The Feminist Futures Bundle

I'm really pleased too announce The Feminist Futures Bundle, a bundle of e-books that are entirely feminist sf/f, and includes Alanya to Alanya, the first volume of my Marq'ssan Cycle. The bundle goes on sale tonight and will be available for a limited time. Let me turn you over to Cat Rambo, who curated this wonderful bundle:

In time for Women's History Month, here's a celebration of some of the best science fiction being written by women today. This bundle gathers a wide range of outlooks and possibilities, including an anthology that gives you a smorgasbord of other authors you may enjoy.

I used to work in the tech industry, and there I saw how diversity could enhance a team and expand its skillset. Women understand that marketing to women is something other than coming up with a lady-version of a potato chip designed not to crunch or a pink pen sized for our dainty hands. Diversity means more perspectives, and this applies to science fiction as well. I am more pleased with this bundle than any I've curated so far.

In her feminist literary theory classic How to Suppress Women's Writing, science fiction author Joanna Russ talked about the forces working against the works of women (and minority) writers. A counter to that is making a point of reading and celebrating such work, and for me this bundle is part of that personal effort, introducing you to some of my favorites.

And in the name of expanding one's knowledge and enjoyment of women writing SF, the majority of these books are first volumes of series, and I hope if you enjoy them, you'll find the others as well as telling other people about them. The Kirstein series is the only one where not all the books are available; she's currently working on book five and plans seven altogether. Many of them are independently or small press published, showing the depth and quality of work such publishing venues can yield.

I come to the task of writing these notes having just finished reading through a slush pile for an anthology I'm editing, If This Goes On, devoted to political science fiction. Some of the themes there are echoed in some of the works here, and it's been interesting to note the resonances. Other books in the bundle are more lighthearted or escapist. I hope everyone will find at least a few they enjoy, and that many readers will join me in thinking they're all swell.

I'll be doing some video interviews with authors about their books - look for the hashtag #thefutureisfeminist on social media or subscribe to my Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/spezzatura) or newsletter (http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/newsletter/) to make sure you get notified when they appear! – Cat Rambo

The initial titles in the Feminist Futures Bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:

• Happy Snak by Nicole Kimberling
• Alanya to Alanya by L. Timmel Duchamp
• Code of Conduct by Kristine Smith
• The Birthday Problem by Caren Gussoff

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular titles, plus SIX more!

• Starfarers Quartet Omnibus - Books 1-4 by Vonda N. McIntyre
• The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
• Spots the Space Marine by M.C.A. Hogarth
• The Terrorists of Irustan by Louise Marley
• Queen & Commander by Janine A. Southard
• To Shape the Dark by Athena Andreadis

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!

It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

• Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.
• Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.
• Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.
• Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now!
• Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you'll get the bonus books!

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, tweet us at @storybundle and like us on Facebook.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2016, pt. 7: Caren Gussoff

The Pleasures of 2016: How One Social Justice Warrior Prepares to Fight for 2017

by Caren Gussoff

I've been trying to write about the pleasures of 2016. There's a cogent draft, sitting in my Google Drive: cogent, but half-hearted, and, in places, downright despondent. Trump's endorsing a yahoo, who famously forgot the Department of Energy even existed, to lead it, replacing a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Citizens in Aleppo are posting final farewells on social media. Hamas supporters are celebrating the group's 29th birthday by giving their children toy machine gun replicas to wave in the streets (regardless of where you fall on this issue, why not give the kids, I don't know, balloons?).  And this is just today's news, the 14th, as I type this.

I want to tell you about Adrian Barnes' Nod, which turns our collective anxiety and dysfunction over sleep (so beautifully exploited in Karen Russell's 2014 novella, Sleep Donation) into the plague that ends the world, but not before a carnival of phantasmagorical horrors -- nightmares, even -- set us up for the kill.

Or Charlie Jane Ander's All The Birds In the Sky, which tells half its story of time through the quirky, and sometimes maddening, structure of the book itself, rekindling my optimism about postmodernism and the genre novel.

There was also Keanu, a film that disguised its incisive social satire and honest glimpse at race relations in a post-Obama America behind one of the cutest kittens to be captured on film.

I really did want to spend all my time on these, because they are totally worth it, and maybe more so, now, as glittering islands of human goodness in a world that feels like lightness may become a precious commodity, and one to fight for.

In that spirit, I want to share my (in progress) reading list for 2017. There's so much I don't know, and while I mayn't take pleasure in why these are on my reading list, I will in knowing that whatever is down the road, I'm using my brain and my voice, as well as my heart. I want to have pleasures again, in 2017, 18, and onward.

1. The Qur'an: I can't defend Muslim brothers or family unless I go to the source. 

2. Man's Search For Meaning: Viktor Frankel survived Auschwitz, physically and spiritually. He left us a guide as to how he did this.

3. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: We elected the first black president, yet incarcerate disproportionately more black men. And, if nothing else, November results illustrate that racism remains alive and well.

4. Animal Farm: Time to re-read. We elected Napoleon. 

5. Black Panther -- A Nation Under Our Feet: For when I feel squashed beneath this list, Te-Nehisi Coates' take on the Marvel hero will remind me what we're fighting for to begin with.

I would love to hear more suggestions for my list. Comments are appreciated, or email me directly at caren at spitkitten.com.

Caren Gussoff''s novella, Three Songs for Roxy, a First Contact story, was published as a Conversation Piece in 2015, and her pandemic zombie math novel, The Birthday Problem, preceded that by a year. She has published numerous pieces of short fiction. For more about her and a list of her publications, visit her at spitkitten.com.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening, Pt. 2: Caren Gussoff

Beautiful and Resilient
by Caren Gussoff 

2015's done.

You feel my relief, typing out those two little words, a dicyanoacetylene blue fire in ozone. Right?

And there's no one, nearly, around me who's sad to see this year go. This year choked itself with tragedies, small and large, personal and global. Many of my most-loveds wrestled demons and heartache.

And there was Trump.

In direct contrast to the anguish-smeared offal potpourri that was 2015, however, some remarkable work happened, reminders that humanity can be beautiful and resilient, that anything is possible tomorrow, and that there are wonderful ways to escape your present, if it's filled with as much grief and trouble as we've seen.

~Pretty Much Dead, Daphne Gottlieb (Ladybox Books): As much fable as love-letter to pre-tech wealth San Francisco, Gottlieb's latest collection of short stories are ugly-beautiful in the way only cities, themselves, can be, when you're hungry and uncomfortable, and struck by how apartments are more like stacked people nests than sensible shelter and subways are dragons. The workmanship in these pieces is unbelievable; I only put this book down in order to occasionally feel sorry for myself that I hadn't written sentences this good -- a feeling I honestly haven't had since the first time I read Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son in college.

~A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, Lucia Berlin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): When Lucia Berlin died in 2004, commercial success had eluded her (like the rest of us). In her case, though, I have no idea why: her quiet stories of love and failure, addiction, jealousy, pain and redemption are kinder, more true, than Raymond Carver's (yes, I understand what I'm claiming). While literary fiction can fall over itself with its frosty sophistication, Berlin was devoted to her characters, whether they did right or wrong, and wrote with such love, it's impossible to not feel loved. Most of the stories in this new book are culled from her previous collections, but re-reading them together was fresh and a fine perspective across an underappreciated genius's body of work.

~The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf): I have to admit, I have a thing for Ishiguro. It's a lot like my thing for Chip Delany. I can't guarantee you that I wouldn't love 800 pages of the word "fart" if one of those men wrote it. That being said, The Buried Giant was awesome. It's a sad book. Books about forgetting are always sad -- at least to me -- and it's pretty standard Ishiguro to be extra bittersweet about it. There's also the whole Ishiguro plot where what's happening is not what's actually happening, and you only get hints at what's actually going on with Axl and Beatrice, and, if you haven't enjoyed that feeling in Never Let Me Go or The Unconsoled, you aren't going to be happy with this one either -- regardless of how many critics wrote that The Buried Giant was a "…departure" for him. And, if you've never read any Ishiguro, my genre-friends, this one has magical creatures and all kinds of toothy speculative elements to sweeten the deal of reading a book by one of the greatest stylists anywhere.

And with that, friends, I officially close out the year. May 2016 be filled with better times, high hopes, and books we hold high to toast lives lived in boundless joy.

Yes.

Caren Gussoff's currently publishing a serial mystery novel, Last End, right now on chanillo.com. Three Songs for Roxy, her First Contact novella, was published as a Conversation Piece in 2015, and her pandemic zombie math novel, The Birthday Problem, preceded that by a year. Her latest short work will be out in Black Static sometime soon. For all and more, visit her at spitkitten.com.

Caren Gussoff, Cat Rambo, and Julie McGilliand Reading in Seattle

On Wednesday evening, April 8, Caren Gussoff will be reading with Cat Rambo and Julie McGilliand at University Bookstore in Seattle. Caren will be reading from her newly released CP volume, Three Songs for Roxy, Cat will be reading from her debut novel Beasts of Tabat and Julie from Waking Up Naked. Books will be available for purchase! Authors will be happy to sign them! And I will be there in the audience, cheering. Do come, if you can.

Caren Gussoff's Three Songs for Roxy

 
I'm pleased to announce the Publication of Three Songs for Roxy, a novella by Caren Gussoff, in both small trade paperback and e-book editions. Three Songs for Roxy tells three inter-related tales: of Kizzy, a foundling raised by a Romany Gypsy family in present-day Seattle, as she is about to be claimed by the aliens who left her to be raised as human; of Scott Lynn Miller, an unstable survivor of Katrina and security guard who is deeply affected by what he witnesses when the aliens contact Kizzy; and of "Natalie," an alien assigned to retrieve Kizzy, who is befriended by the current champion of the "Night of a Thousand Stevies" and falls in love with Kizzy's adopted sister Roxy. Three Songs for Roxy explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and what it means to be an outsider.

“Some stories aren’t meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles. In the telling, mundane stories become colorful, colorful becomes fantastic, fantastic becomes legend, and legend becomes myth. Some stories aren’t meant to be beautiful or mythic, they are meant to be true—chachi paramcha—and so those are better not told.”—from Three Songs for Roxy

Gussoff, nevertheless, tells some of those stories in all their mundane (and colorful) details. When does the mundane become fantastic? And when is the fantastic mistaken for the mundane? Gussoff’s is a world of permeable borders.

The book, which is the forty-second volume in the Conversation Pieces series, is available now in both print and e-book editions through Aqueduct's website and will soon be available elsewhere. 

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 3, 4

The Fall issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out! You can purchase the issue for $3 (or subscribe for $10) at http://www.thecsz.com/.

Vol. 3, No. 4:Vol No. 4 — October 2013

Essay

Seeing C.M. Kornbluth as Gender-Egalitarian
  by Mark Rich

Poem

a tipping point
  by Gwynne Garfinkl

Grandmother Magma

Two Eleusinian Mysteries
Lud-in-the-Mist and
Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
 by Michael Swanwick

Reviews

Big Mama Stories
by Eleanor Arnason
  reviewed by Andrea Hairston

We See a Different Frontier
edited by Fabio Fernandes
and Djibril al-Ayad
  reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Caution: Contains Small Parts
by Kirstyn McDermott
  reviewed by Kiini Ibura Salaam

She Walks in Darkness
by Evangeline Walton
  reviewed by Caren Gussoff

One Small Step
edited by Tehani Wessely
  reviewed by Karen Burnham

Sea Change
by S.M. Wheeler
  reviewed by Nisi Shawl

Featured Artist

Luisah Teish