperback.

What made you decide to write this memoir? Was it something you always intended to write about?

Somehow I managed to avoid writing, and talking much, about my childhood for many years, fearing, I think, that I was responsible for some of the tragic things that happened. However, with the birth of my children, the past began urging me to make peace. I also found myself wanting to celebrate the beauty and connection to nature in my childhood, and the amazing effort made by my father, Eliot Coleman, and others, to lay the foundations for today’s organic food revolution.

How much research was involved to bring such rich detail to the parts that occurred before you were old enough to remember it? You have your mother’s journals. Did your parents help you otherwise in the process of telling this story?

I began with my own scraps of memories, images from photos, and family stories, but I needed to do a lot of research to fill in the blanks. There was my mother’s journal, numerous news articles about us, books by the Nearings and others, and I tracked down and interviewed many of the apprentices and people who visited us during the 1970s. It was only with the help of all these people, especially my parents, that I was able to tell this story.

Was this a difficult book to write? Or was it liberating?

Both! It’s incredibly difficult to dig into painful events in the past, but also very rewarding to let them go and find the beauty beneath. The liberation that came was something like what comes from making compost. You put all these scraps of things into a pile and let them settle and soon enough they turn into black gold, as my father calls compost, the rich soil in which new life can grow.

Read the rest of Lisa’s interview with Melissa Coleman.

Catch up on previous State of the Thing newsletters.

If you don’t get State of the Thing, you can add it in your email preferences. You also have to have an email address listed.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019009

Violette dreamt of milky baths
Of gorgeous gowns of fresh bread
Of gorgeous gowns of pure blood
One day there will be no more fathers
In the gardens of youth
There will be strangers
All the strangers
Men for whom you are always brand new
And the very first
Men for whom you can escape from yourself
Men for whom you are nobody's daughter
Violette dreamt of undoing
and undid
The hideous vipers' knot of blood connections

- Paul Éluard, quoted in Sarah Maza's Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019008

I don't know if you've heard, but Alain de Botton, hot on the heels of his book How to Think More About Sex, is going to reinvent porn. I know! There's no use making any jokes about it, Hadley Freeman has already made all the good ones.

For those who believe that philosophy is, by and large, little more than stating the obvious with extra jazz hands, De Botton's porn manifesto will not persuade them otherwise. Similarly, to those who see De Botton as a precious philosopher with little connection to the real world, again, you should brace yourselves for your opinions to remain utterly unchanged.

crossedgenres [cgmod]

The deadline for submissions to CGP’s upcoming anthology MENIAL: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction has been extended a month. The deadline for sending submissions is now June 30.

Other people treat laborers like the dirt they work with. But skilled labor is crucial to the continuation of human culture on earth – and if we ever wish to visit the stars, skilled labor will be indispensable.

We welcome and strongly encourage submissions with underrepresented main characters: characters of color, LGBTQ characters, women characters, etc.!

We decided to extend the deadline largely because of the surprising success of our Kickstarter, which saved Menial (and the rest of our 2013 projects) in one day! We want to ensure that as many people as possible can get their submissions in, so Menial turns out even more awesome! =)

Submission guidelines for Menial are here. If you have a story idea but didn’t think you had time, now you have no excuse! Send us your stories!

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019007

How I hate doing this stuff on the blog, but we're being practical.

So! Looking for subletters for my Berlin apartment for July and August, possibly in the fall as well. It's a nice, quiet space in Prenzlauer Berg, a 3 minute walk from public transit. Full of books, obviously, in English and German. There's also a Russian book that I just found the other day, of unknown origins. Maybe you can tell me if it's good or not.

Email me if interested in talking about it. It's a nice little place to get a lot of writing done in the day and then do a lot of street drinking at night.

crossedgenres [cgmod]

(Cross-posted from Kickstarter)

Now that we’ve reached our initial $4000 goal – in less than a day, yowza! – It’s time for a stretch goal. We thought up this goal at the beginning, but weren’t sure we’d get the chance to go for it – we thought $4k was ambitious! But here we are!

Crossed Genres Magazine, the genre-twisting zine that started it all, was retired at the end of 2011 after 36 issues. The zine, which was published free on the CG website (and as quarterly print/ebooks), had a different genre or theme each month, which writers had to combine with science fiction and/or fantasy. We covered everything from classic genres like Romance and Mystery; to archetypes (like a trio of issues: Heroes & Heroines, Sidekicks & Minions, and Villains); to more nebulous concepts like Anthropomorphism or Luck.

CG Magazine was our most effective way of continuously pushing progressive speculative fiction. During its run we dedicated issues to LGBTQ characters, characters of color, serious tales starring children… the final issue’s theme was Different – “who and what decides or defines our differences, and why; what sets us apart and how can differences bring us together.”

We were sad to see CG Magazine go, but the combination of lost money and time commitment was too much for us at the time. Since then, after much consideration and lamenting its loss, we’ve decided that if we can eliminate paying for the zine out-of-pocket, we’ll make time for it. We didn’t actually want to close the zine, and a lot of people were upset that it was gone – we received many emails that were flat-out furious – so we’re hopeful that we may be able to resurrect it.

Therefore: If the Kickstarter surpasses $5500 in total pledges, we will bring back Crossed Genres Magazine starting at the beginning of 2013!

Moreover, we wanted to make sure our pledgers get to reap the benefits of the resurrection. SO: If we do reach $5500, and re-launch the zine – everyone who pledges at least $25 will receive ebooks of the first year of the resurrected zine, for no extra, in addition to your pledge rewards! (YES this is retroactive. If you’ve already pledged, you’ll still benefit!)

We’re excited at the opportunity to throw ourselves back into the zine – we have over seven YEARS worth of monthly genres/themes we didn’t get to! So let’s bring it back & bring it on!

-Kay & Bart

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019006

This week's Kirkus Q&A is with Alix Shulman, regarding her caustic little novel Menage. We talk about what makes a piece of fiction feminist, and the corrosive powers of money in art.

as a fiction writer I have always balked at restrictions imposed by various prescriptions about what feminist fiction should be. In fact, I wrote an essay exploring what feminist fiction is, “The Taint,” reprinted in my new collection, A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays. In it I quote Naomi Weisstein’s broad definition: “Feminist fiction is fiction that does not admire patriarchy or accept its ideology. Nor does it accept its male characters as necessarily more exciting, important, or valuable than its female characters. In addition, the female characters... whether they be villains or heroes...are neither necessarily nice nor necessarily beautiful. In this way feminist fiction challenges the patriarchal belief in the fixed and eternal nature of men and women.”

crossedgenres [cgmod]

Ibi Zoboi’s “The Fire in Your Sky“, and Nisi Shawl’s “Black Betty“, were both named as Notable Stories of 2011 for the storySouth Million Writers Award!

The Million Writers Award is given each year to the best online short stories. Both “The Fire in Your Sky” and “Black Betty” were originally published in Crossed Genres Magazine.

The top ten stories of the year from within the Notables will be released in June, and voting will be open to the publich. Here’s hoping both of these excellent stories make the final list!

Congratulations to Ibi and Nisi for this deserved recognition!

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

crossedgenres [cgmod]

(Cross-posted from Kickstarter)

Everyone, we hardly know what to say! It’s been just 20 hours since we launched our Kickstarter, and we’re already at $3,363 – that’s 84% of our goal! Unbelievable! This is far beyond anything we’d have expected at this point.

With only $637 to go, we were even wondering if we’d make the goal within 24 hours! That would be incredible!

We had an idea for a stretch goal – a secondary goal we’d shoot for if we ever reached the first one. But we feared that $4000 was ambitious enough on its own, so we didn’t know if we’d ever get to really try for the stretch goal. Now, it sure looks like we will!

It’ll benefit pledgers, too. We have a couple of things we’re planning to thank our supporters, beyond the rewards already listed.

For now though, we’re just thrilled to be so close to our goal – reaching that $4000 and guaranteeing the continuation of Crossed Genres will be a such an incredible relief! Let’s keep it up, and push it over the top!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

-Bart and Kay

P.S. – when we hit our goal, we’ll post a few outtakes of our son Baz from the KS video!

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019005

Ahmet Sik, a Turkish journalist and author recently released from prison, says he is working with his lawyers to prepare for June 18, his next day in court, as he fights accusations that he was part of a plot known as Ergenekon, aimed at toppling the governing Justice and Development Party.

During an interview on the campus of Bilgi University, where he teaches, Mr. Sik said Monday that whether he was convicted or exonerated, it would not change the oppression of the media in Turkey.

scott_lynch

It's been a while since I bored into a book like a hopped-up literary woodpecker, so here's some brain spillage originally written last year and never posted.

Left: "Black Destroyer," 1939

Right: Current edition from Orb Books.

Hot jets, Kinnison! What a jaunt in the way-back machine this is. I first became aware of The Voyage of the Space Beagle via Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials as a kid, and once again waited a mere two decades before reading the source material. At this rate, I'll have all of my seventh-grade math homework turned in by December, 2013.

Voyage is a 1950 fix-up of four previously published short stories, forming a loosely chronological account of the titular Space Beagle's multi-year exploration beyond the confines of the Milky Way. Its thousand-man crew, chemically castrated for the duration to keep their minds firmly on Doing Science, is preyed upon by a series of increasingly dangerous creatures, and must also deal with internal pressures, scientific disputes, and a case of dreaded SPACE MADNESS.

crossedgenres [cgmod]

Crossed Genres’ co-publishers are both out of work, and we’re at risk of losing all our funds to continue publishing! So we’ve launched a Kickstarter to cover our publication costs through 2013 and save CGP!

100% of the $4000 fundraising goal will be used for publishing new books. Over half will go directly to authors and artists for fiction and cover art. The rest will pay for editorial, production and distribution costs, as well as some advertising/publicity. (None of it will go into our pockets. We’ll be very happy to simply not lose money any more.)

WHAT WILL THE KICKSTARTER PAY FOR?

Projects in 2013 will include:

• Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction</p>

  Other people treat laborers like the dirt they work with. But skilled labor is crucial to the continuation of human culture on earth – and if we ever wish to visit the stars, skilled labor will be indispensable.

  We want stories about men and women who understand the nuts and bolts, the atmosphere and the water and the soil. You know – the things that keep us alive. We want characters who get their hands dirty every day; people who aren’t too proud to work their bodies at least as hard as their minds.

• Winter Well, speculative novellas about older women

  We’re looking for speculative stories featuring women of advancing age (late middle age and older). They’re smart, they’re tough, and they have wills of their own.

  They may be warriors, politicians, adventurers, etc. Even if they are also wives, mothers, wise women or healers, those archetypes must not be their defining characteristics. Their motivations, their driving force, must be their own. Whatever was in their past, they’re not interested in being in the background now.

  We want stories about women breaking free of suppression; we also want stories of women who’ve been empowered all their lives.

• Plus at LEAST two additional titles released in the 2nd half of 2013. We may add 1-2 additional projects depending on how successful the Kickstarter is. These titles haven’t been decided yet – and some of the rewards for pledging give you the chance to influence what we publish!

REWARDS

Some of the rewards for pledging to the Kickstarter include:

• Signed, ARC and limited-print copies of CG titles
• Ebook bundles – every one of our current titles, everything through 2013 – even every title we’ll ever publish.
• 8″ x 10″ photo prints of some of our most popular covers!
• Short story writing critiques from authors Cat Rambo & Jean Johnson, and from the CG editors!
• Help us choose the theme for an upcoming anthology, & get credited when it’s published!
• A custom-designed LEGO set based on the CG Magazine genre of your choice!
• Name & describe a character in NY Times bestselling author Jean Johnson‘s upcoming novel Theirs Not To Reason Why: Damnation!
• An ebook reader loaded with many books, and physically signed by many various authors!
• SOME SURPRISES! Stay tuned, but supporters of the Kickstarter may end up getting more than they pledged for!

We’ve been extraordinarily proud to bring new voices to appreciative readers through CGP. There’s nothing quite like accepting a story and having the author excitedly tell us that it’s their first sale (which has happened to us too many times to count). Over the 3 1/2 years since we founded CGP we’ve produced some excellent and unique reading experiences. But unfortunately, we’re quite serious when we say that’s now at risk. We simply can’t afford to lose money on the small press any longer.

If the fundraising goal isn’t reached, then CGP will stop producing new books. We’ll cancel the submission calls for Menial: Skilled Labor in SF and Winter Well, and after we release Daniel José Older’s Salsa Nocturna in July and Sabrina Vourvoulias’ INK in October, there will be no more new titles.

We don’t want this to happen. And we hope that you don’t either. We love discovering brilliant new stories and authors. Please help us keep doing so, and we’ll continue to share them with you!

Thanks,
Kay & Bart, co-publishers

Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019004

How to become a magician, circa 1882.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019003

This article by Philip Kitcher has the saddest god damn subtitle: "Why history and the humanities are also a form of knowledge." The fact that someone felt the need to actually say that out loud, as if it's not already obvious to everyone, it hurts the heart. The piece -- the main title being "The Trouble with Scientism" -- is good, and maybe in a world where all you need is to slap NEUROSCIENCE somewhere on your book to get it taken super seriously and unquestioningly it's necessary.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019002

Kate Summerscale is all over the place these days, everyone is excited about Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. (I haven't gotten round to it yet, I've a couple books about murder to get through first. It's all nastiness in my apartment lately.)

She's profiled at the Guardian, where she talks about her days working the obituary desk at the Telegraph. And she's at the Independent, talking about her days working at the obituary desk at the Telegraph. (Remind me, if I decide to do a Q&A with her for Kirkus, to find something else to talk about.)

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019001

A group of fraternity brothers from Lousiana Tech University burning their textbooks in celebration of the end of the school year are believed by local authorities to have caused a fire that burned down their fraternity house.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/20/2783286/a-different-kind-of-french-kiss.html

OK, if nobody else will do it, I'm going to patch up this spat between the United States and France.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2012_05.php#019000

Eavan Boland, who wrote the lovely memoir A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, talks about why those words "woman" and "poet" needed to be in the subtitle. (via)

The "Status of Woman" clause in the Irish Constitution, which clearly defines a woman's contribution to the state as that of a homemaker, added to the tensions that Boland encountered as a young writer. "The Irish Constitution is one of the very few in Europe that enshrined the woman's place as being in the home," she said. Thus, both state and societal expectations made it difficult for her to realize her dream early on.