fantastic books

DC convention next weekend

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Convention weekend: I’ll be at Capclave in Gaithersburg, Maryland, September 29 to October 1. It’s a smaller, powerful convention that tends to focus on short fiction.

If you’re looking for me, I will be (as always) tethered to the Fantastic Books table in the dealers’ room (open Friday from 3 to 6pm, Saturday from 10am to 6pm, and Sunday from 10am to 2pm).

I’ll also be on programming

Friday at 5:30 pm in the Wilson room: “Exquisite Corpse Writing Challenge” with Hildy Silverman, Richard Peter Haviland Sparks, and Mary G. Thompson

Friday at 7:00 pm in the Washington Theater: “Anthology Builder” with Neil Clarke, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Mike McPhail, Neil Clarke, and Alex Shvartsman

Friday at 10:00 pm in the Wilson room: “The Writer’s Toolkit” with Ken Altabef, Morgan Hazelwood, Mike McPhail, and Adeena Mignogna

Saturday at 10:00 pm in the Washington Theater: “The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian” with Hildy Silverman, Michael A. Ventrella, and perhaps some other special guest

Good review of Jewish Futures

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Untitled-150Sorry you haven’t heard from me recently; it’s been a busy month. There was the trip to South Carolina, four days at home, a week-long family cruise (from which I still haven’t gone through the pictures, though I intend to, in order to share some), the book-launch event in Massachusetts (I was there for three days), and now, finally, trying to get back up to speed.

In the midst of all that comes this wonderful review of Jewish Futures from the Elder of Ziyon blog:

“[M]any of these stories are good enough to be included in collections of the best SF of the year.… [Samantha] Katz is an enormously talented writer for a 16 year old high school student.… Leah Cypress’ ‘Frummer House’ is a laugh-out-loud funny story about smart homes that suddenly enforce a higher level of religiosity on their Jewish residents than they are comfortable with. It is so steeped in frumkeit that it has its own glossary so everyone else could understand it. For religious Jews who would get the references, the book is worth it for this story alone.… ‘Initial Engagement’ by Steven H. Silver uses a future world to help us understand our world [and] is the epitome of what SF should be.… The longest, and best, story in the collection is ‘Moon Melody’ by SM Rosenberg. It is outstanding in how it explores the moral issues of [the characters’ superpowers].… I would be surprised and disappointed if ‘Moon Melody’ is not included in the Best of the Year anthologies for 2023.… Altogether, it is a really good collection of stories, with a higher percentage of stories that I enjoy than most anthologies I have read. There have been other Jewish science fiction anthologies… but this is to my mind by far the best, the most professional, and the most Jewish of all of them.”

Amazon Rejects Jewish Futures

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Breaking news: Amazon.com has decided to “block [the ebook version of Jewish Futures] from being sold on Amazon.” Apparently, the fact that Fantastic Books published the print version means that Fantastic Books submitting the ebook version to publish through them violates… something. I have no idea. So, if you use a Kindle ebook reader, and you’d like to read an electronic version of Jewish Futures, we recommend you buy it directly from Fantastic Books. Doing so will get you both the epub and the mobi versions of the book.
Amazon provides a number of ways to load your eBooks on to your Kindle. For instance, you can email it to your Kindle address. Click this link for their email instructions, however the “Other Ways to Send” column on the right side of the Amazon page also shows you the other options available to you.
Also, they seem to have finally realized that the trade paperback version of the book is available.

Book signing in Boston

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Untitled-150We are delighted to announce that on Wednesday, August 23, at 7 pm, we will be having a book event for Jewish Futures at Brookline Booksmith! Editor Michael A. Burstein will be moderating a panel discussion with me as the publisher, cover artist Eli Portman, and contributors EM Ben Shaul, Abraham Josephine Riesman & SI Rosenbaum. If you’d like to attend, please use the link to let the store know you will be there! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jewish-futures-stories-from-the-worlds-oldest-diaspora-tickets-667143473087?fbclid=IwAR1rINPQkYChS-w_ISSURifRYdnL9QwNuOO9mhQ2UCbP7MPe7phtplva1e4

Busy day in publishing-land

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Untitled-150It’s been a busy — but productive — day here in publishing land.

I woke up early, hoping to get a lot done. But looking back on the not-yet-complete day, there’s been even more accomplishment than I expected.

One of those accomplishments which I can talk about include finalizing and revealing the cover of the forthcoming anthology Jewish Futures, edited by Michael A. Burstein, with cover art by Eli Portman.

And then, following up on emails from two friends, and a slew of people looking to download a non-existent ebook, I was able to finalize and make available the ebook versions of Barry N. Malzberg’s essay collection The Bend at the End of the Road.

Beyond those, there was a bunch of not-yet-talking-about-it-publicly work that got done, and I also managed a little time for my own writing. So yes, it’s being a pretty good day.

Back-to-back science fiction conventions

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I’m hitting the road on Friday for a couple of weeks. It started with two science fiction conventions on successive weekends, and I’ve decided to extend the in-between and after time, so I’ll be away for a while (with, probably, intermittent on-line access).

This weekend, I’ll be at Balticon in Baltimore, Maryland. As usual, I’ll be at the Fantastic Books table in the dealers’ room for a lot of the time. But programming put me on a slew of panels while the dealers’ room is open, so I hope to have friends staffing the table while I’m elsewhere panelizing. (That’s also a round-about way of saying I might have to miss one or two of the panels I expect to be on.)

If you’re looking for me on those panels, my schedule is:

Friday at 4:00 PM in Gibson: “So, you want to be a writer?” with Joshua Bilmes, Monica Louzon, and Michael A. Ventrella.

Saturday at 2:30 PM in Club Lounge: “Are classics still relevant? Is older SFF ‘unreadable’?” with AD Boorman, Max Baskin, Randee Dawn, and Mark Roth-Whitroth.

Saturday at 4:00 PM in James: “Making Old Hats New” with Eric Hardenbrook and Mark L. Van Name.

Sunday at 1:00 PM in Mount Washington: “Editors Can Be Your Friends” with Scott H. Andrews, Joshua Bilmes, Bjorn E. Hasseler, and Joy Ward.

Sunday at 2:30 PM in James: “Honing the Writer’s Craft Through Short Stories” with Scott H. Andrews, Elektra Hammond, and Alex Shvartsman.

Sunday at 4:00 PM in Club Lounge: “The New World of Publishing” with Joshua Bilmes, Shahid Mahmud, and Alex Shvartsman.

Sunday at 8:30 PM in Guilford: “Plot a story from audience input” with Randee Dawn, Michael M. Jones, Ken Schrader, and Mary G. Thompson.

The convention wraps up Monday, and then I expect to overnight somewhere in Virginia with friends, and then drive down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a couple days.

The following weekend, June 2-4, I’ll be at ConCarolinas for the first time (in Charlotte, North Carolina). I don’t have a table in the dealers’ room, but I will have a table in what they call Authors’ Alley. I fear the table space may be limited, meaning I’ll only be able to show a smattering of the Fantastic Books books that are available. We’ll see. New convention: new experiences.

The panels I’m scheduled to be on at ConCarolinas are:

Friday at 10 PM in Olmstead: “The Ethics of Using AI and Machine Learning in Content Creation” with Bishop O’Connell, William C. Tracy, and Brandon N. Whitworth.

Saturday at 12:30 PM in Olmstead: “How to Destroy the World” with Charlie Kaufman, Darin Kennedy, Cisca Small, and Mel Todd.

Sunday at 12:30 PM in Keynes: “Walking On Sunshine and Where’s the Beef” with Samantha Bryant, Nancy Northcott, and Amy Ravenel.

Sunday at 1:30 PM in Walden: “Mars Wants What?” with R.M. Hamrick, Michael Mammay, Edward McKeown, and Sumiko Saulson.

After that convention, I’ll probably spend another week or so in the Carolinas, before heading back home to New York. Should be quite an adventure! Hope to see lots of you there (and there, and there…).

Asimov’s reviews Three Time Travelers Walk Into…

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ThreeTimeTravelers_FrontIn his review in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Peter Heck recommends Three Time Travelers Walk Into… (edited by Michael A. Ventrella, published by Fantastic Books in May), calling it “highly entertaining” and “thoroughly readable.” He also includes specific mentions of Gail Martin’s “The Mystic Lamb,” Peter David’s “A Christmas Prelude,” Jonathan Maberry’s “The Adventure of the Confounded Writer,” and says “one writer—no spoilers here—gives a younger version of himself a chance to alter history after meeting two of his mentors and the version of himself who has lived through our history—a tour de force of time-travel twists and turns.”

On Dhalgren, electronically

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9781515424192A while back, Fantastic Books published On Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren: the definitive collection of reviews, commentary, and discussions of the classic novel. I was (and still am) thrilled to have been a part of this book, working closely with Delany himself to see that it was published in the form he wanted.

Publishers Weekly said of the book “Samuel R. Delany’s influential and divisive 1975 novel Dhalgren gets a full critical treatment in this immersive and comprehensive collection.… Fans of Delaney’s classic will want to snap this up.”

It is, however, one of the more expensive books we’ve published, because it contains a bunch of color illustrations. So for those of you who wanted the book, but couldn’t justify the price tag, the ebook version is now available. As with all of our titles, we’re selling the ebook directly from our new web site. It’s also available from the usual retailers.

https://www.fantasticbooks.biz/product-page/on-samuel-r-delany-s-dhalgren-edited-by-bill-wood-1

Electronic Eye of Argon

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Untitled-41212Due to some outrageous formatting in the printed book, there’s no way to produce a standard ebook of Fantastic Books’ The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventure of Grignr the Barbarian. But due to the popularity of the book — and the new Fantastic Books web site — I decided to offer a pdf version of the book. It’s available, as of five minutes ago, for download only from the site, at this link: https://www.fantasticbooks.biz/product-page/the-eye-of-argon-and-the-further-adventures-of-grignr-the-barbarian