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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Erin K. Wagner's When Home, No Need to Cry


 

 I'm pleased to announce the release of When Home, No Need to Cry, a collection of short fiction by Erin K. Wagner and is the eighty-fifth volume in our Conversation Pieces Series. It is available now in both print and e-book editions at www.aqueduct press.com

 

 

A child spells away the changeling that haunts her. An Appalachian girl marries young and learns that men don’t die easy. A dying astronaut yearns to return to space and the alien dreams that crept inside her head. An old woman chases down her most elusive prey and realizes the hunt isn’t worth it. From sunny kitchens to arid Mars, this collection of stories traces the quiet things that haunt us, whether it be suspicions of neighbors, the failures of memory, or the ghosts of planets.

You can read a sample of the book at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-232-9.pdf.

 

Reviews

 Wagner collects 10 speculative shorts loosely connected by a quietly brooding aesthetic and themes of how humanity is changed by brushes with the supernatural or extraterrestrial. “Blowflies” calls on the author’s Appalachian heritage and evokes a lonely mood, while “How to Tell the Future by Tea Leaves, Stars, and Cards” uses a child’s limited understanding of her weirdly unsettling environment to set a scene both luminous and stifling. The standout, “Blood & Formalin,” follows an embalmer in a time of war as he is confronted with what caring for the dead really means. The last three stories move the collection to outer space: an astronaut waits to die in a space shuttle in the title piece; the human population of Mars has developed a different sense of priorities than their Terran tourists in “A Planet Like Earth”; and “From That Sea of Time” takes readers to an entire planet abandoned in mournful memorial. Wagner’s writing seats itself deeply in each individual narrator’s perspective and explores the tension between individual agency and the undeniable pull of the strange. Readers are sure to be enthralled. --Publishers Weekly


 

 


Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Nisi Shawl's Our Fruiting Bodies


 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Our Fruiting Bodies, a collection of short fiction by Nisi Shawl, in both paperback and ebook editions. It's available now from Aqueduct at www.aqueductpress.com. And you can read a sample from the book here: http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-224-4.pdf.

 Our Fruiting Bodies collects stories of old growth and fresh decay, of stubborn rebirth and the faint but nonimaginary paths connecting life and nonlife.From the sharp, sweet confessional of their Peter Pan-inspired “Awfully Big Adventure,” through the melting ambitextualities of “Just Us”—from the early, dizzy-eyed quest at the heart of “Looking for Lilith” through the newly unfurling tendrils that pierce the grounds of “I Being Young and Foolish,” Nisi Shawl’s search for the power of fiction’s truth puts pure, precious gifts right here, right in your hands, ripe and ready for reading.

Nisi Shawl's Our Fruiting Bodies is a wilderness of untamed magic to explore, ever changing underfoot, beauty thorned and fertile with meaning, nurtured by the most talented of keepers. Shawl trusts their readers to be attuned to the mysteries of the imagined, rather than sated by formula or convention.
 —Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers 

Reviews

Rich in diversity and imagination, this will delight any speculative fiction reader.  (Read the whole review)
  —Publishers Weekly, Aug 15, 2022

"Nebula Award nominee Shawl (Everfair, 2016) presents a new collection of fantastical short fiction bound to delight speculative fiction and Afrofuturism readers."--Booklist, Nov 2022 (the whole review will be available when it goes online on Nov. 10.)