Yeah, not a lot to add from the past week. Everything is Christmas wishes, end-of-year lists, and the ineffectual flailing our 45th POTUS. I expect things will pick up again in the new year.
Not a lot new this week for the library at Winkelman Abbey. Here we have the latest issues of Amazing Stories and Apex Magazine. I’m saving my money for the holidays and will probably burn a gift card or two to add to my collection of Russian literature, anarchist literature, and Russian anarchist literature.
Apex Book Company just announced that they will no longer be publishing the print version of their magazine, which makes me sad. It was a year-long experiment on Patreon to see if there was enough interest to keep such an endeavor afloat. According to editor Jason Sizemore, there were just barely enough subscribers to launch the print version for a year, and therefore they are going to return to only publishing electronic versions with possible annual “Best of” collections or the like. If you have not yet experienced Apex Magazine, or the books produced by Apex Book Company, I recommend you hie yourself to their online store post-haste.
In reading news, I completed Flex by Ferret Steinmetz, and immediately started the sequel The Flux, which thus far (two chapters in) is every bit as good as the first. Still about halfway through The Monster Baru Cormorant, and in the spare moments I am reading random entries in Salvage. The most recent was China Mieville’s long essay about social sadism, which is online at Salvage.zone. So it goes.
A few new books with dark and somber covers to match late-autumn Michigan. The first two are the second and third issues of Salvage, which bills itself as “a quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters,” and has the tagline “bleak is the new red.” It is good. Really really good. I first heard about it when researching different *punk literary subgenres, and came across an article about China Miéville wherein he discussed his involvement with Salvage. Miéville has lengthy essays in each of the issues I have so far purchased (2, 3, 5) and likely will have more in the future issues which arrive as part of my subscription. Well, of course I purchased a subscription.
On the right is the latest shipment from Two Lines Press, which continues to surprise me with wonderful books.
On the reading front, I have mostly recovered from the week at the AWS:Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, and am partway through The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson and Flex by Ferret Steinmetz. Both are quite excellent reads and they are absolutely nothing alike. I highly recommend both.
November was crazy busy, what with National Novel Writing Month and the AWS:Reinvent conference, so here are all the links from November 4 until now. Regular posting will resume, er, whenever.
A small update this week, which given the mountain which arrived last week is just fine. This is the latest from my subscription to the excellent Open Letter Books, which was the first publisher to which I subscribed, back in 2014 or 2015.
I spent all of this past week in Las Vegas for the AWS:Reinvent conference, which left me with a decent amount of time for books on the airplane and in airports. I read Mirra Ginsburg‘s wonderful translation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita from cover to cover, and made significant dents in Sunvault and Volume 5 of The Apex Book of World SF. I also made a little headway in the extraordinary Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez, but reading such a book in the middle of the Las Vegas strip made me want to burn the place to the ground. I will revisit Scarborough over the holidays, when I won’t be surrounded by the monetized fetishizing of the worst of first world indulgences.
Several new additions to the library at Winkelman Abbey. The titles by Yang, Palmer, Jemisin and Dickinson I ordered from Books and Mortar here in Grand Rapids. The Sanchez in the latest from my subscription to Deep Vellum, and Granta and Poetry round out the haul. Subscriptions are the best. So are superb local bookstores.
The week of November 11 brought fifteen(!) new books and journals to Winkelman Library. The top two rows are the contents of the most recent Grab Bag from Subterranean Press, one of the premiere publishers of special editions of genre fiction. The bottom row includes, from left, the latest issue of Peninsula Poets; The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years, which is the latest book from my subscription to Restless Books; Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson, which I picked up at Books and Mortar; issue 54 of McSweeney’s, and All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963 – 2018, published by McSweeney’s. All this should keep me busy for the next week or so. The books in this photo are #217 to 231 in the 2018 Reading List post, where I have included links for ordering and author information.
Only one new acquisition for the first full week of November, but that one thing was actually three things – three chapbooks, to be precise, from Ugly Duckling Presse. The collection (the box for which is at the top of the photo) is called Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets. The three are Transfigured Publicity by Paul Nougé, Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet, and For Balthazar by Louis Scutenaire.
I have to say, in the brief time that I have held a subscription to Ugly Duckling Presse they have been absolutely knocking it out of the park.
This past week was an excellent time to be a reader at the Winkelman Abbey. A fantastic variety of books and journals arrived throughout the week. The top row of this photo is ALL FIVE VOLUMES of the Apex Book of World SF, published by the excellent folks at Apex Publications.
The bottom row contains, from left, Resist Fascism from a Kickstarter campaign run by Bart Leib of Crossed Genres Publishing. Next to that is The Way North, an anthology of Upper Peninsula writing which I picked up when I ordered an upcoming volume of poetry by Jack Ridl, which I will undoubtedly post here when it arrives next spring. Third in is the latest issue of Apex Magazine by the same folks who created all of the books in the top row. On the right side of the bottom row is a recent issue of Sugar House, a lit journal which I picked up for research purposes as I plan my next round of poetry submissions.
All in all, excellent additions to my library.