Stone Martyrs by Erik Hofstatter

 

 

 I'm pleased to announce the release, in both print and e-book editions, Stone Martyrs by Erik Hofstatter. Hofstatter tells the dark, dark story of the legendary Mother Shipton and the Rollright Stones through poetic prose. It's available now at www.aqueductpress.com, and you can read a sample from the story at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-272-5.pdf. 

 

Have you ever written to ether? When pain was the only ink available to you? When envelopes were made of flesh?

Inspired by the folklore of Mother Shipton & The Rollright Stones, Stone Martyrs presents their unheard confessions, their thoughts addressed, but never answered, when only trees listened, when stones had feelings--a collection of words their hearts never had the courage to say. Until now. 

 If stones could speak, what stories would they tell? We learn the horrific answer to that question in Erik Hofstatter’s intriguing collection of dark prose poetry. Profundity mixes with vulgarity, the sacred with the profane, as the once-human Rollright Stones near the British village of Long Compton come alive to contemplate past conquests and atrocities. Sex and violence, passion and obsession, witchcraft and loss of innocence combine in this powerful, disturbing, yet strangely moving dialogue of forever-earthbound souls.—Anna Taborska, award-winning author of For Those Who Dream Monsters and Bloody Britain

 

“Hofstatter’s Stone Martyrs has the intriguing drama of ancient myth. Poetry and prose marry perfectly to create a dichotomy of dark and light, base coarseness and ephemerality. It’s not to be missed.”–Mercedes M. Yardley, author of The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks

 

“The stories and visuals that are conjured up as you read each passage are intense, disturbing, and actually quite moving. It reads like a play, almost, and there is great use of language to really please any lover of wordplay.”—Brendan Fisher, review in Games, Brrraaains and a Head-Banging Life

 

Octavia Cade's Mary Shelley Makes a Monster

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of Mary Shelley Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade, the seventieth volume in our Conversation Pieces series, in both print and paperback editions.  You can purchase it now at www.Aqueductpress.com, where you you can also read a sample from the book,



Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is a series of fantasy-biographical poems in which Mary Shelley’s monster, bereft of its foster mother after Shelley’s death, goes searching for a replacement. All our monsters are mirrors. And when Mary Shelley’s monster—built from her life rather than her pen, born out of biography instead of blood—outlives its mother, that monster goes looking for a substitute. But all the monster really knows of women is that women write, and so the search for a replacement takes it first to Katherine Mansfield, and then to other women who know what mutilated things can be made from ink and mirrors….

New e-books from Aqueduct Press

We've just released e-book editions for four volumes in our Conversation Pieces series:

Vol. 5: Rosaleen Love's The Traveling Tide ($5.95)

Vol. 15: Lesley A. Hall's Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work ($5.95)

Vol. 24: Sylvia Kelso's Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and About Science Fiction ($5.95)

Vol. 34: Christopher Barzak's Birds and Birthdays ($5.95)

You can order them now at http://www.aqueductpress.com/.

WisCon 33 WisCon Chronicles 4

Hello Everyone.
As you may know, I've just become an Aqueductista, with my collection of SF essays coming out from Aqueduct at WisCon 33. And you doubtless also know, every year Aqueduct produces a volume covering the previous WisCon. Timmi has asked me to edit the 4th WisCon Chronicles, covering WisCon 33. It's an honour, but it also feels like a very big responsibility!

Chronicles 4 will concern me in my second hat, as editor, formal or informal, up to and including academic volumes, and I hope to blog, if sporadically, on the Chronicle's progress. For now, though, here’s a fullscale call for materials for WisCon Chronicles 4. In this volume we’re looking to include

Some academic papers,
Some extracts from work by people who read at the conference, including flash fiction, excerpts from longer fiction and poetry - especially Aqueductistas, of course.
Guest of Honour speeches, one already promised.

We’re also looking to include some panel reports.
Panels are the core of WisCon, where the important, the sensitive and the new issues for the SF and F and feminist scenes and increasingly, fandom in or out of the Blogosphere, come to light.
And we are looking from input from everyone who attended WisCon 33.

Panel reports could be on a single or several panels, or thoughts about such, any length under 4000 words, about any panel you felt was important, to you in person or to the feminist SF and F scene, or in general.

If you’ve posted such reports already, please consider passing them on to us to consider for printing. All contributors will be acknowledged, under whatever name they wish, in the Chronicles
We also want overall personal views. The notional title for the 4th Chronicls is My WisCon, and we would love to have as many of these as possible.

My Wiscons would ideally
Be under 4000 words but longer than 400
Possibly overlap with My WisCons from people who went to the same events
Need not cover everything, just your thoughtpoints
Could come as straight reports, but also as poems, letters, dialogue, recipes, and so on.

The only thing we can’t manage is illustrations, they are too expensive, so actual art or photos, sadly, might not be the best choice.

The current deadline for Chronicles 4 turn-ins is the 1st of August. Please send your thoughts and/or impressions to me at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com
Attachments are possibly better, but in the body of the post will do.

Thoughts and queries cd. also be sent there. I hope to establish an LJ community for discussion as well.
Hope to hear from you!

Fascinating, informative and entertaining"

Rick Kleffel reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl for the Agony Column. Here's a chunk of his review:

Ursula K. Leguin's 'Cheek by Jowl' (Aqueduct Press ; April 2009 ; $16) is an essential book of writing about writing and reading, particularly in the genres of fantasy and young adult fiction. If you either plan on reading or writing either, this book will be the magnifying glass and prescription eyeglasses that will make it all clear, bring it all into focus, heighten your vision. This is meta-reading.

'Cheek by Jowl'is an important book by any measure. Essays and non-fiction by one of today's most important literary figures are always welcome, but 'Cheek by Jowl' offers transcribed and expanded speeches from Ursula K. Le Guin, targeted at those who are interested in reading — and writing fantasy. And here's one the best aspects of this book; it's the product not of some castoff imprint of a mega-publisher, but the work of Aqueduct Press, a dedicated small press with an emphasis on genre fiction and women. At the moment, through May 1, they're offering a pre-release special of $12, making this book even more of a must-buy.

'Cheek by Jowl' includes 8 essays that you simply could not find collected anywhere else, and most of which you’d have been pretty hard-pressed to find in the first place. These include speeches and magazine articles, many of which have been altered and expanded for this publication. It's beautifully illustrated with a three-page list of the sources of the illustrations. It also includes an extensive bibliography for those who would read more.

The first review of Centuries Ago and Very Fast

Richard Labonte reviews Rebecca Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast here, characterizing the collection of linked stories as a "hugely imaginative fable." His review begins:

In his 15,000 years, gay immortal Vel has seen it all, from mastodons roaming the Earth in the Pleistocene era to the Stonewall riots in1969. He's had innumerable lovers, remaining young as they aged. He can trip through time, offering one boyfriend in the 20th century a handful of woolly mammoth fur snatched in a flash from thousands of years past....

"Ore," he concludes, "a mainstream science fiction novelist and short story writer with James Tiptree, Jr. and Philip K. Dick nominations to her credit, has crafted a time-travel tale incorporating ancient religious rites, a tender gay love story, snapshots of historical attitudes about homosexuality - and earthy queer erotica."

Aqueductista Events This Weekend

Two Aqueductistas will be talking, reading, and signing at bookstores on Saturday. Nisi Shawl will be appearing at Book People in Moscow, Idaho. According to the Daily Evergreen, this will be a "brown bag lunch" event and that besides reading from Filter House, Nisi will also sing with accompaniment from Brian Clark on guitar. Here a snippet from the article in the Daily Evergreen:

Her work is helping pioneer the capacities of the sci-fi genre beyond the cliches from questioning the most rigid social norms. She will be reading from her latest collection of short stories, “Filter House,” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the BookPeople of Moscow bookstore on 521 S. Main St.

“I use science fiction to question the authority of the way things are. It’s good for challenging the status quo and that’s what I use it for," she said.

Defying any branch of mainstream storytelling, Shawl said her ratio of female to male protagonists is nearly nine to one and the women are rarely preoccupied with locking down a love interest. Yet, Shawl said she doesn’t feel particularly aware of trying to write feminist literature.

“It’s not a conscious or preachy thing, gravity is a part of my work too,” she said.

On the other side of the country, in Phialdelphia, Josh Lukin will launching Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States by giving a lecture-- "How Dreams of Freedom Survive in a Conservative Time"-- at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mt. Airy at 3 p.m. Here is the bookstore's description:

Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States. Reading with Josh Lukin. An examination of fiction from repressed voices in a misunderstood decade, with essays by Stephanie Brown, Ladislava Khailova, Kathlene McDonald, Ian Peddie, Harry Thomas, and Jennifer Worley. Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time? Some scholars argue that the Red Scare, newly institutionalized discrimination against gays, and a public discourse saturated with sexism left wounds in American society. Others trace the origins of sixties liberation movements to the fifties and celebrate America's postwar prosperity, or argue that such new phenomena as rock 'n' roll, teenage consumerism, and Beat poetry gave Americans a new sense of freedom and identity. Invisible Suburbs advances a new synthesis of both views from the perspective of literary scholarship. Josh Lukin is lecturer of English at Temple University. His work has appeared in many periodicals, among them Modern Language Notes, Minnesota review, Comics Journal, and Exquisite Corpse, as well as in the anthology Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century.

Have to say, I'd love to be able to attend both of these events and am sorry I can't.