Small Beer Press

Washington Post Notable Books: "A charming and funny sequel to Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows."

In this delightful dive into the bygone world of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows staunch Mole, sociable Water Rat, severe Badger, and troublesome and ebullient Toad of Toad Hall are joined by a young mole lady, Beryl, and her dear friend, Rabbit. There are adventures, kidnappings, lost letters, and family secrets—lavishly illustrated throughout by award-winning artist Kathleen Jennings.

Praise for Kij Johnson:

“The Fox Woman immediately sets the author in the front rank of today’s novelists.” —Lloyd Alexander

“Johnson has a singular vision and I’m going to be borrowing (stealing) from her.” —Sherman Alexie

“Johnson’s language is beautiful, her descriptions of setting visceral, and her characters compellingly drawn.” —Publishers Weekly (starred re-view)

“Johnson would fit quite comfortably on a shelf with Karen Russell, Erin Morgen-stern and others who hover in the simultaneous state of being both “literary” and “fantasy” writers.” —Shelf Awareness

Kij Johnson’s stories have won the Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and Nebula awards. She has taught writing and has worked at Dark Horse, Microsoft, and Real Networks. She has run bookstores, worked as a radio announcer and engineer, edited cryptic crosswords, and waitressed in a strip bar.

Kathleen Jennings was raised on fairytales in western Queensland. She trained as a lawyer and filled the margins of her notes with pen-and-ink illustrations. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy award and has received several Ditmar Awards. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.

“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.

"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."

“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.

Cara's mother is still missing. When her brother Jax texts her from "smart kid's boot camp" in Boston, Cara and her two best friends go to the rescue. But the camp is a front for Cara's mother's organization who are fighting against a force who wants to make the planet over in its own image, which will leave no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human.

A Junior Library Guild Selection.

Lydia Millet is the author of Love in Infant Monkeys and Ghost Lights. She works at an endangered-species protection group. The Shimmers in the Night is the second book in the Dissenters series.

Praise for Joan Aiken:

"Joan Aiken's invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come."—Philip Pullman

"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.

Praise 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 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.

Praise for the Dissenters Series:

"Millet's prose is lyrically evocative ('the rhythmic scoop and splash of their paddles'). A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A thoughtful and thought-provoking beginning to a new fantasy series. The Cape Cod woods, wildlife, and beaches are depicted with loving detail, and the dark forces arrayed against the young protagonists are at once tantalizingly mystifying and alarmingly timely."—Patricia McKillip

"Readers will want to leave the lights on well after finishing this book as the detail depicted will create similarities in your mind to Clive Barker's Abarat books. Readers will likely want Cara on their team as they jump, like Alice down the rabbit hole, through the guide book that turns into a window through another world."—VOYA

How well do you actually know your family? In the third and final installment in the thrilling Dissenters series, Cara Sykes and her family are hoping to enjoy a normal Cape Cod summer. But there are strong and surprising forces lined up against them, there will be unexpected revelations, and the highest price will have to be paid.

Lydia Millet is the author of many novels for adult readers, including PEN-USA Award–winner My Happy Life. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Arizona and now works as a writer and editor at an endangered-species protection group called the Center for Biological Diversity.