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Trafalgar
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Don't rush Trafalgar Medrano when he starts telling you about his latest intergalactic sales trip. He likes to stretch things out over precisely seven coffees. No one knows whether he actu-ally travels to the stars, but he tells the best tall tales in the city, so why doubt him? Trafalgar is Angélica Gorodischer's second novel to be translated into English. Her first, Kalpa Imperial, was selected for the New York Times summer reading list.
Angélica Gorodischer lives in Rosario, Argentina. She has received many awards, most recently the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Errantry
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Praise for Elizabeth Hand:
"Fiercely frightening yet hauntingly beautiful."—Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl
"A sinful pleasure."—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
No one is innocent, no one unexamined in award-winner Elizabeth Hand's new collection. From the summer isles to the mysterious people next door all the way to the odd guy one cubicle over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.
Elizabeth Hand's novels include Shirley Jackson Award–winner Generation Loss, Mortal Love, and Available Dark.
Cloud & Ashes
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Praise for Cloud & Ashes:
"A rich poetic prose laden with fetching archaisms that's unlike anything else being written today. Brilliant and truly innovative fiction, not to be missed."The Washington Times
Greer Gilman is the author of Moonwise. A graduate of Wellesley and the University of Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.
The Chemical Wedding
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Praise 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
Often de-scribed as an alchemical allegory, John Crowley instead decided this is "the first science fiction novel." After all "it's fiction; it's about the possibilities of a science; and it's a novel." No matter what else it might be, it's definitely "one of the great outlandish stories in Western literature." With eight appropriately weird and fascinating black and white woodcuts by Theo Fadel.
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942. He moved to New York City after college in Indiana to make movies, and did find work in docu-mentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He has published many novels including the Ae-gypt quartet and Little, Big. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.
Theo Fadel has a BA in Archeology (Bryn Mawr) and a Master of Architecture from Co-lumbia University. Currently her studio is in Easthampton, and she's been in Massachusetts less than a hundred years. This is the first book she has illustrated.
Best Worst American
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Winner of the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award
These are the best Americans, the worst Americans. In these stories (these cities, these people) there are labyrinths, rivers, wildernesses. Voices sound slightly different than expected. There's humor, but it's going to hurt.
In "On Paradise," a petshop manager flies with his cat to Las Vegas to meet his long-lost mother and grandmother, only to find that the women look exactly like they did forty years before. In "The Spooky Japanese Girl is There For You," the spooky Japanese girl (a ghost) is there for you, then she is not.
These refreshing and invigorating stories of displacement, exile, and identity, of men who find themselves confused by the presence or absence of extraordinary women, jump up, demand to be read, and send the reader back to the earth changed: reminded from these short stories how big the world is.
Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00
The Mount
Regular price $18.00 Save $-18.00* Philip K. Dick Award Winner
* Best of the Year: Locus, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Magazine
* Nominated for the Impac Award
Charley is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives in a stable. He isn't a runner, he's a mount. He belongs to a Hoot: The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn't seen his mother for years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he's going to have to learn how to be a human being.
Meet Me in the Moon Room
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00* Philip K. Dick Award finalist
* Locus Recommended Reading
Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling—frequently managing to be both—these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space.
Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin, although there is no one quite like him. Try one of these stories, it won't take you long, but it will turn your head inside out.
"What other writer could make you start laughing halfway down the first page of a story about a man putting on a sweater? Thurber maybe, a long time ago. Buy this book."
—Damon Knight
"These stories cannot be compared to anyone else's. There is no one in the same class as Ray Vukcevich. The stories are uniquely, splendidly, brilliantly original, a surprise in each and every one, and brimming with wit and laugh-out-loud humor. A stunning collection."
—Kate Wilhelm
"The absurd and the profound are seamlessly joined through fine writing. Meet Me in the Moon Room is a first-rate collection.
—Jeffrey Ford
"The 33 brief stories in Meet Me in the Moon Room defy categorization genre. A few toy with the conventions of science fiction; others branch off from trails blazed by Donald Barthelme. Moon Room will delight those who appreciated the risks Don DeLillo took in Ratner's Star."
—Hartford Courant
"Eccentric short stories, which frequently give everyday life a loopy twist."
—Book Magazine
"Ray Vukcevich is a master of the last line. Almost every one of his stories has a zinger at the end, but not the kind of zinger that chocks the reader or causes annoyance. Often it's a perfect line of dialogue that opens up the whole story.... Vukcevich is ingenious with the short-story form. Although the stories read as playful vignettes, Vukcevich covertly works in ideas of self, identity, destiny, and obsession. And occasionally, the dangers of outer space."
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
"Vukcevich is a master of radical recombinations, drawing from (amongst others) the Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, O. Henry, Dali, Asimov, pulpish space opera, and the latest in nanotech to produce works that are all his own. Sometimes in as little as four or five pages, he deftly juggles so many ideas, emotions, and perspectives, it produces a curiously refreshing sense of vertigo—a high with no hangover to follow.... It would be...a great mistake to ignore the extraordinary talent of Ray Vukcevich."
—Locus
"Vukcevich is a very slick writer, an authentic sprinter in an era of milers and all-out stayers.... Vukcevich can do punchlines, but he does not rely on them. Indeed, his extraordinarily light touch when it comes to narrative closure is his most distinctive feature. Anyone who considers bizarre surrealism and casual absurdity—the main stocks-in-trade of the fantastic ultrashort story writer—easy clay to mold into narrative form has not given serious consideration to the matter of finishing."
—New York Review of Science Fiction
"These stories niftily propel their characters down the blurred line between fantasy and psychosis, with effects spanning the gamut from melancholy to goofy, from plaintive to outraged.... This is Vukcevich's gloriously mad world, and we are lucky to share it."
—Asimov's
"The same antic spirit that imbued Vukcevich's mystery novel The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces moves playfully through this first collection of fantastic fiction, whose 33 helium-filled stories achieve just the right absurdist life to escape the gravity of their themes. "By the Time We Get to Uranus" offers a peculiarly affecting take on terminal illness: the afflicted grow buoyant spacesuits that force them to leave loved ones behind. The mysteries of parenthood manifest amusingly in "Poop," about a couple who discover that their newborn's diaper fills variously with birds, mice, and symphonic music. Though deceptively simple in their pared-down style, the vignettes show meticulous care in the crafting of oddball metaphors to express the moods of their estranged spouses, exasperated lovers, competitive children, and disgruntled employees. The willingness with which the author's characters accept the incongruity of their situations often yields profoundly moving insights into the human condition. In the poignant title tale, for example, a man does not find it at all strange that a lover from decades past has summoned him to a simulated moon landscape at a theme park, reflecting that the meaning of life really is "nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe." Inventive and entertaining, these stories yield more emotional truth than much more comparatively realistic fiction.
Forecast: With blurbs from Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Jeffrey Ford, this collection is a quality item that should benefit from good word of mouth."
—Publishers Weekly
"A man pulls the sweater his girlfriend made him over his head and nearly gets lost inside it. Rescued from the arctic ice, the dying Victor (Frankenstein) tells a story that leaves little doubt that the monster is James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus or Finn (again). Tim saves the world from a comet by having his family put paper bags over their heads. What? What?! What?!! Calm down. This is just the world according to Ray Vukcevich, sf-ish enough to get him into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's, but also resembling the fantastic milieus of Gogol, Kafka, and Looney Toons. Whether you cotton to it depends on how you feel about cartoons made of words and prisons made of logic: are you afraid of amused? Actually, either reaction works for appreciating Vukcevich's outlandish virtuosity. Sf fans with long memories will note Vukcevich's deadpan delivery and jokey-creepy aura, recall the wonder-workings of Fredric Brown (see From These Ashes [BKL Ap 15 01] and smile."
—Booklist
"Ray Vukcevich should be as revered as Donald Barthelme or Salvador Dali in the pantheon of modern surrealists. Unjustly deprived of such honors, he should at least be allowed a few weeks in a time-share vacation condo with Don Webb, Rick DeMarinis, Mark Leyner and James Blaylock, literary peers whose absurdist take on existence Vukcevich shares. Did I mention that the condo would occupy an abandoned ICBM silo, as in Ray's creepily twisted ghost story, "Pretending"? Or perhaps the luxury beach house would perch on a few square inches of the scalp of the barbershop patron who boasts a monkey-filled jungle in his hair, in "The Barber's Theme". The writers' relaxathon could also take place in the outer reaches of our Solar System, once the lucky vacationers grow their organic spacesuits, as average folks do in "By the Time We Get to Uranus." Or as a last choice, the writers might congregate in the mysterious highway median of "Fancy Pants", where metamorphoses that would baffle Ovid occur.
Wherever the greats hold their Beach Blanket Oulipo, Vukcevich will doubtlessly be the life of the party. Alternately melancholy and boisterous, plaintive and assertive, sensitive and outrageous, serious and goofy, Vukcevich's stories portray a universe not only stranger than the average person imagines, but stranger than he or she can imagine! It's an uncommon, even scary intellect and vision and talent that can make us believe in wisdom out of a baby's butt ("Poop") o
Carmen Dog
Regular price $14.00 Save $-14.00“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
“A rollicking outre satire.... full of comic leaps and absurdist genius.”—Bitch
“A wise and funny book.”—The New York Times
"This trenchant feminist fantasy-satire mixes elements of Animal Farm, Rhinoceros and The Handmaid's Tale.... Imagination and absurdist humor mark [Carmen Dog] throughout, and Emshwiller is engaging even when most savage about male-female relationships."—Booklist
"Her fantastic premise allows Emshwiller canny and frequently hilarious insights into the damaging sex-role stereotypes both men and women perpetuate."
—Publishers Weekly
The debut title in our Peapod Classics line, Carol Emshwiller’s genre-jumping debut novel is a dangerous, sharp-eyed look at men, women, and the world we live in.
Everything is changing: women are turning into animals, and animals are turning into women. Pooch, a golden setter, is turning into a beautiful woman—although she still has some of her canine traits: she just can't shuck that loyalty thing—and her former owner has turned into a snapping turtle. When the turtle tries to take a bite of her own baby, Pooch snatches the baby and runs. Meanwhile, there's a dangerous wolverine on the loose, men are desperately trying to figure out what's going on, and Pooch discovers what she really wants: to sing Carmen.
Carmen Dog is the funny feminist classic that inspired writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler to create the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award.
Trash, Sex, Magic
Regular price $20.00 Save $-20.00“This just absolutely rocks.”—Audrey Niffenegger
“Raunchy, funny, and disturbing.”—Chicago Reader
“Deeply charming.”—The Washington Post
A tender, joyful, raunchy, radiant novel. Imagine The Metamorphoses or A Midsummer Night’s Dream transported to the woods of Illinois. When a development company cuts down a beloved tree, and tries to drive out Raedawn Summer’s family, strange things start to happen.
Solitaire
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Kelley Eskridge is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. Her stories have received the Astraea Award and been adapted for television and film. She lives in Seattle with her partner, novelist Nicola Griffith.
Howard Who?
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00“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.
The first paperback (and twentieth anniversary) edition of a landmark debut collection. Waldrop’s capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, world wars, long-dead film stars, Mexican wrestlers, pulp serials, and fairy tales is put to good use in these sophisticated re-combinations of oddball television shows, radio plays, scientific expeditions, extinct species, knock-knock jokes, and questions like these:
* What if the dodo wasn't extinct after all?
* What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind?
* What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond?
Never published in paperback, long out of print, and extremely collectible, Howard Who? was Waldrop's seminal debut collection. If you haven't read Waldrop before, you're in for a treat.
"The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful.... Italo Calvino once said that he was "known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself." Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he'll come up with next, but somehow it's always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art -- and to fishing."
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"A charming collection."
—Los Angeles Times
"Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop."
—Metrobeat
Table of Contents
Introduction by George R. R. Martin.
The Ugly Chickens
Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen
Ike at the Mike
Dr. Hudson's Secret Gorilla
. . . the World, as we Know't
Green Brother
Mary Margaret Road-Grader
"Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me
Horror, We Got
Man-Mountain Gentian
God's Hooks
Heirs of the Perisphere
Praise for Howard Waldrop:
"Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy."
—Library Journal
"Wise and funny."
—Publishers Weekly
"An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy."
—Booklist
"Erudite and gonzo."
—Science Fiction Weekly
"Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre."
—The Houston Post/Sun
"The man's a national treasure!"
—Locus
"The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honkytonk angel."
—Washington Post Book World
About the Author:
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens."
Stranger Things Happen
Regular price $18.00 Save $-18.00New edition with 16 interior illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice‘s 25 Favorite Books, and was a Firecracker Award finalist.
Mothers & Other Monsters
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00* Story Prize finalist.
* A Book Sense Notable Book.
Nancy Pearl selected Mothers & Other Monsters as a "Books for a Rainy Day" on Morning Edition on NPR.
In her luminous, long-awaited debut collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.
— A woman introduces her new lover to her late brother.
— A teenager is interviewed about her peer group's attitudes toward sex and baby boomers.
— A missing stepson sets a marriage on edge.
— Anthropologists visiting an isolated outpost mission are threatened by nomadic raiders.
McHugh's characters—her Alzheimers-afflicted parents or her smart and rebellious teenagers—are always recognizable: stubborn, human, and heartbreakingly real.
This new trade paperback edition has added material for book clubs and reading groups, including an interview with the author, book club questions and suggestions, and a reprint of Maureen's fabulous essay, "The Evil Stepmother."
Table of Contents
* Ancestor Money
* In the Air
* The Cost to Be Wise
* The Lincoln Train
* Interview: On Any Given Day
* Oversite
* Wicked
* Laika Comes Back Safe
* Presence
* Eight-Legged Story
* The Beast
* Nekropolis
* Frankenstein's Daughter
Reading Group Guide
* The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
* Author Interview
* Talking Points
Reviews
"Gorgeously crafted stories."
—Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, "Books for a Rainy Day"
"My favorite thing about her is the wry, uncanny tenderness of her stories. She has the astonishing ability to put her finger on the sweet spot right between comedy and tragedy, that pinpoint that makes you catch your breath. You're not sure whether to laugh out loud or cry, and you end up doing both at once."
—Dan Chaon
"When I first read China Mountain Zhang many years ago, Maureen McHugh instantly became, as she has remained, one of my favorite writers. This collection is a welcome reminder of her power—they are resonant, wise, generous, sharp, transporting, and deeply, deeply moving. McHugh is enormously gifted; each of these stories is a gift."
—Karen Joy Fowler
"Wonderfully unpredictable stories, from the very funny to the very grim, by one of our best and bravest imaginative writers."
—Ursula K. Le Guin
"Enchanting, funny and fierce by turns —a wonderful collection!"
—Mary Doria Russell
"All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical. But here the fantastical seems so normal, so part of our everyday experience, that we simply accept McHugh's premises, odd as they might be when you consider them independently of the tales themselves. The adjective that best represents this collection is 'unsettling'. How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man she's attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she dreads introducing him to her dead brother ("In the Air"); "Ancestor Money," in which a bequest entices a woman to leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China; or "Laika Comes Back Safe," the story of two teenagers who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives, but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. Whether it's alternative history that seems so real you start to question your own knowledge of the past ("The Lincoln Train") or a tale of the horrifying end of a utopian colony ("The Cost To Be Wise"), McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right hands.
I was so impressed by these stories that I immediately went back and read McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang, which I had somehow missed, and enjoyed it thoroughly."
—Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, "Books for a Rainy Day"
"Unpredictable and poetic work."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer (Recommended Summer Reading)
"[McHugh] cherry-picks subtle magical or futuristic elements from the expansive genre library."
—Angle
"McHugh's prose style is unique."
—Louisville Eccentric Observer
"McHugh is enormously talented.... [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense of a humor, and a keen wit."
—Strange Horizons
"There's not a single story that isn't strong, and most are brilliant."
—Ideomancer
"Clear, bright, and honest."
—New York Review of Science Fiction
"Each story in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics of families and the vagaries of being human. "Ancestor Money"" considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the living; "The Lincoln Train" describes an alternate ending to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped westward on crowded trains. "Nekropolis," the germ of McHugh's novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of families in it. In "Eight-Legged Story," a stepmother comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in "Frankenstein's Daughter," a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter's clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by shoplifting. McHugh's stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters' lives—slices of life well worth reading and rereading."
—Booklist
"The 13 stories in McHugh's debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power. In "Presence," a woman helps her husband through an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer's disease and, by the story's end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing personality. "In the Air" bridges three generations with its account of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter by means of biologically implanted homing devices. "Laika Comes Back Safe" represents so believably the feelings two school friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate Civil War history in "The Lincoln Train" or a tale of extraterrestrial anthropology in "The Cost to Be Wise," McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to the wider audience they deserve."
—Publishers Weekly
"In this collection of stories, Maureen F. McHugh explores the subject of technology and identity, demonstrating that technology can only be a lens for what defines us as human, that is, our intimate relationship with the world around us and all the beings with whom we share that world. It is not technology which transforms us into monsters, but the danger of losing our s
Hound
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Selected as a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Book Awards.
"Ingenious and refreshingly irreverent, Hound is not only a mystery on many levels, but also an intelligent and often funny tour-de-force of the perils and follies of human relationships. McCaffrey has a gift for crafting quirky characters and original dialogue, and the path of our hero, Henry, is always wonderfully unpredictable. I came away from this 'book noir' with a sense of catharsis, but also with a sudden desire to reread and rethink all the great classics to which McCaffrey alludes in his terrific novel."Anne Fortier, author of Juliet
"As much about booksand love and knowledge and familyas about murder, Hound is the first in McCaffrey's projected trilogy, and book lovers will eagerly await Henry's next outing."Richmond Times-Dispatch
"McCaffrey, the owner of Boston's legendary Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, succeeds in conveying his love of books in his intriguing debut."Publishers Weekly
Hound is the first of three novels featuring bookhound Henry Sullivan. When an ex-lover is murdered, he mounts an unofficial investigation into her death that leads him through the murky depths of both Boston's literary world and his own past.
Vincent McCaffrey has owned the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years. He has been paid to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. Hound is his first novel.
Couch
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00"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
"Delightfully lighthearted writing. . . . Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the enthusiastic prose carries readers through sporadic dark moments . . . Parzybok’s quirky humor recalls the flaws and successes of early Douglas Adams."—Publishers Weekly
"The book succeeds as a conceptual art piece, a literary travelogue, and a fantastical quest."
—Willamette Week
"Hundreds of writers have slavishly imitated—or outright ripped off—Tolkien in ways that connoisseurs of other genres would consider shameless. What Parzybok has done here in adapting the same old song to a world more familiar to the reader is to revive the genre and make it relevant again"
—The Stranger
A Spring Summer Indie Next Reading List Pick: Top 10 Reading Group Suggestions
"Couch follows the quirky journey of Thom, Erik, and Tree as they venture into the unknown at the behest of a magical, orange couch, which has its own plan for their previously boring lives. Parzybok's colorful characters, striking humor, and eccentric magical realism offer up an adventuresome read."
—Christian Crider, Inkwood Books, Tampa, FL
A January 2009 Indie Next List Pick
"This funny novel of furniture moving gone awry is a magical realism quest for modern times. Parzybok's touching story explores the aimlessness of our culture, a society of jobs instead of callings, replete with opportunities and choices but without the philosophies and vocations we need to make meaningful decisions."
—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA
"A lot of people are looking for magic in the world today, but only Benjamin Parzybok thought to check the sofa, which is, I think, the place it’s most likely to be found. Couch is a slacker epic: a gentle, funny book that ambles merrily from Coupland to Tolkien, and gives couch-surfing (among other things) a whole new meaning.”
—Paul La Farge
"One of the strangest road novels you'll ever read. It's a funny and fun book, and it's also a very smart book. Fans of Tom Robbins or Christopher Moore should enjoy this."
—Handee Books
"It is an upholstered Odyssey unlike any other you are likely to read. It is funny, confusing in places, wild and anarchic. It is part Quixote, part Murakami, part Tom Robbins, part DFS showroom. It has cult hit written all over it."
—Scott, Me and My Big Mouth
Benjamin Parzybok on tour: http://booktour.com/author/benjamin_parzybok
In this exuberant and hilarious debut reminiscent of The Life of Pi and Then We Came to the End, an episode of furniture moving gone awry becomes an impromptu quest of self-discovery, secret histories, and unexpected revelations.
Thom is a computer geek whose hacking of a certain Washington-based software giant has won him a little fame but few job prospects. Erik is a smalltime con man, a fast-talker who is never quite quick enough on his feet. Their roommate, Tree, is a confused clairvoyant whose dreams and prophecies may not be completely off base. After a freak accident fl oods their apartment, the three are evicted—but they have to take their couch with them. The real problem? The couch—huge and orange—won’t let them put it down. Soon the three roommates are on a cross-country trek along back roads, byways, and rail lines, heading far out of Portland and deep into one very weird corner of the American dream.
Benjamin Parzybok is the creator of Gumball Poetry, a journal published through gumball machines, and the Black Magic Insurance Agency, a city-wide mystery/treasure hunt. He has worked as a congressional page, a ghostwriter for the governor of Washington, a web developer, a Taiwanese factory technical writer, an asbestos removal janitor, and a potato sorter. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with the writer Laura Moulton and their two children.
The Liminal People
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00The Liminal People is the first of Ayize Jama-Everett's Liminal novels.
Membership in the razor neck crew is for life. But when Taggert, who can heal and hurt with just a touch, receives a call from the past he is honor bound to try and help the woman he once loved try to find her daughter. Taggert realizes the girl has more power than even he can imagine and has to wrestle with the nature of his own skills, not to mention risking the wrath of his enigmatic master and perhaps even the gods, in order keep the girl safe. In the end, Taggert will have to delve into the depths of his heart and soul to survive.
After all, what really matters is family.
New Author Foreword.
The fourth and final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World, will be published in February 2023.
A Life on Paper
Regular price $22.00 Save $-22.00The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud 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, Châteaureynaud is France’s own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic.
A Life on Paper presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in “Icarus Saved from the Skies,” even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father’s obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Châteaureynaud’s stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious.
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is the author of eight novels and almost one hundred short stories, and he is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Bourse Goncourt de la nouvelle. His work has been translated into twelve languages.
Edward Gauvin has published Châteaureynaud’s work in AGNI Online, Conjunctions, Words Without Borders, The Café Irreal, and The Brooklyn Rail. The recipient of a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, he translates graphic novels for Tokyopop, First Second Books, and Archaia Studios Press.
After the Apocalypse
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year
In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.
Praise for Maureen F. McHugh:
"Gorgeously crafted stories."Nancy Pearl, NPR
"Hauntingly beautiful."Booklist
"Unpredictable and poetic work."The Plain Dealer
Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor's choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.
io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011
Tiptree Award Honor List
Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Story Prize Notable Book
Fountain of Age
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Nine 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.
Kress unpacks the future the way DNA investigators unravelled the double helix: one gene at a time. In many of these stories gene sculpting is illegal yet commonplace and the effects range between slow catastrophe (End Game”), cosmic (First Rites”), and tragic (Safeguard”). Then there’s the morning when Rochester disappears and Jenny has to rely on The Kindness of Strangers.” There’s Jill, who is kidnapped by aliens and trying to learn the Laws of Survival.” And there’s Hope, whose Grandma is regretting the world built By Fools Like Me.”
Endless Things
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00Praise for the Ægypt sequence:
"With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America’s greatest living writer of fantasy. Ægypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period."
—Michael Dirda
"A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique."
—The New York Times Book Review
"A master of language, plot, and characterization."
—Harold Bloom
"The further in you go, the bigger it gets."
—James Hynes
"The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic. . . . Ægypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49."
—USA Today
"An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies."
—San Francisco Chronicle
This is the fourth novel—and much-anticipated conclusion—of John Crowley’s astonishing and lauded Ægypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Ægypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.
"It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience."
—Washington Post Book World
"An unpredictable, free-flowing, sui generis novel."
—Los Angeles Times
"With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us."
—Book Forum
"Crowley’s peculiar kind of fantasy: a conscious substitute for the magic in which you don’t quite believe any more."
—London Review of Books
"A beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory."
—Seattle Times
"This year, while millions of Harry Potter fans celebrated and mourned the end of their favorite series, a much smaller but no less devoted group of readers marked another literary milestone: the publication of the last book in John Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle."
—Matt Ruff
"Crowley’s eloquent and captivating conclusion to his Ægypt tetralogy finds scholar Pierce Moffet still searching for the mythical Ægypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world’s myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm’s existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft’s unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing traces of Ægypt’s mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians, the mysticism of John Dee, the progressive thoughts of heretical priest Giordano Bruno and the “chemical wedding” of two 17th-century monarchs in Prague. Like Pierce’s travels, the final destination for this modern fantasy epic is almost incidental to its telling. With astonishing dexterity, Crowley (Lord Byron’s Novel) parallels multiple story lines spread across centuries and unobtrusively deploys recurring symbols and motifs to convey a sense of organic wholeness. Even as Pierce’s quest ends on a fulfilling personal note, this marvelous tale comes full circle to reinforce its timeless themes of transformation, re-creation and immortality."
—Publishers Weekly
Locus Award finalist
John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Four Freedoms. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all of his work is still in print.
The Ant King
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00"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. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art."
—Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008
* "Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, "best first collection" for this book."
—Booklist (Starred review, Top 10 SF Books of the Year)
"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland."
—Publishers Weekly
"Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with "Biographical Notes," a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and "A Siege of Cranes," a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents.... Perhaps none of the tales is odder than "Orphans," in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
"Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual."
—Boston Phoenix
A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting.
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and McSweeney’s, been translated into fourteen languages, and listed in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Rosenbaum’s work has been reprinted in Harper’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He lives in Switzerland with his family.
At the Mouth of the River of Bees
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00A sparkling debut collection from one of the hottest writers in science fiction: her stories have received the Nebula Award the last two years running. These stories feature cats, bees, wolves, dogs, and even that most capricious of animals, humans, and have been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and The Secret History of Fantasy.
At the Mouth of the River of Bees
26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss
The Horse Raiders
Spar
Fox Magic
Names for Water
Schrodinger’s Cathouse
My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire
Chenting, in the Land of the Dead
The Bitey Cat
The Empress Jingu Fishes
Wolf Trapping
The Man Who Bridged the Mist
Ponies
The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles
The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change
Kij Johnson's stories have won the Sturgeon and World Fantasy awards. She has taught writing; worked at Tor, Dark Horse, and Microsoft; worked as a radio announcer; run bookstores; and waitressed in a strip bar.
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00"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.
A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Kessel, whose story "A Clean Escape" was filmed as part of ABC's Masters of Science Fiction, ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon.
"In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In "Pride and Prometheus," Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while "A Lunar Quartet" introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel's wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you'll ever read ("The Red Phone")." A-
—Entertainment Weekly
"Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head."
—Time Out Chicago
"Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories."
—Charlotte Observer
"A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction."
—The Seattle Stranger
"Kessel's blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing."
—Booklist
"These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch."
—Publishers Weekly
"Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please—or to defy prediction."
—Metro Magazine
"One of the best collections of the year."
—Locus
"Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless."
—SciFi.com
"John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel's wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn's first light. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek."
—Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, NC
"Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous."
—The Fix
John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree awards, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product, and story collection, Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book).
Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Child Garden
Regular price $20.00 Save $-20.00Winner 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 talewith a marvelous premise expertly carried out."Kirkus Reviews
"Excellent. . . . Dark and witty and full of love, closely observed, and sprinkled with astonishing ideas. Science fiction of a very high order."Greg Bear
"One of the most imaginative accounts of futuristic bioengineering since Greg Bear's Blood Music."Locus
In a future London, humans photosynthesize, organics have replaced electronics, viruses educate people, and very few live past forty. But Milena is resistant to the viruses. She's alone until she meets Rolfa, a huge, hirsute Genetically Engineered Polar Woman, and Milena realizes she might, just might, be able to find a place for herself after all.
Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The King's Last Song, Air (a Clarke and Tiptree Award winner), and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner), and the collection Paradise Tales. Canadian by birth, he has lived in Cambodia and Brazil and now teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester in England.
The Monkey's Wedding
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00Praise 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
"Aiken writes with the genius of a born storyteller, with mother wit expanded and embellished by civilized learning, and with the brilliance of an avenging angel."The New Yorker
Joan Aiken's stories captivated readers for fifty years. They're funny, smart, gentle, and occasionally very, very scary. The stories in The Monkey's Wedding are collected here for the very first time and include six never before published, as well as two previously published under the pseudonym Nicholas Dee. Here you'll find the story of a village for sale . . . or is the village itself the story? There's an English vicar who declares on his deathbed that he might have lived an entirely different life. After his death, a large, black, argumentative cat makes an appearance. . . . This hugely imaginative collection includes introductions by Aiken as well as by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.
Best known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1924-2004) wrote over a hundred books and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband's death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women's Own, and many others. Visit her online at: www.joanaiken.com.
Meeks
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00No 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.
Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he’s a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks’ survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain—but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration?
A dark satire rendered with the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film, Julia Holmes’ debut marries the existentialism of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to the strange charm of a Haruki Murakami novel. Meeks portrays a world at once hilarious and disquieting, in which frustrated revolutionaries and hopeful youths suffer alongside the lost and the condemned, just for a chance at the permanent bliss of marriage and a slice of sugar-frosted Independence Day cake.
Julia Holmes was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in the Middle East, Texas, and New York, where she is currently an assistant editor at Rolling Stone. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction.
Second Line
Regular price $18.00 Save $-18.00hese 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. Rickey’s parents aren’t quite so taken with the boy’s plans and get him an impossible-to-resist place at the Culinary Institute of America.
In D*U*C*K, Rickey and G-man’s restaurant, Liquor, is doing well but there are the usual complications of running a kitchen: egos get bruised, people get fired . . . and then Rickey is jumped in an alley by one of their ex-waiters.
On the mend, Rickey takes a side job to cater the annual Ducks Unlimited banquet, where every course must, of course, include the ducks the hunters have bagged. Rickey’s crew are ready to meet the challenge, but Rickey’s not sure he can do it all and deal with the guest of honor—his childhood hero, former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert.
"Fun foodie fiction, and readers will scarf it down as quickly as a plate of blackened crawfish."—Publishers Weekly
Originally published in limited hardcover editions, these two novels are full of the pure joy of love, hard work, and great food and are a tremendous extension (or introduction) to Brite’s series.
Praise fo the Rickey and G-man stories:
“A high-end restaurant is...a gift that keeps on giving. The heat, the bickerings and intrigue, the pursuit of perfection, the dodgy money keeping it all afloate: the setting spawns plots...Can the [Liquor] franchise sustain itself? The answer is yes.”—New York Times
“World-class satire and perfect New Orleans lit.”—Andrei Codrescu
“Steeped in spicy dialogue and [New Orleans] flavor...a behind-the-swinging-door peek into the world of chefs.”—Entertainment Weekly
Poppy Z. Brite’s fiction set in the New Orleans restaurant world includes Prime, Liquor, and Soul Kitchen. She has also published five other novels and three short story collections. She lives with her husband Chris, a chef, in New Orleans.
Sherwood Nation
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00It 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.
"Parzybok does this thing where you think, 'this is fun!' and then you are charmed, saddened, and finally changed by what you have read. It's like jujitsu storytelling."Maureen F. McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse
In drought-stricken Portland, Oregon, a Robin Hood-esque water thief is caught on camera redistributing an illegal truckload of water to those in need. Nicknamed Maid Marianreal name: Renee, a twenty-something barista and eternal part-time college studentshe is an instant folk hero. Renee rides her swelling popularity and the public's disgust at how the city has abandoned its people, raises an army . . . and secedes a quarter of the city.
Even as Maid Marian and her compatriots build their community one neighbor at a time, they are making powerful enemies amongst the city government and the National Guard. Sherwood is an idealistic dream too soon caught in a brutal fight for survival.
Sherwood Nation is the story of the rise and fall of a micronation within a city. It is a love story, a war story, a grand social experiment, a treatise on hacking and remaking government, on freedom and necessity, on individualism and community.
Benjamin Parzybok has reached into the post-collapse era for a story vital to our here and now. Sherwood Nation is part political thriller, part social fable, and part manifesto, its every page brimming with gonzo exuberance.”Jedediah Berry (The Manual of Detection)
Benjamin Parzybok is the author of the novel Couch and has been the creator/co-creator of many other projects, including Gumball Poetry, The Black Magic Insurance Agency (city-wide, one night alternate reality game), and Project Hamad. He lives in Portland with the artist Laura Moulton and their two kids. He blogs at secret.ideacog.net.
The Poison Oracle
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Sara Paretsky, author of Breakdown
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
Praise for The Poison Oracle:
"I have no idea if any of this talk and ac-tion is authentic, and I don't care. Either way it's marvellous."Rex Stout
"Intelligent, elegantly written . . . a thoroughly enjoyable read."Sunday Times
Praise for Peter Dickinson's mysteries:
"He is the true original, a superb writer who revitalises the traditions of the mystery genre . . . incapable of writing a trite or inelegant sentence . . . a mas-ter."P. D. James
"Consummate storytelling skill."Peter Lovesey
Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom's educational facilities, include an English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in Dinah, a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols. When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to dis-cover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that exposes in the everyday language people use humanity's thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth.
Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger. His novels include Death of a Unicorn, A Summer in the Twenties, and many more. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.
A Natural History of Hell
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00World Fantasy Award winner · Shirley Jackson Award winner
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.
Praise for Jeffrey Ford:
"Outstanding. . . . Ford uses . . . incongruously lyrical phrases to infuse the everyday with a nebulous magic."Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year(Starred Review)
"For lovers of the weird and fantastic and lovers of great writing, this is a treasure trove of disturbing visions, new worlds and fully realized craft."Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
"Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too."Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Jeffrey Ford was born on Long Island in New York State in 1955 and grew up in the town of West Islip. He studied fiction writing with John Gardner at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton. He's been a college English teacher of writing and literature for thirty years. He is the author of eight novels including The Girl in the Glass and four short story collections. He has received the World Fantasy, Nebula, Edgar, and Shirley Jackson awards. He lives with his wife Lynn in a century old farm house in a land of slow clouds and endless fields.
The King's Last Song
Regular price $20.00 Save $-20.00"[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
"Ryman has crafted a solid historical novel with an authentic feel for both ancient and modern Cambodia."
—Washington DC City Paper
“Another masterpiece by one of the greatest fiction writers of our time.”—Kim Stanley Robinson
"Ryman's knack for depicting characters; his ability to tell multiple, interrelated stories; and his knowledge of Cambodian history create a rich narrative that looks at Cambodia's "killing fields" both recent and ancient and Buddhist belief with its desire for transcendence. Recommended for all literary fiction collections."
—Library Journal
Archeologist Luc Andrade discovers an ancient Cambodian manuscript inscribed on gold leaves but is kidnapped—and the manuscript stolen—by a faction still loyal to the ideals of the brutal Pol Pot regime. Andrade’s friends, an ex-Khmer Rouge agent and a young motoboy, embark on a trek across Cambodia to rescue him. Meanwhile, Andrade, bargaining for his life, translates the lost manuscript for his captors. The result is a glimpse into the tremendous and heart-wrenching story of King Jayavarman VII: his childhood, rise to power, marriage, interest in Buddhism, and the initiation of Cambodia’s golden age. As Andrade and Jayavarman’s stories interweave, the question becomes whether the tale of ancient wisdom can bring hope to a nation still suffering from the violent legacy of the last century.
Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels Air (winner of Arthur C Clarke and James Tiptree awards) and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner). Canadian by birth, he has lived in Cambodia and Brazil and now teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester in England.
Questionable Practices
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Stories from Eileen Gunn are always a cause for celebration. Where will she lead us? "Up the Fire Road" to a slightly alternate world. Four stories into steampunk’s heart. Into a very strange family gathering as they celebrate Christmas. Into the golem's heart. Never where we might expect.
The Privilege of the Sword
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00“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.
Ellen Kushner is the author of Swordspoint.
Paradise Tales
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Paradise Tales builds on the success of his most recent novel, The King's Last Song, and on the three Cambodian stories included here, "The Last Ten Years of the Hero Kai," "Blocked," and the exceedingly-popular "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter." Paradise Tales includes stories selected from the many periods of Ryman’s career including Birth Days,” Omnisexual,” The Film-makers of Mars,” and a new story, K is for Kosovo (or, Massimo’s Career).”
To complement this first full-length short story collection, Small Beer Press is reprinting Ryman's backlist: Was, The Child Garden, and a book of four novellas, The Unconquered Countries, with new introductions to continue to build the readership of one of the most fascinating writers exploring the edges of being, gender, science, and fiction.
Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The King's Last Song, The Child Garden, Air (a Clarke and Tiptree Award winner), and The Unconquered Country (a World Fantasy Award winner). Canadian by birth, he has lived in Cambodia and Brazil and now teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester in England.
Young Woman in a Garden
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Praise for Delia Sherman's previous books:
"Multilayered, compassionate, and thought-provoking."Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Fantastic in every sense of the word, Sherman's second novel (Through a Brazen Mirror) is a skillfully crafted fairy tale that owes as much to E.T.A. Hoffman as to Charles Perrault. . . . The Porcelain Dove is no dainty vertu but a seductive, sinister bird with razored feathers."Publishers Weekly
Delia Sherman was born in Japan and raised in New York City. Her work has appeared most recently in the anthologies Naked City, Steampunk!, and Queen Victoria's Book of Spells. She is the author of six novels including The Porcelain Dove (a New York Times Notable Book), The Freedom Maze, and Changeling, and has received the Mythopoeic and Norton awards. She lives in New York City.
What I Didn't See
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist
Locus Award shortlist
Story Prize Notable Books
Frank O’Connor Award longlist
"Beautifully written and subtly discomforting stories."Nancy Pearl
"An exceptionally versatile author."St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In her moving and elegant new collection, New York Times bestseller Karen Joy Fowler writes about John Wilkes Booth’s younger brother, a one-winged man, a California cult, and a pair of twins, and she digs into our past, present, and future in the quiet, witty, and incisive way only she can.
The sinister and the magical are always lurking just below the surface: for a mother who invents a fairy-tale world for her son in Halfway People”; for Edwin Booth in Booth’s Ghost,” haunted by his fame as America’s Hamlet” and his brother’s terrible actions; for Norah, a rebellious teenager facing torture in the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award winner The Pelican Bar” as she confronts Mama Strong, the sadistic boss of a rehabilitation facility; for the narrator recounting her descent in What I Didn’t See.”
With clear and insightful prose, Fowler’s stories measure the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness. This collection, which includes two Nebula Award winners and stories which have been significantly rewritten since first publication, is sure to delight readers, even as it pulls the rug out from underneath their feet.
The Liminal War
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00In the third Liminal Novel Taggert's adopted daughter disappears so he only has one option: find her.
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.
A Summer in the Twenties
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00"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:
"The works of British Mystery Writer Peter Dickinson are like caviar—an acquired taste that can easily lead to addiction. Dickinson . . . does not make much of the process of detection, nor does he specialize in suspense. Instead, he neatly packs his books with such old-fashioned virtues as mood, character, and research."—Time
"Dickinson (author of engagingly offbeat thrillers and children's books) does splendidly here with atmosphere, with the eccentric supporting characters, with the occasionally bizarre comic touches."—Kirkus Reviews
In 1926 the British government was worried about revolution. Two million people are about to go on strike and class warfare is about to erupt. Tom Hankey is caught between his love for Judy, a bright young thing, and Kate, a fireball agitator. Brought home from Oxford by his father, Tom volunteers to drive a train in the General Strike. When the train is ambushed, Tom is thrust into the darkest and most threatening regions of English politics. Gritty yet sparkling and full of unexpected turnarounds, A Summer in the Twenties resonates and captivates.
Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger. His novels include Death of a Unicorn, The Poison Oracle, and many more. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.
Was
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00"A moving lament for lost childhoods and an eloquent tribute to the enduring power of art."—The New York Times
Was is a haunting novel which explores the lives of characters intertwined with The Wizard of Oz: the “real” Dorothy Gale; Judy Garland’s unhappy fame; and Jonathan, a dying actor, and his therapist, whose work at an asylum unwittingly intersects with the Yellow Brick Road.
The Entropy of Bones
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00In Ayize Jama-Everett's second Liminal novel, a young martial artist finds there's more to the world than she can kick, more than she can see.
Chabi doesn’t realize her martial arts master may not be on the side of the gods. She does know he’s changed her from being an almost invisible kid to one that anyone — or at least anyone smart — should pay attention to. But attention from the wrong people can mean more trouble than even she can handle. Chabi might be emotionally stunted. She might have no physical voice. She doesn’t communicate well with words, but her body is poetry.
Terra Nullius
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00"A gut punch of a book in the style of Le Guin, Atwood, and Butler. Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel blazes with truth.”
— Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
Terra Nullius (def): land belonging to no one; no man’s land
“Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running.”
The Natives of the Colony are restless. The Settlers are eager to bring peace to their new home, and they have a plan for how to achieve it. They will tear Native families apart and provide re-education to those who do not understand why they should submit to their betters.
Peace and prosperity are worth any price, but who will pay it? This rich land, Australia, will provide for all if only the Natives can learn their place.
Jacky has escaped the Home where the Settlers sent him, but where will he go? The Head of the Department for the Protection of Natives, known to Settlers and Natives alike as the Devil, is chasing Jacky. And when the Devil catches him, Sister Bagra, who knows her duty to the ungodly, will be waiting for Jacky back at Home.
An incendiary, timely, and fantastical debut from an essential Australian Aboriginal writer, Claire G. Coleman.
Do you recognize this story? Look again.
This is not Australia as we know it. This is not the Australia of our history books. This Terra Nullius — shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize and Highly Commended for the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards — is something new, but all too familiar.
You Have Never Been Here
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.
Praise for Mary Rickert's books:
"The Memory Garden is a lovely book of women, friendship, sadness and healing, and it is genuinely uplifting. Like the garden of its title, this is a book to take in slowly, to spend time in, to wander through; you'll likely find your-selves the better for it." NPR
"This is a novel haunted by mortalitywith people who died young, with people now old and dying, with ghosts. But it is often a joyful novel, a novel of life, forgiveness and good meals with friends and strangers."Los Angeles Review of Books
"I've seldom read a book as gentle, and yet as powerful." io9.com
"Rickert writes with a blend of poetical language and dark suspense."The Washington Post
"A poet of the extremes housed within the human heart."Locus
Mary Rickert has long been an undiscovered master of the fantastic. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, received the Crawford and World Fantasy awards, and stories from this collection of new and selected work have received the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. She has worked as kindergarten teacher, barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and in the personnel de-partment of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She is the author of two collections and the novel The Memory Garden and she has received the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. She lives in Wisconsin. See more at maryrickert.com.
Trampoline
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00“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
Twenty astounding stories by Karen Joy Fowler, Glen Hirshberg, Samantha Hunt, Shelley Jackson, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Greer Gilman, and more.
Death of a Unicorn
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Laurie R. King
For best-selling author Lady Margaret, the past is no longer a pleasant memory. Her first lover's mysterious death and the seeming inevitability of her inheriting the family's stately home are cast in new light by secrets unwillingly revisited. The first in a series of reprints of Peter Dickinson's mysteries, this classic British mystery will win fans currently engrossed in Downton Abbey.
Praise for Peter Dickinson's mysteries:
"A literary magician controlling an apparently inexhaustible supply of effects . . . Craftsmanship such as this makes for compulsive reading."
Penelope Lively
"He is the true original, a superb writer who revitalises the traditions of the mystery genre . . . incapable of writing a trite or inelegant sentence . . . a master."
P. D. James
"He sets new standards in the mystery field that will be hard to live up to."
Ruth Rendell
"He has an eye and a mind and a voice like no other."
Donald E. Westlake
"A fresh triumph . . . a simultaneous insight into kids and their minders, and emerging nations, and the concept of freedom - all done with consummate story-telling skill."
Peter Lovesey
"Read this book carefully. It's a jewel."
The New York Times Review
"Brilliantly imaginative first detective story . . .wonderfully convincing."
The Observer
"Mr Dickinson is the most original crime novelist to appear for a long, long time."
The Guardian
"Brilliantly original, as always."
Times Literary Supplement
"Wry, witty, irresistible."
The Financial Times
"Dickinson tops all his prizewinners with this stunning psychological thriller."
Publishers Weekly
Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.
Ambiguity Machines
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Philip K. Dick Award finalist
Praise for Vandana Singh:
“A most promising and original young writer.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
“Lovely! What a pleasure this book is . . . full of warmth, compassion, affection, high comedy and low.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses
“Vandana Singh’s radiant protagonist is a planet unto herself.”—Village Voice
“Sweeping starscapes and daring cosmology that make Singh a worthy heir to Cordwainer Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.”—Chris Moriarty, Fantasy & Science Fiction
“I’m looking forward to the collection . . . everything I’ve read has impressed me—the past and future visions in ‘Delhi’, the intensity of ‘Thirst’, the feeling of escape at the end of ‘The Tetrahedron’…” —Niall Harrison, Vector (British Science Fiction Association)
“…the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world … she writes with such a beguiling touch of the strange.” —Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard
In her first North American collection, Vandana Singh’s deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. In "Requiem," a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance.
Singh's stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and oft reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.
Horse of a Different Color
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00"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
"Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today."The Houston Post
"The most startling, original, and entertaining short story writer in science fiction today."George R. R. Martin
"It always feels like Christmas when a new Howard Waldrop collection arrives."Connie Willis
Howard Waldrop's stories are keys to the secrets of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps the stories between the stories everyone else knows. From "The Wolfman of Alcatraz" to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from "The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew" to the sixth Marx brother's story of a vaudeville act tracking down the Holy Grail, this new collection is a wunderkammer of strangeness.
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, Night of the Cooters, Other Worlds, Better Lives, and Things Will Never Be the Same. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens."
Prophecies, Libels & Dreams
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Praise 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
These inter-connected stories are set in an opulent quasi-historical world of magick and high manners called the Republic of Califa. The Republic is a strangely familiar placea baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremonyyet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig. By turn whimsical and horrific (sometime in the same paragraph), Wilce's stories have been characterized as "screwball comedies for goths" but they could also be described as "historical fantasies" or "fanciful histories" for there are nuggets of historical fact hidden in them there lies.
Ysabeau S. Wilce is the author of Flora Segunda, Andre Norton Awardwinner Flora's Dare, and Flora's Fury, and she has published work in Asimov's, Steampunk!, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. She lives in San Francisco, California.
Monsterland
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00Previously published as North American Lake Monsters. Monsterland is a new anthology TV series from Hulu based on Nathan Ballingrud’s striking, bleak, and luminous debut collection, starring Kaitlyn Dever, Kelly Marie Tran, Jonathan Tucker, and Taylor Schilling, and more.
Ballingrud’s Shirley Jackson Award winning collection of gothic and uncanny stories investigates the loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary American life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves. Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, ex-wives—or the faces we see in our mirrors.
The people in these stories, ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids seduced by extremism, are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they’re ruined; sometimes redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, terrifyingly human, even at their most monstrous.
Old Men in Love
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00“Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts.”—The Times (London)
“Our nearest contemporary equivalent to Blake, our sweetest-natured screwed-up visionary.”—London Evening Standard
Alasdair Gray’s unique melding of humor and metafiction at once hearken back to Laurence Sterne and sit beside today’s literary mash-ups with equal comfort. Old Men in Love is smart, down-to-earth, funny, bawdy, politically inspired, dark, multi-layered, and filled with the kind of intertextual play that Gray delights in.
As with Gray’s previous novel Poor Things, several partial narratives are presented together. Here the conceit is that they were all discovered in the papers of the late John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow teacher who started a number of novels in settings as varied as Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset, and Britain under New Labour.
This is the first US edition (updated with the author’s corrections from the UK edition) of a novel that British critics lauded as one of the best of Gray’s long career. Beautifully printed in two colors throughout and featuring Gray’s trademark strong design, Old Men in Love will stand out from everything else on the shelf. Fifty percent is fact and the rest is possible, but it must be read to be believed.
Alasdair Gray is one of Scotland’s most well-known and acclaimed artists. He is the author of nine novels, including Lanark, 1982 Janine, and the Whitbread and Guardian Prize–winning Poor Things, as well as four collections of stories, two collections of poetry, and three books of nonfiction, including The Book of Prefaces. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Heroes of an Unknown World
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00In the final novel of the Liminals, a found family of Black superheroes has one last chance to save the world.
After traveling back in time to rescue his fostered daughter, Taggert has returned to the present and found himself in his favorite place: up against the wall. But the world they’ve returned to is not the one they left: everything is slightly grayer, the music is boring, joy is just out of reach. The liminals’ entropic enemies, the Alters, are trying to bring about the end of the world by sucking the life—literally—out of enough people to tip the balance their way.
Traveling from Jamaica to London to Indonesia to the heart of the whirlwind in the desert at the heart of all deserts, Taggert and his found family of liminals and supporters have to find a way to bring back the joy before they’re all ground down into the gray dust.
Generation Loss
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00
Believer Book Award finalist
Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption. Generation Loss is the Shirley Jackson Award winning novel that launched Elizabeth Hand’s ex-punk photographer Cass Neary into the world.
“Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary series began in 2008 with Generation Loss, a startling and addictive novel that introduced a protagonist fueled by drugs and post-punk irreverence.”
— Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review
“Sharp, clear, and mercilessly lean. Not only did that style fit
Cass, it fit Hand: The author, roughly the same age as her character,
was also a part of the punk scene in her youth. Generation Loss
rasps with gritty authenticity, from the copious references to artists
like Iggy Pop and the Ramones to the way Cass’ hardcore attraction to
damage and destruction propels her deep into the book’s maze of murder
and secrets.”
— Jason Heller, NPR
“Although it moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound. A dark and beautiful novel.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey
toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.”
—Los Angeles Times
The Invisible Valley
Regular price $16.00 Save $-16.00Lu Beiping is one of 20 million young adults the Chinese government uproots and sends far from their homes for agricultural re-education. And Lu is bored and exhausted. While he pines for romance, instead he’s caught up in a forbidden religious tradition and married off to the foreman’s long-dead daughter so that her soul may rest. The foreman then sends him off to cattle duty up on Mudkettle Mountain, far away from everyone else.
On the mountain, Lu meets an outcast polyamorous family led by a matriarch, Jade, and one of her lovers, Kingfisher. They are woodcutters and practice their own idiosyncratic faith by which they claim to placate the serpent-demon sleeping in the belly of the mountains. Just as the village authorities get wind of Lu’s dalliances with the woodcutters, a typhoon rips through the valley. And deep in the jungle, a giant serpent may be stirring.
The Invisible Valley is a lyrical fable about the shapes into which human affection can be pressed in extreme circumstances; about what is natural and what is truly deviant; about the relationships between the human and the natural, the human and the divine, the self and the other.
Big Dark Hole
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00World Fantasy Award finalist
It sounds innocuous. The routine world of college teaching. Evenings on a porch with your wife. And then . . . 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. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Jeffrey Ford's stunning new collection Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.
An Agent of Utopia
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00In 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 a unique twenty-first-century fabulist.
From the Florida folktales of the perennial prison escapee Daddy Mention and the dangerous gator-man Uncle Monday that inspired "Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull" (first published in Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson) to the imagined story of boxer and historical bit player Jess Willard in World Fantasy Award winner "The Pottawatomie Giant" (first published on SciFiction), or the Ozark UFO contactees in Nebula Award winner "Close Encounters" to Flannery O’Connor’s childhood celebrity in Shirley Jackson Award finalist "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" (first published in Eclipse) Duncan’s historical juxtapositions come alive on the page as if this Southern storyteller was sitting on a rocking chair stretching the truth out beside you.
Duncan rounds out his explorations of the nooks and crannies of history in two irresistible new stories, "Joe Diabo's Farewell" — in which a gang of Native American ironworkers in 1920s New York City go to a show — and the title story, "An Agent of Utopia" — where he reveals what really (might have) happened to Thomas More’s head.
Hard Light
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00“One of noir’s great anti-heroes”—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, punk photographer Cass Neary lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.
Only Quinn doesn’t show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party’s host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.
Forced to run Mallo’s contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England’s Land’s End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history―if she survives.
Strobe-lit against an apocalyptic background of rock and roll, rave culture, fast drugs and transgressive photography, Hard Light continues the breathless, breathtaking saga of Cassandra Neary which began in Generation Loss and Available Dark.
Taboo
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years . . .
Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.
But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.
We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. Taboo won four literary awards, was longlisted for four and shortlisted for three more. It is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.
Available Dark
Regular price $17.00 Save $-17.00"Available Dark works well as a thriller, but it’s Cass who makes the book extraordinary." — Time Magazine
A searing and iconoclastic crime novel in which photographer Cass Neary, introduced in the underground classic Generation Loss, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of crime in Scandinavia’s coldest corners.
As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. This is where Cass's worst fears are confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.
The Adventures of an Ugly Girl
Regular price $10.99 Sale price $7.14 Save $3.85The Adventures of an Ugly Girl (1893) is a novel by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. While she is mostly remembered today for New Amazonia, a feminist utopian novel which depicts the emergence of an advanced society of women in the not-so-distant future, Corbett was also a pioneering romance and detective novelist. While little is known about Corbett, her surviving novels and stories suggest she was a passionate campaigner for women’s suffrage in an era of conservative politics and traditional values. “‘Why, what does it matter how your hair is dressed, or what sort of a gown you put on? You may just as well spare your pains, for unfortunately nothing that you can do seems to mitigate your ugliness. I’m sure I cannot think where you get it.’” Dora Courtenay is moments away from meeting her new stepmother, but can’t find anything proper to wear for the occasion. Despite her sister Belle’s constant bullying, she finds the confidence to get herself dressed and, with her brother Jerry’s encouragement, goes downstairs to finish preparing the dining room for their guest. As her father and his new bride wait in the next room, Dora, unaware of their presence, makes a crude joke about Lady Elizabeth, only to discover that her insult, however innocent, was overheard. Despite this blunder, the two start off on even ground, leading Dora to believe that she could grow to admire her new stepmother. Soon, however, her step grandfather the Earl of Greatlands makes a surprising request: he would like to marry her, making Dora a Countess.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Romantic and Horrific Stories
Regular price $14.99 Sale price $9.74 Save $5.25Romantic and Horrific Stories (2021) is a collection of short fiction by Bram Stoker. Although he is largely remembered as the author of Dracula (1897), one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Stoker was a versatile writer whose gift for transmitting terror is matched by his ability to craft convincing and moving tales of love.
“The Crystal Cup,” first published in London Society in 1872, is the story of an artist who is forced to create a flawless crystal vase for the king. Having left his wife and home behind, he suffers under a series of constraints and grueling demands. “The Chain of Destiny” is a bestselling epistolary tale featuring hypnotism, magic, and supernatural elements that first appeared in The Shamrock in 1875. In Stoker’s 1898 tale “Bengal Roses,” A teenager from the country falls for a beautiful young woman, but soon discovers she loves an older cavalry officer. First published in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in 1899, “A Yellow Duster” is the story of two old men whose lifelong friendship is threatened by a mysterious secret. Curious about a dust rag found in his friend’s display case, the story’s protagonist asks the collector of rare and priceless objects why he has preserved something so seemingly worthless.
Other stories collected herein include “Our New House,” published in the Boston Herald in 1895, as well as “The Burial of the Rats” and “A Dream of Red Hands,” both of which appeared in Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories (1914). Romantic and Horrific Stories compiles a dozen works of short fiction by Bram Stoker, the secretive and vastly underrated creator of Dracula, one of history’s greatest villains. This edition of Bram Stoker’s Romantic and Horrific Stories is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Unveiling a Parallel
Regular price $7.99 Sale price $5.19 Save $2.80Unveiling a Parallel (1893) is a novel by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant. Alongside Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1890) and Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), Unveiling a Parallel is an important early work of feminist utopian science fiction. “Having launched my aeroplane on the current of attraction which flows uninterruptedly between this world and that, traveling was as swift as thought. My impression is that my speed was constantly accelerated until I neared my journey’s end, when the planet’s pink envelope interposed its soft resistance to prevent a destructive landing. I settled down as gently as a dove alights, and the sensation was the most ecstatic I have ever experienced.” A nineteenth century voyager travels by aircraft to the planet Mars, where he encounters two advanced civilizations of Martians. In Paleveria, women have taken control over men by adopting their tactics for violence and oppression. Their capitalist society is highly stratified, allowing wealthy women to hold all financial and political power. In Caskia, men and women have learned to live in harmony. Unlike their neighbors, they value egalitarianism, art, and intellectual advancement over wealth and power. Before returning to Earth, the voyager learns as much as he can about these Martian civilizations, speaking with their leaders to gain a better understanding of the values that guide their progress.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The Conquest
Regular price $10.99 Sale price $7.14 Save $3.85The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913) is a novel by Oscar Micheaux. Before he became the first Black movie mogul in American history, Micheaux was a homesteader-turned novelist whose passion for storytelling and business acumen were born from a youth of hard work and struggle. The son of a former slave, Micheaux dedicated his life to countering the dominant narratives of American history while inspiring and empowering Black people around the world. “The heavy rains washed the loam from the hills and deposited it on these bottoms. Years ago, when the rolling lands were cleared, and before the excessive rainfall had washed away the loose surface, the highlands were considered most valuable for agricultural purposes, equally as valuable as the bottoms now are.” A Black homesteader named Oscar Devereaux reflects on a life of perseverance. Raised alongside twelve siblings in rural Illinois, he leaves home and family behind to seek a life of fortune and independence. Never one to set limits, Devereaux discovers that no dream is beyond his reach. Dedicated to educator and orator Booker T. Washington, The Conquest was described by its author as the “true story of a negro who was discontented and [of] the circumstances that were the outcome of that discontent.” This edition of Oscar Micheaux’s The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
K.L. Reich
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99Available in English for the first time, Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s searing Catalan novel, K.L. Reich, is a central work of testimonial literature of the Nazi concentration camps. Begun immediately after Amat-Piniella’s liberation in 1945, the book is based on his own four-year internment at Mauthausen.
“When the war is over, remember all this. Remember me,” implores one of the book’s characters on his deathbed, and it is this call to bear witness that Amat-Piniella takes up in his account of the Spanish Republican fighters who were exiled in France at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and soon swept up into the German concentration camp system. As an already organized anti-fascist army, they played an important role as a nucleus of resistance within the camps, and their story is little known to English-language readers.
Because of the length of his internment, his decision to write his book as fiction, and his staggering powers of observation and recollection, Amat-Piniella’s portrayal of life in the camps is unmatched in scope and detail. It is also a compelling study of three powerful ideological movements at work at the time: anarchism, communism, and fascism, all within the desperate and brutal world of the camps.
“My book does not seek to deepen wounds or differences, but to unite people before cruelty,” said Amat-Piniella. This is an essential text as we ponder the twentieth century and its meaning to us today. This edition includes a new preface, annotations, and a translators’ note.
Watermelon Syrup
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor’s family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Great Depression.
Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy’s expensive cast off clothes, and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. When Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person.
At home, Lexi finds a journal written by her older brother during the family’s journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one hat reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Waterloo, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realization that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny.
Watermelon Syrup is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities.
Writing Surfaces
Regular price $23.99 Save $-23.99In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present a collection of John Riddell’s work. Riddell’s poems and short stories are a remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings. Riddell’s oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged with media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing.
Riddell is best known for his short fiction pieces “H” and “Pope Leo: El Elope,” a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol. However, his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions.
Riddell’s work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet.
With media studies increasingly turning to “media archaeology” and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (as typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for further appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.
The Foreigner
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99The Foreigner (1909) tells the story of Kalman Kalmar, a young Ukrainian immigrant working in rural Saskatchewan. It addresses the themes of male maturation, cultural assimilation, and a form of “muscular Christianity” recurring in Connor’s popular Western tales. Daniel Coleman’s afterword considers the text’s departure from Connor’s established fiction formulas and provides a unique framework for understanding its depiction of difference.
Painted Fires
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99Painted Fires, first published in 1925, narrates the trials and tribulations of Helmi Milander, a Finnish immigrant, during the years approaching the First World War. The novel serves as a vehicle for McClung’s social activism, especially in terms of temperance, woman suffrage, and immigration policies that favour cultural assimilation. In her afterword, Cecily Devereux situates Painted Fires in the context of McClung’s feminist fiction and her interest in contemporary questions of immigration and “naturalization.” She also considers how McClung’s representation of Helmi Milander’s story draws on popular culture narratives.
Terrier Town
Regular price $31.99 Save $-31.99 Debate still rages on about who invented baseball. But one thing is certain...it was alive and fractious in southwestern Ontario in the summer of 1949. Charlie Hodge, just finishing his last year of high school, has made the Galt Terriers’ roster and will be riding the bench with a star-studded team, many of whom had played with the major leagues.
When those seasoned pros arrive in town, big things are expected, and they don’t disappoint. There is the towering home run that Goody Rosen hits into the Grand River; the frozen baseball scheme that backfires; and the busload of promotional cooking oil hijacked just before game time. It all comes down to Game 7 in the Terriers’ semi-final series with the Brantford Red Sox, when a convicted gambler, playing centre field that night, makes one of the most controversial plays ever seen at Dickson Park.
Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, David Menary recreates that post-war season in Terrier Town through the eyes of Charlie Hodge. While Charlie is a fictional character, the other players are not. This is a story that will resonate with young and old alike, baseball fans or not. This is a team that became a vital part of the town, and the town an elemental part of the team. This is a time rapidly fading from memory — a summer of myths and legends.
The Flying Years
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99Originally published in 1935, Frederick Niven’s The Flying Years tells the history of Western Canada from the 1850s to the 1920s as witnessed by Angus Munro, a young Scot forced to emigrate to Canada when his family is evicted from their farm. Working in the isolated setting of Rocky Mountain House, Angus secretly marries a Cree woman, who dies in a measles epidemic while he is on an extended business trip. The discovery, fourteen years later, that his wife had given birth to a boy who was adopted by another Cree family and raised to be “all Indian” confirms Angus’s sympathies toward Aboriginal peoples, and he eventually becomes the Indian Agent on the reserve where his secret son lives. Angus’s ongoing negotiation of both the literal and symbolic roles of “White Father” takes place within the context of questions about race and nation, assimilation and difference, and the future of the Canadian West. Against a background of resource exploitation and western development, the novel queries the place of Aboriginal peoples in this new nation and suggests that progress brings with it a cost.
Alison Calder’s afterword examines the novel’s depiction of the paternalistic relationship between the Canadian government and Aboriginal peoples in Western Canada, and situates the novel in terms of contemporary discussions about race and biology.
The Seats of the Mighty
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99From the pen of Gilbert Parker comes one of the most popular Canadian novels of the late nineteenth century. First published simultaneously in Canada and the United States in 1896, The Seats of the Mighty is set in Quebec City in 1759, against the backdrop of the conflict between the English and the French over the future of New France. Written and published after Parker's move to England, the novel attempts to romanticize French Canada without alienating his English and American readership. The novel’s enduring popularity led to a stage version in 1897 and a silent film in 1914.
Panic Signs
Regular price $31.99 Save $-31.99Cristina Peri Rossi is one of the most acclaimed and personal voices in Hispanic letters. This volume of short stories, Panic Signs, first published in 1970 in Montevideo, Uruguay, presages the atrocities that would come with dictatorship in 1972.
The premonitory dimension is one of the striking characteristics in all the stories — a sense of impending catastrophe, sometimes hallucinatory and often graphic, leads us to undetermined places where the horrors of censorship, torture, and human bondage take place. At the same time, the stories expose the shackles that incapacitate us and deny us the acceptance of ourselves.
This elegy for freedom mourns the loss of liberty and justice while seducing us into questioning what we hold true. The metaphorical procession of images, and the craftsmanship of a narrative that continually engage us, motivate us to explore our own uncertainties and values, and offer an unquestionable opportunity to reassess today’s global conditions. Peri Rossi succeeds in creating a whirlwind of despair and self-discovery, impelling us to assess our own panic signs and so avoid being entrapped by those who hold power over us.
The translation of this powerful text will help English-speaking readers attain a more profound understanding of the complexities of Latin America’s cultural and socio-political issues.
The Tramp Room
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99A young girl falls asleep in the Joseph Schneider Haus and wakes up in the 1850s. At the same time, a tramp boy seeks sanctuary from a cruel master. Caught in the past, the young girl, Elizabeth Salisbury, is thrust into the drama of the tramp boy’s struggle to remain free.
Cabbagetown Diary
Regular price $24.99 Save $-24.99Robert Fulford called it “a remarkable glimpse of the underbelly of Toronto,” but the reviews that greeted the publication of Cabbagetown Diary in 1970 were decidedly mixed. The novel’s rowdy concoction of grit and violence and rooming-house sleaze had a strongly polarizing effect on its readers. Many admired the frankness of Butler’s depiction of a sordid environment, and others deplored the obscenity of the language and the dangerous and careless ways in which his characters behave, bent as they are on downward self-transcendence. But Cabbagetown Diary was undeniably a promising debut by a young writer whose brash tone and pungent subject matter were unique in Canadian writing at that time.
The novel takes the form of a diary written by a disaffected young Toronto bartender, Michael, over the course of his four-month liaison with Terry, a naive teenager who is new to the city. Michael introduces her to his friends and his inner-city haunts, to drink and drugs, and to the nihilist politics espoused by some in his circle. With hard-bitten cynicism and flashes of dark humour, Michael relates the vicissitudes of their summer together.
This reissue of Cabbagetown Diary includes a biographical sketch by Charles Butler and an afterword by Tamas Dobozy.
Aaron
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99W. Donald Wilson and Paul G. Socken’s translation of Aaron, by Québécois author Yves Thériault, makes this fine novel available in English for the first time.
An exploration of “otherness,” the story centres on Moishe, an Orthodox Jew and refugee from Russia, who is raising his grandson, Aaron, alone in Montreal, following the deaths of Aaron’s parents. Poverty-stricken, Moshe works as a tailor, maintains his strict adherence to Orthodoxy, and educates Aaron to follow in his path. Aaron becomes increasingly estranged from his grandfather’s ways, however, and his meeting with the militantly secular Jewish girl Viedna confirms his decision to embrace modernity, secularism, and materialism and to reject his faith entirely. The story portrays a tragically polarized situation in which neither side is able to communicate or to build an alternative world view that incorporates both tradition and modernity. Possibly Thériault’s finest novel, Aaron is a parable of our modern world and a poignant cautionary tale.
The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850) was one of the first books of Indigenous history written by an Indigenous author. The book blends nature writing and narrative to describe the language, religious beliefs, stories, land, work, and play of the Ojibway people. Shelley Hulan's afterword considers Copway's rhetorical strategies in framing a narrative—she considers it a form of "history, interrupted"—for a non-Indigenous readership.
Thanks for Listening
Regular price $41.99 Save $-41.99A treasure chest of exceptional stories by one of Canadas classic authorsall now available in one volume.
Ernest Buckler, best known as the author of the Canadian classic, The Mountain and the Valley, never achieved the lasting fame he deserved. His first story was published in Esquire, a significant American literary magazine known for publishing leading writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis. Over the years, nearly forty more of Buckler’s short stories were published in several popular magazines, including Maclean’s where his story “The Quarrel” won first prize for fiction.
In Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler, Marta Dvořák gathers together many of those stories as well as some previously unpublished pieces. At times she has chosen to include the fuller, original versions, and has reinstated some of the lost passages that were cut from stories to fit popular magazine requirements.
Ernest Buckler’s writing is rooted in the magic of the ordinary. He celebrates the land and its community, and sensuously recreates a paradise — almost a Garden of Eden. Buckler’s American editors were right in believing that no one evoked the lost world of North Americas agrarian past better than Ernest Buckler.
The King of Elfland's Daughter
Regular price $14.99 Sale price $9.74 Save $5.25The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). Having established himself as a bestselling author of short fiction, Dunsany published The King of Elfland’s Daughter, his second novel. Recognized as a pioneering author of fantasy and science fiction, Dunsany is a man whose work, in the words of H. P. Lovecraft, remains “unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision.” In accordance with tradition, the Lord of Erl assents to the will of the people, who wish to be ruled by a magical being. In order to fulfill their request, he sends his son Alveric, a trustworthy young man, to the realm of Elfland, where time moves slowly and citizens live long, prosperous lives. There, Alveric falls in love with Lirazel, the daughter of the King, and convinces her to return to Erl as his wife. He arrives triumphantly, but soon Lirazel grows tired of the ways of men. Caught between the demands of tradition and the desires of his heart, Alveric must decide to whom he will remain loyal. Largely forgotten after its publication, The King of Elfland’s Daughter was eventually recognized as a groundbreaking work of high fantasy and fairytale fiction. This edition of Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter is a classic of British fantasy fiction reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The Forest of Bourg-Marie
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99In The Forest of Bourg-Marie, originally published in 1898, Toronto author and musician S. Frances Harrison draws together a highly mythologized image of Quebec society and the forms of Gothic literature that were already familiar to her English-speaking audience. It tells the story of a fourteen-year-old French Canadian who is lured to the United States by the promise of financial reward, only to be rejected by his grandfather upon his return. In doing so, the novel offers a powerful critique of the personal and cultural consequences of emigration out of Canada.
In her afterword, Cynthia Sugars considers how The Forest of Bourg-Marie reimagines the Gothic tradition from a settler Canadian perspective, turning to a French-Canadian setting with distinctly New-World overtones. Harrison’s twist on the traditional Gothic plotline offers an inversion of such Gothic motifs as the decadent aristocrat and ancestral curse by playing on questions of illegitimacy and cultural preservation.
The Water Lily Pond
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99This evocative narrative draws us into the inner life of a young Chinese peasant girl, May-ping, and her first glimmerings of youthful love and idealism under the Maoist regime in China. As she grows into a mature woman, she becomes increasingly aware of the strife around her.
An intelligent girl born into a Poor-Class family in a small village in rural China, she is, because of the Maoist policy towards such families, able to pursue her dream of going to university. To her surprise, urban snobbery and “student thought-spying” at university make it essential for her to hide her real thoughts. Such self-protection becomes especially necessary once her idealistic boyfriend Dan — a secret boyfriend because young people were forbidden to be romantically involved — is sent to a labour camp for his outspoken ways.
In her village, she learns that everything has value except the lives of girls and women. One of her childhood friends, a landowner’s daughter who because of her family’s Landlord Class, is not allowed to go to university drowns herself when forced to face an arranged marriage. Hua-Hua, a shy and gentle neighbour, hangs herself after her husband beats her brutally for not bearing him a son.
May-ping manages to survive the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Communist party who feels outside the system and keeps her inner self intact. Her story reveals how political change during the Maoist regime left its mark on ordinary people.
Employing stories within stories, the narrator carries the reader to a mythological realm to images of the resilient water lilies and the nurturing lily pond.
In Due Season
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99First published in 1947, In Due Season broke new ground with its fictional representation of women and of Indigenous people. Set during the dustbowl 1930s, this tersely narrated prize-winning novel follows Lina Ashley, a determined solo female homesteader who takes her family from drought-ridden southern Alberta to a new life in the Peace River region. Here her daughter Poppy grows up in a community characterized by harmonious interactions between the local Métis and newly arrived European settlers. Still, there is tension between mother and daughter when Poppy becomes involved with a Métis lover. This novel expands the patriarchal canon of Canadian prairie fiction by depicting the agency of a successful female settler and, as noted by Dorothy Livesay, was “one of the first, if not the first Canadian novel wherein the plight of the Native Indian and the Métis is honestly and painfully recorded.” The afterword by Carole Gerson and Janice Dowson provides substantial information about author Christine van der Mark and situates her under-acknowledged book within the contexts of Canadian social, literary, and publishing history.
My Husband
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99In Italy, as in most Western cultures, the 1960s was a dynamic and turbulent decade of social change. Dacia Maraini, in this short story collection, explores the vexing, tragic, and often humorous experiences of women living in modern urban Italy.
With a style as lean as Samuel Beckett’s, and a love of the absurd that rivals Eugène Ionesco, Maraini’s stories are both poignant and wickedly funny. The writer’s ironic lens zooms in to examining sexual relations, working conditions, women’s issues, and family dynamics, illuminating the lives of an entire generation. With classic existential angst, Maraini’s characters are often profoundly dissatisfied with their situations, but also ill-equipped to initiate any real change. This feminist version of the absurd is deliciously wry and terrible. The stories have a real bite.
Originally published as Mio marito in 1968, this is the first English translation of My Husband.
Read, Listen, Tell
Regular price $41.99 Save $-41.99“Don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.” —Thomas King, in this volume
Read, Listen, Tell brings together an extraordinary range of Indigenous stories from across Turtle Island (North America). From short fiction to as-told-to narratives, from illustrated stories to personal essays, these stories celebrate the strength of heritage and the liveliness of innovation. Ranging in tone from humorous to defiant to triumphant, the stories explore core concepts in Indigenous literary expression, such as the relations between land, language, and community, the variety of narrative forms, and the continuities between oral and written forms of expression. Rich in insight and bold in execution, the stories proclaim the diversity, vitality, and depth of Indigenous writing.
Building on two decades of scholarly work to centre Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, the book transforms literary method while respecting and honouring Indigenous histories and peoples of these lands. It includes stories by acclaimed writers
like Thomas King, Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, and Eden Robinson, a new generation of emergent writers, and writers and storytellers who have often been excluded from the canon, such as French- and Spanish-language Indigenous authors, Indigenous authors from Mexico, Chicana/o authors, Indigenous-language authors, works in translation, and “lost“ or underappreciated texts.
In a place and time when Indigenous people often have to contend with representations that marginalize or devalue their intellectual and cultural heritage, this collection is a testament to Indigenous resilience and creativity. It shows that the ways in which we read, listen, and tell play key roles in how we establish relationships with one another, and how we might share knowledges across cultures, languages, and social spaces.
Argimou
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99Both an adventure-laced captivity tale and an impassioned denunciation of the marginalization of Indigenous culture in the face of European colonial expansion, Douglass Smith Huyghue’s Argimou (1847) is the first Canadian novel to describe the fall of eighteenth-century Fort Beauséjour and the expulsion of the Acadians. Its integration of the untamed New Brunswick landscape into the narrative, including a dramatic finale that takes place over the reversing falls in Saint John, intensifies a sense of the heroic proportions of the novel's protagonist, Argimou.
Even if read as an escapist romance and captivity tale, Argimou captures for posterity a sense of the Tantramar mists, boundless forests, and majestic waters informing the topographical character of pre-Victorian New Brunswick. Its snapshot of the human suffering occasioned by the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians, and its appeal to Victorian readers to pay attention to the increasingly disenfranchised state of Indigenous peoples, make the novel a valuable contribution to early Canadian fiction.
Situating the novel in its eighteenth-century historical and geographical context, the afterword to this new edition foregrounds the author's skilful adaptation of historical-fiction conventions popularized by Sir Walter Scott and additionally highlights his social concern for the fate of Indigenous cultures in nineteenth-century Maritime Canada.
I Am a Damn Savage; What Have You Done to My Country? / Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu; Tanite nene etutamin nitassi?
Regular price $25.99 Save $-25.99Quebec author An Antane Kapesh's two books, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976) and Qu'as-tu fait de mon pays? (1979), are among the foregrounding works by Indigenous women in Canada. This English translation of these works, each page presented facing the revised Innu text, makes them available for the first time to a broader readership.
In I Am a Damn Savage, Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders – like herself – were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system. What Have You Done to My Country? is a fictional account by a young boy of the arrival of les Polichinelles (referring to White settlers) and their subsequent assault on the land and on native language and culture.
Through these stories Antane Kapesh asserts that settler society will eventually have to take responsibility and recognize its faults, and accept that the Innu – as well as all the other nations – are not going anywhere, that they are not a problem settlers can make disappear.
A Prisoner in Fairyland
Regular price $21.99 Sale price $14.29 Save $7.70A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) is a novel by Algernon Blackwood. Having already established himself as a promising short story writer, Blackwood began publishing novels at the age of 40. A lifelong occultist, Blackwood was interested in the fine line between the human and spiritual realms, often incorporating supernatural elements into his work. A Prisoner in Fairyland is a story of a wealthy retiree’s return to the wonderful imaginative world of his youth. Hoping to spend the rest of his life in service of others, he gets the old Starlight Express up and running again. “For, from boyhood up, a single big ambition had ever thundered through his being—the desire to be of use to others. To help his fellow-kind was to be his profession and career.” Henry Rogers has always been a dreamer. On the brink of retirement, he plans to use his carefully accumulated wealth to fulfill his philanthropic destiny. Initially unsure of the shape of his charitable contribution to society, a trip to his childhood home changes everything. There, he finds the old train carriage where he would spend days at a time immersed in a world of fantasy and adventure. Back on the Starlight Express, Rogers plans to take deserving passengers to the wondrous realm of Fairyland. He soon discovers, however, that his impassioned beliefs—however well-intentioned—risk condemnation and persecution from those whose investments on Earth prevent them from indulging in imaginative excursions into the unknown. A Prisoner in Fairyland is a story for children and adults alike, a novel that poses timeless questions regarding the nature of our existence, both upon earth and beyond. This edition of Algernon Blackwood’s A Prisoner in Fairyland is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Whom God Hath Sundered
Regular price $34.99 Sale price $22.74 Save $12.25Whom God Hath Sundered (1910-1913) is a trilogy by Oliver Onions. Published toward the beginning of Onions’ career as a leading novelist and short story writer specializing in genre fiction, Whom God Hath Sundered is a largely unknown trilogy of crime novels deemed a forgotten classic by British literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith. From the beginning, In Accordance With the Evidence—the first installment of the trilogy—is as much the story of James Jeffries as it is of Archie Merridew. Unlike Jeffries, who was “atrociously poor…in those days,” Merridew was a young man whose every opportunity seemed to have been ordained at birth: “His folks lived at Guildford; his father paid his rent for him, thirty-eight pounds a year; and his pleasant quarters under the roof had everything that mine hadn't.” As their story unfolds, Jeffries falls for the beautiful Evie Soames, but jealousy and competition with Archie threaten to derail his every move. Unhappy with his low-paying work, luckless in love, Jeffries begins to resent Archie with a near-violent passion. When Archie becomes engaged to Evie, Jeffries is left with no choice. As he looks back on his life from the distance of a dozen or more years, he recounts his path from hardship to murder, laying bare the psychological traumas that led him to commit his crime. In parts two and three, The Debit Account and The Story of Louie, we see the consequences of his heinous act unfold. This edition of Oliver Onions’ Whom God Hath Sundered is a classic of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Jimbo
Regular price $12.99 Sale price $8.44 Save $4.55Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) is a novel by Algernon Blackwood. Having already established himself as a promising short story writer, Blackwood published his debut novel at the age of 40. A lifelong occultist, Blackwood was interested in the fine line between the human and spiritual realms, often incorporating supernatural elements into his work. Jimbo: A Fantasy is a story of a young boy’s out of body experience after sustaining a terrible injury, a narrative that explores the vibrant worlds we wake to in our dreams. “Jimbo had fallen on his head. Inside that head lay the mass of highly sensitive matter called the brain, on which were recorded, of course, the impressions of everything that had yet come to him in life. […] [H]e would have to wander, lost and lonely, through the comparative chaos of disproportioned visions, generally known as the region of delirium, until the doctor, assisted by mother nature, restored him once more to normal consciousness.” Unsupervised, Jimmy wanders into the fields near his home. Charged by an angry bull, he falls and strikes his head, losing consciousness for an indeterminate period of time. As his body struggles to stay alive, his mind creates a world of its own, a haunting realm of dreams both fantastic and somehow realer, more vibrant, then the world he seems to have lost. Jimbo: A Fantasy is a story for children and adults alike, a novel that poses timeless questions regarding the nature of our existence, both upon earth and beyond. This edition of Algernon Blackwood’s Jimbo: A Fantasy is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Miss Betty
Regular price $10.99 Sale price $7.14 Save $3.85Miss Betty (1898) is a novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Written only a year after the publication of Dracula, Miss Betty helped to establish the Irish master of Gothic horror’s reputation as a leading writer of the early-twentieth century. “Of all the incidents of her early life none had so great or lasting an effect on Betty Pole as those that evening in Cheyne Walk on which she had been accused of breaking the blue china jar.” Following an innocent accident, Betty Pole is berated by her grandfather, who believes she has broken a priceless heirloom. On this day, Betty first learns of her strange ability to sense things before they happen, which proves both a gift and a curse in due time. That night, Betty learns the truth behind her identity and is named the heiress of her grandfather’s fortune. The next morning, he is found dead. As Betty gets older, as England passes from one era into the next, she is forced to hide her ability from the suspicions and intentions of friends and strangers alike. Miss Betty is a gripping work of fantasy and historical romance by Bram Stoker, the secretive and vastly underrated creator of Dracula, one of history’s greatest villains. This edition of Bram Stoker’s Miss Betty is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Once On a Time
Regular price $18.99 Sale price $12.34 Save $6.65Once on a Time (1917) is a fairy tale by A.A. Milne. Known more for his series of Winnie-the-Pooh stories and poems for children, Milne also wrote novels, fairy tales, and plays, including this entirely original work of fiction inspired by the author’s experience in the Great War. Addressing themes of power, conflict, and moral ambiguity, Once on a Time updates the classic fairy tale format for the twentieth century, and remains a wonderful work of fiction for children and adults alike. >While testing out a pair of magical boots, King Merriwig of Euralia, a jolly and decent ruler, accidentally instigates war with a neighboring kingdom. While he is off fighting with the cruel and egotistical King of Barodia, Merriwig’s daughter, Princess Hyacinth, is left in charge of Euralia. Despite her youth, she possesses both wisdom and a desire to do right by her people. But the Countess Belvane, the king’s mistress, has desires of her own. Jealous of Hyacinth, she hatches a plan to take control of the kingdom, causing mischief for the Princess at every turn. With the help of Prince Udo of Araby—who suffers from a strange enchantment—and his companion Coronel, Princess Hyacinth does her best to take care of Euralia until her father is able to return. This edition of A.A. Milne’s Once on a Time is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The Twelfth Hour
Regular price $19.99 Sale price $12.99 Save $7.00The Twelfth Hour (1907) is a novel by Ada Leverson. Having established herself as a journalist and short story writer, Leverson published her debut novel to moderate acclaim. Entertaining and effortlessly witty, Leverson’s prose paints a stunning portrait of the Edwardian era, a time when hope and relative peace proved prosperous for many. Often compared to her close friend Oscar Wilde, Leverson, a pioneering Jewish woman, remains a unique and refreshing voice in English literature. Felicity, Sylvia, and Savile Crofton all feel the pressure placed on upper-class youths to marry wisely. At 25, Felicity appears to have found herself a good husband, a man of wealth and social standing who on closer appearance seems more interested in leisure than love. Determined not to fall into a similarly unhappy marriage, her 20-year-old sister Sylvia hopes to thwart her father’s wish that she marry millionaire Mr. Ridokanski. Although he is only 16, Eton student Savile is deeply in love with a famous opera singer—from a distance—but also feels obliged to entertain the affections of Dolly Clive, a girl his own age. Finding company in their own unique miseries of the heart, the Crofton siblings hatch a plan to achieve happiness for themselves, satisfaction for their father, and whatever it is young people are meant to owe to society. The Twelfth Hour is a humorous tale of romance and desire from Ada Leverson, an underappreciated novelist of the Edwardian era. This edition of Ada Leverson’s The Twelfth Hour is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The Iron Heel
Regular price $19.99 Sale price $12.99 Save $7.00The Iron Heel (1907) is a novel by American writer Jack London. A groundbreaking work of dystopian science fiction, The Iron Heel was inspired by London’s socialist views and belief in an eventual global upheaval. Although his predictions proved wrong for the United States of the early-twentieth century, London was recognized by such figures as George Orwell for his foresight regarding the rise of fascism in Europe. The novel is told from the perspective of a scholar named Anthony Meredith who lives in the post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man in the year 2600 AD. Having discovered the “Everhard Manuscript,” a record of the rise of the Oligarchy in twentieth century America that provides the bulk of the narrative, Meredith writes the introduction and extensive footnotes throughout. The Manuscript is the story of Avis Everhard, a young woman who becomes radicalized by the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and eventually leads a failed revolution against the Oligarchy. While the frame narrative provides a sense of hope for the future of humanity, the Manuscript describes a society crushed by the consolidation of economic and political power by a wealthy few, who control all aspects of everyday life and rule with the help of a ruthless mercenary army. As she rises through the ranks of the resistance movement, Everhard comes to understand that the sacrifices required of a hero must be made for a future she holds little hope of seeing. This edition of Jack London’s The Iron Heel is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
When William Came
Regular price $12.99 Sale price $8.44 Save $4.55When William Came (1913) is a novel by Saki. Considered a masterpiece of invasion literature, When William Came indulges in the paranoid atmosphere of the leadup to the Great War to weave a sinister tale of espionage, survival, and conspiracy. Keenly aware of the heightening tensions between Britain and Germany, Saki crafts an entertaining story with a political purpose: to call for national conscription in the event of war. Much has changed in London since Murrey Yeovil left for a hunting trip in Eastern Siberia. War came and went, London fell to German forces, and his wife Cicely found a younger lover. Disembarking from the train, he gets into a cab and gives his address, only to discover his driver speaks German. Slowly, he grows accustomed to the rhythms of life under an occupying force, but it is impossible to ignore how many people have been lost. Of those who survived the war, many fled for the countryside or to colonies and nations overseas. They are the lucky ones, who need not fear a trip to the store or a turn down the wrong street might lead to imprisonment—or worse. Soon, Murrey must decide where his true loyalties lie. This edition of Saki’s When William Came is a classic of British invasion literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker
Regular price $21.99 Sale price $14.29 Save $7.70Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker (1925) is a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim. Written at the height of his career as a bestselling author of political thrillers and genre fiction, Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker is a story of romance and international intrigue concerned with the geopolitical realities of its day. A monarchist, Oppenheimer often wrote critically about socialists and anarchists in his novels, fomenting antirevolutionary sentiment in his native England and abroad. On a diplomatic trip to New York, legendary politician Gabriel Samara, a leader from a newly progressive republic of Russia, negotiations are underway to develop stronger relations between the United States and his recovering nation. Seeking assistance in the campaign to demilitarize Russia after the expulsion of the Bolsheviks and Czarists, Samara employs a young typist named Catherine Borans, herself of Russian ancestry. Working as his secretary and translator, she inadvertently saves him from an assassination attempt, forming a strong bond with a man notorious for his no-nonsense personality. When a secret from Borans’ past comes to light, however, their relationship—and the negotiations—risk coming to nothing at all. This edition of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker is a classic of English political fiction reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The Worm Ouroboros
Regular price $27.99 Sale price $18.19 Save $9.80The Worm Ouroboros (1922) is a high fantasy novel by E. R. Eddison. Inspired by the Norse sagas and medieval history, Eddison crafted an epic story of magic, adventure, romance, and war. Praised by New York Times critic Edwin Clark as a novel that “transcends all ordinary life,” The Worm Ouroboros is frequently named among the greatest works of fantasy fiction ever produced. At their palace in Demonland, Lord Juss, his brothers Goldry and Spitfire, and their cousin Brandoch Daha receive an ambassador from Witchland. After a brief introduction, the visiting dwarf reveals his business—King Gorice XI demands their absolute fealty. Rather than submit, however, Lord Juss challenges Gorice to a wrestling match with Goldry, to be held on the neutral Foliot Isles. Knowing the fate of Mercury hangs in the balance, Goldry fights bravely and defeats the wicked King. Through black magic, however, an evil sorcerer condemns Gordry to imprisonment on a mystical mountain peak. Distraught, Juss, Spitfire, and Brandoch return to Demonland to mount an army in order to march on the capital of the Witches, who have joined forces with Lord Gro of Goblinland. The Lords of Demonland break through enemy lines, making their way to the citadel of Carcë, where they mistakenly believe Goldry has been taken. The Worm Ouroboros is a story of bravery and betrayal by a master of high fantasy whose imaginative gifts have influenced generations of devoted readers. This edition of E. R. Eddison The Worm Ouroboros is a classic of British literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
War and Peace Books XI - XV
Regular price $28.99 Sale price $18.84 Save $10.15War and Peace (1869) is a novel by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Serialized between 1865 and 1867, it was published in book form in 1869 and has since been recognized as a masterpiece of world literature. Notable for its epic scale, War and Peace encompasses hundreds of characters, diligently following its five central families across fifteen years while featuring detailed imaginings of such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte. In Books XI-XV, Tolstoy depicts the loss of Moscow, the final struggle against French forces, and the beginning of a new era for Russia, Europe, and the world. French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte leave the Russian military and people with no choice. Not only must they abandon Moscow, they must burn it to the ground in order to slow the Grande Armée’s advance. The Rostov family leaves in a hurry, bringing with them the mortally wounded Prince Andrei, who is nursed by his beloved Natasha. Meanwhile, Pierre hatches a plan to assassinate Napoleon, but is soon captured and threatened with execution. As he awaits his fate in prison, guerrilla fighters manage to repel the French, forcing Napoleon’s disastrous retreat. With its depiction of the brutalities of war on individuals and society alike, Tolstoy’s story brings history to life while reminding us that the past is always closer than we care to think. As ambitious as it is triumphant, Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is an epic novel of history and family, a story of faith and the will to persevere in the face of unspeakable catastrophe. War and Peace is a work that transcends both history and description, not just for the scale of its narrative and setting, but for the scope of its philosophical interests. Since its publication, it has been praised as an essential work of literature by Ivan Turgenev, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway, and has been adapted for film, theater, and television countless times. This edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a classic of Russian literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Miss Million's Maid
Regular price $22.99 Sale price $14.94 Save $8.05Miss Million’s Maid (1913) is a romance novel by Berta Ruck. After a decade of publishing stories in literary magazines, Ruck began releasing romance novels to popular acclaim. Miss Million’s Maid is a satirical tale of love, work, and modern life that continues to entertain over a century after it was written. Beatrice Lovelace longs for a social life. Although she was born into a family of London elites, her family’s fortunes turned to leave Beatrice with next to nothing. Living with her frugal Aunt Anastasia, she hears secondhand of events around town she has no opportunity to see for herself. Her only friend, if she could be called such, is her loyal maid Nellie Million, whose name takes on a brand-new meaning when a distant uncle unexpectedly leaves her a massive fortune. Sensing an opportunity, Beatrice volunteers to work as her maid, making something of herself for the first time in her life. Despite their cordiality and good rapport, the two women soon succumb to the pressures of life in a class they had never experienced. Juggling work and wealth, navigating the ways of men, Nellie and Beatrice learn that money and happiness often refuse to mix. Miss Million’s Maid is a comedy of social life, a story of romance and friendship from one of the twentieth century’s most prolific authors. This edition of Berta Ruck’s Miss Million’s Maid is a classic of British romance literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Stella Fregelius
Regular price $22.99 Sale price $14.94 Save $8.05Originally published in 1904, Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies centers an unconventional love triangle between a man, his cousin and an unexpected beauty. It’s a complex drama that explores the power of love in the most unusual circumstance. Morris Monk is a young inventor who is engaged to his first cousin, Mary. Even though she is supportive and caring, Morris’s heart belongs to another. He falls in love with Stella Fregelius, the beautiful young daughter of the new church rector. Despite his commitment to Mary, Morris is drawn to Stella with the two establishing an unwavering spiritual connection. When tragedy strikes, his personal and professional relationships are traumatized forcing him to reckon with his past choices. Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies is a captivating tale of forbidden romance infused with science fiction and the supernatural. H. Rider Haggard delivers a thrilling story led by a conflicted and often tortured protagonist. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies is both modern and readable.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
Regular price $18.99 Sale price $12.34 Save $6.65The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1901) is a novel by Yone Noguchi. Published in New York alongside illustrations by Genjiro Yeto, the novel was styled as a fascinating tell-all written by a young Japanese tourist. Composed with the assistance of Léonie Gilmour and Blanche Partington, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl was Noguchi’s first novel and a major departure from his poetry at the time. An 18-year-old Japanese woman going by the name Miss Morning Glory embarks on a journey from her native country to the United States. Accompanied by her uncle, a wealthy industrialist, Morning Glory arrives in San Francisco via steamship. She soon befriends the American wife of a Japanese diplomat, who introduces her to minstrel shows and vaudeville. Left to her own devices, Morning Glory takes over a local cigar shop in Chinatown and begins to assimilate into American life and culture. When she meets Heine, an older poet from Oakland, Morning Glory is inspired to pursue a career as a writer. As she travels across the expansive American landscape with her uncle, she comments on the people and places she encounters along the way. Through her eyes we see the country in a strange new light, perhaps more truth than fiction. This edition of Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
Love Insurance
Regular price $19.99 Sale price $12.99 Save $7.00Lord Harrowby visits Lloyds of London and takes out an insurance policy on his future wedding, which guarantees a hefty payout if the ceremony stalls. It’s an odd request that leads to desperate measures from both parties. Lord Allan Harrowby is engaged to marry a wealthy American heiress. Prior to their nuptials, he decides to take out an insurance policy on their wedding. If it doesn’t occur by a certain time, Harrowby will receive a massive claim for his troubles. The insurers, Lloyds of London, sends one of their trusted employees to the wedding locale to make sure it goes off without a hitch. What happens next is a series of unexpected events that attempt to derail the ceremony at every turn.Love Insurance is a screwball comedy that uses the best elements of the genre. It is a fun and entertaining story that leaps off the page. The novel was later adapted for feature film including 1919’s Love Insurance, 1924’s The Reckless Age and 1940’s One Night in the Tropics With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Love Insurance is both modern and readable.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
War and Peace Books VI - X
Regular price $32.99 Sale price $21.44 Save $11.55War and Peace (1869) is a novel by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Serialized between 1865 and 1867, it was published in book form in 1869 and has since been recognized as a masterpiece of world literature. Notable for its epic scale, War and Peace encompasses hundreds of characters, diligently following its five central families across fifteen years while featuring detailed imaginings of such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte. In Books VI-X, he explores the emotions of his wide cast of characters who, during a period of tenuous peace, attempt to return to a sense of normalcy. Following Napoleon’s defeat of Russian and Austrian forces at the Battle of Austerlitz, the Rostov, Bezukhov, and Bolkonsky families struggle to adapt to a changing world. While Prince Andrei attempts to balance his political obligations with his growing affection for Natasha Rostov, his friend Pierre finds himself at a crossroads. Disillusioned with Freemasonry, obsessed with discovering a way to live ethically, he grows increasingly volatile and despondent. When Natasha is attacked by the vicious Anatole Kuragin, Pierre finds himself in the position of comforting her, and they soon form a strong attachment. After several years, however, Napoleon’s army begins advancing on Russia once more, bringing uncertainty and chaos to its traumatized people. With its juxtaposition of political peace with the private and public turmoil of his characters, Tolstoy’s story brings history to life while reminding us that the past is always closer than we care to think. As ambitious as it is triumphant, Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is an epic novel of history and family, a story of faith and the will to persevere in the face of unspeakable catastrophe. War and Peace is a work that transcends both history and description, not just for the scale of its narrative and setting, but for the scope of its philosophical interests. Since its publication, it has been praised as an essential work of literature by Ivan Turgenev, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway, and has been adapted for film, theater, and television countless times. This edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a classic of Russian literature reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.