Rachel Small

I’m so very pleased to present to you … MY EDITOR – RACHEL SMALL!!! This is the person who makes me and my writing look so good! Rachel has also edited for a couple of other IslandCatEditions authors, Timothy L. Phillips and J. Michael Fay. But here she is now with her own first collection of short stories, co-authored with Carrie Mumford, and recently published! (I sure hope there are no typos or other errors in this promotion, Rachel. I’m nervous!)

Rachel Small
What is your latest release and what genre is it? None of These are True: A Collection of Short Stories is my first publication, co-authored with Carrie Mumford. The stories could be classified as literary/women’s fiction.

Quick description: It’s a collection of ten stories dedicated to female friendship. Some of the stories are about heartbreak and loss, some are funny, some nostalgic. We wanted it to feel like a conversation between friends.

Brief Biography:
I was born and raised in small-town Saskatchewan and have since lived in Calgary, London, and Berlin. Though I love to travel and will likely venture out again in the months to come, I currently call Toronto home. By day, I’m a freelance book editor. I specialize in literary fiction, memoirs, inspirational stories, and travel literature. When I take off my editor’s hat, I enjoy writing flash fiction and short stories.

Links to buy Rachel’s book:
The collection is available nearly everywhere eBooks are sold!

Rachel’s promo links:
Website
Twitter @Faultlessfinish
Goodreads

What are you working on now?
I have a couple more short stories and essays in the works and hope to dive into something longer in the months to come.

Rachel’s Reading Recommendation:
I’ve recently devoured The Difference, by Canadian writer Marina Endicott, and The Overstory, by Richard Powers (a must-read in these times of environmental destruction!).
(And what good reading taste Rachel has! Marina Endicott is on my list of Authors-Readers International and Richard Powers is one of my favourite authors! I raved about The Overstory on my other blog, What Are You Reading?)

Bruce Meyer – update on a new anthology

Bruce Meyer has previously been featured on Reading Recommendations promoting his own book of poetry and with a guest post about writing on my main blog. He’s back now with news of an anthology he has edited for Exile Editions that I believe is an important publication.

CLI-FI: Canadian Tales of Climate Change
The Exile Book of Anthology Series: Number Fourteen
Edited by Bruce Meyer
Published by Exile Editions

With the world facing the greatest global crisis of all time – climate change – personal and political indifference has wrought a series of unfolding complications that are altering our planet, and threatening our very existence. Reacting to the warnings sounded by scientists and thinkers, writers are responding imaginatively to the seriousness of changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself. These stories of Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) feature perspectives by culturally diverse Canadian writers of short fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and futurist works, and transcend traditional doomsday stories by inspiring us to overcome the bleak forecasted results of our current indifference.

Authors: George McWhirter, Richard Van Camp, Holly Schofield, Linda Rogers, Sean Virgo, Rati Mehrotra, Geoffrey W. Cole, Phil Dwyer, Kate Story, Leslie Goodreid, Nina Munteanu, Halli Villegas, John Oughton, Frank Westcott, Wendy Bone, Peter Timmerman, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, with an afterword by internationally acclaimed writer and filmmaker, Dan Bloom.

Where to purchase Cli-fi
Amazon
Chapters/Indigo
Independent Bookstores

And if you are in Toronto on May 7th, the book will be launched …

CLI-FI: Canadian Tales of Climate Change
Sunday, May 7, at the SUPERMARKET Restaurant & Bar
268 Augusta Avenue (Kennsington Market) 3:00–5:30
Readings start at 3:30
Featuring: Geoffrey W. Cole, Rati Mehrotra, Peter Timmerman, Leslie Goodreid, Halli Villegas,
John Oughton, Nina Munteanu, Lynn Hutchinson-Lee

Michael Kelly – an update on a new anthology

Michael Kelly has been previously featured on Reading Recommendations. He’s back now with news of a new anthology of fiction he has edited and published.

Shadows and Tall Trees
edited by Michael Kelly
Published by Undertow Books
Genre: Anthology of Weird Fiction

The acclaimed literary anthology Shadows & Tall Trees has featured authors short-listed for the Man Booker Award, and World Fantasy Award winners. Several of our stories have been reprinted in “Year’s Best” anthologies and have garnered numerous award nominations. The premiere anthology of weird fiction.

Shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award!

Shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award!

“Shadows and Tall Trees is a smart, soulful, illuminating investigation of the many forms and tactics available to those writers involved in one of our moment’s most interesting and necessary projects, that of opening up horror literature to every sort of formal interrogation. It is a beautiful and courageous series.”
– Peter Straub

ALL NEW STRANGE TALES FROM:
Brian Evenson, Malcolm Devlin, Rebecca Kuder, V.H. Leslie, Robert Levy, Laura Mauro, Manish Melwani, Alison Moore, Harmony Neal, Rosalie Parker, M. Rickert, Nicholas Royle, Robert Shearman, Christopher Slatsky, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Michael Wehunt, Charles Wilkinson, and Conrad Williams

Michael Kelly is the Series Editor for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 & 24, Supernatural Tales, Postscripts, Weird Fiction Review, and has been collected in Scratching the Surface, and Undertow & Other Laments. He owns and runs Undertow Publications. Undertow Publications is home to two acclaimed series’ of anthologies: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Shadows & Tall Trees.

Where to purchase:
Amazon
Undertow Books

Kimmy Beach – update on the release of a new book

Kimmy Beach was featured previously on Reading Recommendations in June 2014, and is back now to tell us about a new publication just released!

Nuala, A Fable
Robert Kroetsch Series
by Kimmy Beach
Published by The University of Alberta Press
Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism

“Shh, my Nuala. I am with you. Today I shall teach you the newness of you.”

As the Engine breathes life into Nuala, her gaze falls on Teacher-Servant, the chosen one. He alone will be able to hear her thoughts and interpret her emotions. But soon Teacher-Servant starts to worry that Nuala will be able to give away her thoughts freely. Set in an atypical dystopian world, Nuala is startlingly original and inventive, echoing the work of Margaret Atwood, José Saramago, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Beach’s dark, fearless imagination has created a time and space that are at once remote and strange, but absorbing and deeply credible. Nuala leaves the reader with much to consider about the nature of love, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and autonomy.

Where to purchase Kimmy’s Book:
The University of Alberta Press
Amazon
Chapters/Indigo
Independent Bookstores

Felicity Harley – update on a new novel

Felicity Harley is a fellow Bequian author who has been featured previously on Reading Recommendations here and on my main blog, here and here. I had the great privilege to offer to beta-read and polish-edit this manuscript for Felicity, and am very pleased now to announce the publication of her new novel on a very important subject that should be of interest – and concern – to everyone!

The Burning Years
Until This Last Quartet: Book 1
by Felicity Harley
Published by Double Dragon Publishing
Genre: Literary Science Fiction

In the year, 2060, Sophie, a top female scientist, dismantles the government weather modification program and steals the male and female trans-humans who hold the promise of extended life.

While the remaining inhabitants of Earth are forced to design new underground habitats in order to survive a harsh, overheated world, Captain Rachel Chen, takes the worldship Persephone to Proxima Centauri, hoping this new star system will provide a refuge for the survivors of the human race.

Advance Reviews
“I LOVED this book. Even more than my just “loving it,” though, I feel very strongly that it critically bridges and transcends audiences and the timing is beyond perfect. I believe what you’ve written is incredibly important.

“Your science, both current and future, is sound and far-reaching. You tap into so many levels of what’s going on, and what can possibly go on (travel beyond our planet). I really like the “voice” throughout the book, regardless of which scenario you’ve dropped the reader into. All are equally engaging and the character development is even and (almost) clinically objective. I think this will really (also) appeal to a sci-fi audience, which is awesome and very “in line” with today’s readers.

“Additionally, I have to admit that I was haunted by your descriptions of the plutocracy and their reckless disregard for the vast majority of living things on Earth. What OTHER possible explanation can there even BE than yours (that they consider everyone but themselves to be “takers”)? Your descriptions of the political elite align perfectly with real-time scenes playing out across America right now.

“The mix and “balance” of gloom and despair vs. incredible scientific achievements removed what might have become an almost claustrophobic effect. Example: The US population goes from 318 million to 10 million VS Rachel’s living, breathing personal space on Persephone which made me think of the vividness and aching beauty of the forests in the movie, “Avatar.” Very hard to achieve this effect.

“[Side bar: VERY nice weaving of string theory, parallel universes, quantum entanglement, Maslow, and the heliosphere’s foam zone in the book! Also, excellent timing with “Stranger Things” making the US Department of Energy out to potentially be devastating in the future– and you’ve got DARPA. Perfect!]

“After I finished the book, I again visited your website for The Burning Years. As I scrolled down to the pictures at the bottom, seeing them for the first time, it was SO NEAT. I advise anyone who reads the book to do the same thing.

“Here’s a fiction that’s not afraid to tackle some of the biggest topics of our time.”

Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature and numerous environmental books, and founder of 350.org

“… the journey through a different way of inhabiting our solar system based on the latest technologies, developments, and beliefs about who we are and our relationship to living, life, and space … It’s wonderful―”

Rachel Armstrong, TED Senior Fellow, Professor and Pioneer of “Living Architecture”

To read an excerpt of the novel, please click here and scroll down.

The Burning Years Website
And for more information about Climate Change, please read this article, We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change

Where to purchase Felicity’s book:
Double Dragon Publishing

Ken McGoogan – update on a new edition of a previous novel

Ken McGoogan previously visited Reading Recommendations in Sept. 2016, and is back to tell us about a re-release of a novel he published in 1993 that is now available again in print and as an eBook.

Kerouac’s Ghost
by Ken McGoogan
Published by Bev Editions
Genre: Literary Fiction

Frankie McCracken is still recovering from the Psychedelic Sixties when, while working as a fire lookout in the Canadian Rockies, he finds himself wrestling with a miracle-worker who claims to be the late Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats. This kaleidoscopic coming-of-age novel arrives in 2016 like a note in a bottle from a distant world.

Fiction writer Matt Cohen hailed this work as “an unrepentant blast from the past.” It juggles timelines and narrators, asserts that Kerouac was bigger than Beat, and celebrates his French Canadian roots. This long-awaited, revised digital edition is the definitive version of a favourite novel.

Reviews:
“An unrepentant blast from the past, a politically incorrect celebration of men as libidinous explorers of the physical and spiritual unknown.”
Matt Cohen

“Larger than life and crackling with energy . . . an exuberant celebration of the King Beat himself.”
Charles Mandel

“What I like best about Visions of Kerouac is the gentle voice of conscience underneath the adventure narrative, the writer who is not afraid to find his own heart and follow it amid a wilderness of souls who have lost their way . . . . McGoogan finds the trail to a new and saner life, both for himself and for those of us lucky enough to hear his words.”
Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac

From Ken McGoogan’s Blog

Where to purchase Ken’s book:
Smashwords
Amazon
KOBO

Gail Anderson Dargatz – a new novel

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has visited Reading Recommendations a few times, here, here and here. She’s back now to tell us about a new novel.

The long-awaited new novel by the two-time Giller-shortlisted author is full of the qualities Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s fans love: it’s an intimate family saga rooted in the Thompson-Shuswap region of British Columbia, and saturated with the history of the place. A bold new story that bridges Native and white cultures across a bend in a river where the salmon run.

On one side of the river is a ranch once owned by Eugene Robertson, who came in the gold rush around 1860, and stayed on as a homesteader. On the other side is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river–and the whites. At the heart of the novel are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. As the novel opens, the river is dying, its flow reduced to a trickle, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah’s grandfather and her little brother, their world is thrown into chaos. Hannah, Alex, and most especially Brandon come to doubt their own reality as they are pulled deep into Brandon’s numinous visions, which summon the myths of Shuswap culture and tragic family stories of the past.

The novel hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit, all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the white and Native worlds together in love, and hate, and tragedy for 150 years. Can Hannah and her brother, and Alex, find a way forward that will neither destroy the river nor themselves?

Article about Gail in The Toronto Star.

Where to purchase copies:
Penguin Random House Canada

Robert Eggleton

Robert Eggleton

What is your latest release and what genre is it? Rarity from the Hollow is an adult literary novel, science fiction.

Quick description: Lacy Dawn’s father relives the Gulf War, her mother’s teeth are rotting out, and her best friend is murdered by the meanest daddy on Earth. Life in the hollow is hard. She has one advantage — an android was inserted into her life and is working with her to cure her parents. But, he wants something in exchange. It’s up to her to save the Universe. Lacy Dawn doesn’t mind saving the universe, but her family and friends come first.

Rarity from the Hollow is adult literary science fiction filled with tragedy, comedy and satire. A Children’s Story. For Adults.

Brief biography:
Robert Eggleton has served as a children’s advocate in an impoverished state for over forty years. He is best known for his investigative reports about children’s programs, most of which were published by the West Virginia Supreme Court where he worked from 1982 through 1997, and which also included publication of models of serving disadvantaged and homeless children in the community instead of in large institutions, research into foster care drift involving children bouncing from one home to the next — never finding a permanent loving family, and statistical reports on the occurrence and correlates of child abuse and delinquency.

Today, he is a recently retired children’s psychotherapist from the mental health center in Charleston, West Virginia, where he specialized in helping victims cope with and overcome physical and sexual abuse, and other mental health concerns. Rarity from the Hollow is his debut novel. Its release followed publication of three short Lacy Dawn Adventures in magazines: Wingspan Quarterly, Beyond Centauri, and Atomjack Science Fiction. The second edition of Rarity from the Hollow was released on November 3, 2016. Author proceeds have been donated to a child abuse prevention program operated by Children’s Home Society of West Virginia. Robert continues to write fiction with new adventures based on a protagonist that is a composite character of children he met when delivering group therapy services. The overall theme of his stories remains victimization to empowerment.

Links to buy Robert’s book:
Lulu
Amazon
Dog Horn Publishing

Robert’s promo links:
Website
Goodreads
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
LinkedIn

What are you working on now?
The next full-length Lacy Dawn Adventure is Ivy, also within the speculative fiction genre. How far will a child go to save a parent from addiction? Stopping an alien invasion was merely a rest area on the side road of this almost forgotten town.

Robert’s reading recommendation:
For anybody experiencing serious medical concerns, or as a gift to a loved one who is, I recommend The Warrior Patient by Temple Williams. It’s an amazing book about the importance of assertiveness in our health care delivery system.

Lee D. Thompson

Lee D. Thompson

What is your latest release and what genre is it? Mouth Human Must Die -literary fiction

Quick description: The book itself is a limited edition with Frog Hollow Press, who specialize in chapbooks, broadsheets – fine printing, if you will. Lovely design, great paper. The story – all 7500 words of it – is narrated by Lester, a man with a mental illness. It chronicles a few days of his life and his interactions with Dr. Shabazz, a psychologist, and Lara, a Slow Loris at the nearby zoo.

Brief biography:
I’m from Moncton, New Brunswick (Canada) and have been publishing fiction for 18 years. I’m far too involved with literary things, from having run the provincial writers’ federation to organizing a reader series and editing a literary journal called Galleon. I’m also a freelance editor. And a songwriter/guitarist.

Here’s a review published in The Miramichi Reader.

Links to buy Lee’s book:
Frog Hollow Press

Lee’s promo links:
Blog “Indistractable”
Twitter
Galleon Journal
Editing Services

What are you working on now?
Mouth Human… is part of a story collection, four of which I’ve written, with another four to go. They are long stories, each involving, in its own way, a psychologist named Dr. Shabazz.

Lee’s reading recommendation:
Just finished a story collection by André Narbonne, Twelve Miles to Midnight. Excellent.

Bob Van Laerhoven – update and a special offer

Belgian author, Bob Van Laerhoven, has returned to Reading Recommendations to tell us of a new English translation edition of his novel, Baudelaire’s Revenge, and a special price for the eBook at Amazon for the rest of December.

Baudelaire’s Revenge: A Novel
by Bob Van Laerhoven
Translated by Brian Doyle
Published in English by Pegasus Books
Genre: Fiction – mystery, thriller, suspense

Winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for Best Crime Novel – Winner of the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category Fiction: mystery/suspense

Paris police commissioner Paul Lefèvre, robust and hirsute, hardly seems like a poetry lover. Nonetheless, he instantly recognizes the messages accompanying murder victims killed in flamboyant ways as excerpts from poems by the scandalous, recently deceased poet Baudelaire. Is this gruesomely inventive serial killer exacting revenge on Baudelaire’s enemies? Paris is in an uproar in 1870. The Franco-Prussian War is on full boil, the poor are hungry and insurrectional, and the decadent rich are partying. As Lefèvre and longtime comrade Inspector Bernard Bouveroux—they served together as soldiers in Algiers—seek to stop this diabolical, perhaps otherwordly serial killer, the philosophical Lefèvre is haunted by traumatic memories of war and a childhood abomination. He is also longing for his sharp-witted beloved, the now-missing prostitute Claire de la Lune. In this superbly crafted Hercule Poirot Prize–winning mystery, Belgian writer Van Laerhoven vividly and astutely evokes a city under siege and keenly portrays the complex and controversial Baudelaire. But he also constructs a wildly convoluted and sexually explicit gothic tale of monstrous urges and violently broken taboos.

Some great news: Amazon has selected BAUDELAIRE’S REVENGE for their Kindle 100 promotion for the month of December. From 12/1 to 12/31, it will have a promotional price of $0.99, and it will receive featured placement on the Monthly Kindle Deals page and in Amazon merchandising materials. (Availability of this special may be limited to North America.)

Amazon Canada