Kelland has been nominated for Dark Scribe Magazine’s Black Quill Awards! Click here to see the full list of nominees and register to vote! Also check out the glowing review of Kelland and the interview with Paul G. Bens in that publication.
Curtis Smith’s Sound+Noise has a very nice writeup in the Harrisburg Magazine.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear
Just ask Elvis Scurvine. A brief joyride in a borrowed truck turns into a month-long rollercoaster with the woman he never wanted to meet. Her unorthodox views on health insurance, a failed jailbreak, a pair of Civil War reenactors, and a pharmaceutical experiment gone awry all add to the summer heat in the Crossroads of America.
“This is one wild ride which doesn’t slow down for the turns (or the PsychClones) or the sober confines of polite society. This is the romp his first book predicted; fun stuff!” – Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies
“Slightly off center, out of orbit, and very much down home, Hoosier Life & Casualty amplifies perfectly the strangeness at the crossroads of story, history, and Indiana.” – Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone
“Hoosier Life & Casualty mines the uptight, dysfunctional world of a wealthy Indianapolis family, and refines from that ore a rebel as sympathetic as Vonnegut’s Eliot Rosewater.” – James Alexander Thom, author of Saint Patrick’s Battalion
“I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining, imaginative, and very human book. It deserves a wide readership.” – Michael Z. Lewin, author of Oh Joe
We are pleased to announce that Hoosier Life & Casualty by Ian Woollen is now available through the Casperian Books website and booksellers everywhere. The first chapter can be read online here.
Terence Hawkins has guest blogs up at historical-fiction.com, Historical Boys, and Writerly So, an extract of The Rage of Achilles at The Historical Novel Review, and a review of The Rage of Achilles at 300spartanswarriors.com‘s blog.
Sybil Baker has an interview up at the Dames of Dialogue blog and an editorial in the Writers in the Sky Newsletter.
Richard Labonte has reviewed Paul G. Bens’ novel Kelland at Pride Source.
Blood. Guts. Pride. Wrath.
The ancient clash of armies outside the walls of Troy is a cornerstone of Western literature. In The Rage of Achilles, Terence Hawkins brilliantly reimagines that titanic encounter. His stunningly original telling captures the brutality of the battlefield, the glory and the gore, in language that never relents.
Raw and compelling, The Rage of Achilles tells the story of Achilles, a monstrous hero, by turns vain and selfish, cruel and noble; of Paris, weak and consumed by lust for his stolen bride; of Agamemnon, driven nearly to insanity by the voices of the gods; and of Trojans and Achaeans, warriors and peasants, caught up in the conflict, their families torn apart by a decade-long war. The Rage of Achilles is an exhilarating story that has captured the imaginations of readers for thousands of years restored to immediacy.
We are pleased to announce that The Rage of Achilles is now available through the Casperian Books website and booksellers everywhere. The prologue can be read online here.
Paul Bens will be signing Kelland on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. at A Different Light Bookstore, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94114. Full details at the A Different Light Bookstore blog.
The Life Plan has a new review out in Midwest Book Review (fifth one down), and Sybil Baker herself is one of the featured writers in the Chattanooga CityScope’s A Passion for Writing article.
A review of Kelland just went up on the Dark Discoveries Magazine blog.
I’m getting married Saturday, and everyone who is involved with Casperian Books and local will be heading up to Tahoe for the wedding sometime tomorrow, so between about 10 a.m. Friday, October 2nd, and Monday morning, October 5th, there will be no one here to process orders or quote international orders.
This is pretty much the first time in three years that this has happened, and–fingers crossed–the last time it will happen!
We’ll get back to everyone Monday morning!
We are pleased to announce the release of the fifth book in the Administration Series, Quis Custodiet by Manna Francis. It is rather fitting, we think, that we somehow managed to schedule this release date for Banned Books Week ;-)
This volume contains the novella Quis Custodiet and seven short stories, following the careers of para-investigator and inveterate trouble-magnet Val Toreth and ambitious, if occasionally blinkered, corporate Keir Warrick in the near-future dystopia of the European Administration.
No protests, no bombings, no subversion. Is it possible that in one part of the European Administration at least, almost all the citizens are happy with their lot in life? It seems unlikely. When the numbers don’t add up at the Athens branch of the Investigation and Interrogation Division, Para-investigator Toreth is sent there from New London to review their procedures. With sunshine, a less-than-urgent assignment, and hosts who seem anxious to ensure that he has a good time, it seems like the perfect chance for a holiday on Administration time.
Or it would if he didn’t have to leave Sara and the rest of his regular team behind. Working alone for once, as the investigation becomes more complex Toreth finds himself surrounded by people he can’t trust. Worse than that, he has to leave Warrick on his own in New London, a situation further complicated by the reappearance of an old adversary.
You can read the prologue of Quis Custodiet here.
Seneca Wood has made the Entertainment Weekly Must List!
OK, so it’s the extended online version, but still! Next stop: the cover of the Rolling Stone…just kidding ;-)
Sometime between the time I left for the gym Saturday morning at 8:00 and returned from the Farmer’s Market at 11:00, our Internet connection went down–and stayed down until I worked one hour of hi-tech magic around 10:30 p.m. because Casper was using that very special look on me that I always thought only puppies are capable of…it really wasn’t pretty, involving multiple calls to Comcast, the moving of heavy furniture, and then rebuilding the LAN.
As a result, that copy of Quis Custodiet didn’t go out on Saturday. Instead, it’s going out tomorrow to Elizabeth from Texas.
Getting back to reading briefly, the New York Times is doing a poll to see what people are reading on the subway. The results are here and the accompanying article is here. Or you could even take the poll (if you ride the subway in New York).
An while we’re on the subject, a couple of years ago the Booktrust, as part of the Get London Reading campaign, built a great interactive map of books set in London, which can be found here together with other goodies.
Our fall releases kick off today with Paul G. Bens Jr.’s Kelland, a novel that spans genres as it weaves together the stories of four seemingly unrelated characters that are connected by a mysterious being called Kelland.
On October 1st, we’ll be following that up with the fifth installment in Manna Francis’ Administration series, Quis Custodiet. This volume contains one novella and seven short stories, continuing the saga of para-investigator Val Toreth and corporate Keir Warrick in the near-future dystopia of the European Administration.
The Rage of Achilles by Terence Hawkins, a modern, in-your-face retelling of The Iliad, is next on the list, scheduled for release on November 1st. Think Saving Private Ryan meets Homer.
Lastly, on December 1st, we’ll be releasing Hoosier Life & Casualty by Ian Woollen, a timely romantic comedy/satire set in the health insurance industry, though we promise there are no death panels involved.
And because I happen to have the final printer’s proof for Quis Custodiet sitting right in front of me, I believe it might be time for a raffle. So here it goes: Saturday morning we’ll draw a name out of the hat of all US customers who have ordered Kelland from our website by Friday night at 11:59 p.m. and send the lucky winner that printer’s proof of Quis Custodiet. I’ll even throw in priority mail so the book will arrive at its destination by about Wednesday next week!
Happy reading, everyone!
Curt Smith has a guest blog titled On Trances and Other Gifts up at Flash Fiction.net.
And Paul G Bens and Kelland keep on making the rounds, most recently with a very flattering review at Edge, an interview at Small Press Reviews.
A couple of years ago on a flight from Toronto to London, I was sitting next to an acquisitions editor for a very large publisher, who struck up a conversation with me over the book I was reading at the time, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, which she herself had read some thirty years earlier and remembered liking a great deal. And that is really one of the great constants of writing/publishing: most people get there via the love for reading. As Gary Clites just told me:
As a young man interested in writing, I read my way through as much classic American and International lit as I could. I read all of John Steinbeck, and learned the importance of human-sized characters. I read all of Dickens, and learned to be absolutely courageous with plotting (Dickens constantly pushed the edges.) From Gilgamesh to Rabelais to Salinger, we have thousands of years of great writing and all of it offers insight into how to craft your work. How could you not read it?
I probably would never have dreamed up starting Casperian Books if I hadn’t grown up in a household that had thousands of books on its shelves but no television, if my father hadn’t spent at least an hour every night reading to us, if starting at the age of four or five our parents hadn’t taken us to the library on a regular basis to get more books to read. My own house now has more than a thousand books in it, most of them written in German and English, a few, mostly children’s books, in Greek, and once my soon-to-be-husband arrives here next month, we’ll be adding at least a few hundred more, many of them written in French or Greek–we’ll have duplicates then: an English and Greek version of some of Kazantzakis’ books, French and English versions of some of Perez-Reverte’s books, and so on. (Future hubby actually took me on an extended weekend trip to Seville a few years ago because he liked The Seville Communion so much, he wanted to visit the city.)
Before I started Casperian Books (and thus started spending much of my time reading and editing manuscripts and designing books), it wasn’t entirely uncommon for me to have multiple books going at the same time, often in different settings: a volume of short stories or essays at work to read during lunch breaks, a book in my purse to read on public transit (when I lived in cities where I commuted on public transit), and a book on the bedside table to read in the evenings.
Literary references are rife around here: it’s assumed that a reference to Heinlein (“TANSTAAFL!”) will be just as easily understood as a reference to Aristophanes (“Piglets!”), that “Belgium, man, Belgium!” will be just as easily understood as “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” It’s assumed that a well-rounded education included not only grammar and spelling and exposure to the meat and bones of Aristotle’s Poetics (if not necessarily the text itself), but also the reading of a few books here and there. Our brand-new volunteer project editor’s “job interview” pretty much boiled down to: “Tell me what books you enjoy reading.”
Yet with alarming regularity, we receive queries from prospective authors who say they do not read, which is quite puzzling (not least because we can’t quite work out why anyone who doesn’t read would expect others to).
So I polled the Casperian Books authors and volunteers and asked them to tell me what they’re currently reading. Here are the responses:
Constance:
Right now, I’m rereading the Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony. I’m on 4 and I started on Saturday evening. They are terrible, awful, cliched, every -ist in the proverbial book, wooden Space Opera with an extremely unsexy soft-core pornish substory. The B-movies of SF. Oh, how far we have come in a quarter century! And yet I love them with a mad passion. The books propel me right back into high school, when it all seemed very risque and novel. Before I knew what a trope was, basically.
Before that, I read Nightshift NYC by Russell and Cheryl Sharman; Things That Make Us (Sic) by Martha Brockenbrough; a fat wad of poetry, mostly Billy Collins and Ellen Bass; and I’ve been reading President Kennedy:Profile of Power by Richard Reeves in small bites for several weeks.
Manna Francis:
You caught me at a good moment for that! Currently reading: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch and The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken. Before that, I read Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase (which is REALLY UTTERLY AWESOME, and you should read it, as should everyone else in the world), Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker, and Sharpe’s Eagle by Bernard Cornwell.
Chris Owen:
At the moment I’m doing my summer reading–Version: In Memoriam. David Eddings passed away just before summer, so I’m making my way through The Belgariad series and The Mallorean series, books I adored and re-read over and over through middle school, high school, and my undergraduate years. Also on the go is the collection Steampunk by Anne and Jeff Vandermeer, and Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. I’m listening to the Harry Potter series (yet again) while I sit at my weaving loom, and I go to sleep listening to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio plays. I know not everyone considers audiobooks as ‘reading’, and I suppose it’s not, strictly speaking, but I do think that exposure to expressed narrative is not the same as television being on in the background.
Downstairs, I have bookmarks in (and have read in the last three days) Camp Hell by Jordan Castillo Price and Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
Nathan (our brand-new volunteer editor):
Sorry that it took me a few days to respond…still in San Francisco/Sacramento for my annual pre-semester vacation. But while in San Fran, I had the amazing opportunity to stop by City Lights Bookstore. Definitely renewed my faith in many small press publishers, and was probably the coolest bookstore I’ve ever visited. I bought some books there, which I’ve started to enjoy in my off-time. I started Couch by Benjamin Parzybok, a strange maybe-magical-realist tale about slackers who become attached to their apartment’s hand-me-down couch (bizarre, but very imaginative). I just finished Bar Stories, an anthology from Bottom Dog Press edited by Nan Byrne, and I’m itching to start Bad Habits: A Love Story by Cristy C. Road, which appears to be a comic-novel hybrid about a punk rocker. Also am finishing Rabbit Redux by John Updike, which I didn’t think I’d enjoy, but absolutely love. That’s my “mainstream novel” of the month, I guess. Also bought Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach, which wins “Best Title” for the books I saw at City Lights. There’s something exciting about going to a store stocked with titles that you wouldn’t see in Borders or Barnes & Nobles, titles that don’t seem to be so concerned about pleasing the mainstream reader. I’m a bit of a nerd for getting so excited, but…well…whatever.
Last three titles I read before my current binge: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, Best American Short Stories 2008, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.
Sybil Baker:
Lordy, NOT including the reading I do related to my classes (Asian American lit, novel writing, etc.), I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and End Credits by A.F. Rützy. Before that I read: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, and Shimmer by Eric Barnes.
Gary Clites:
As a thriller writer, I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge of the genre by power-reading James Patterson, arguably the king of the commercial thriller right now. So, the last four books I’ve read were Along Came a Spider, The Big Bad Wolf, Run for Your Life, and Judge & Jury. I’ve also recently read books by Michael Connelly and Janet Evanovich for the same reason. I don’t want to critique them, but I will say that I have been learning about the genre.
As for myself, I’m currently reading The Tower by Valerio Massimo Manfredi. Before that, I read The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith (which I liked so much, I finished it in one go), Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer, and Nation by Terry Pratchett. And while I can’t officially poll Casper because he’s at work right now, I did just look at his bedside table, and it looks like he’s (re)reading Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I am very sad to report that all efforts to teach Soup to read have failed so far, though she has been known to eat the odd book or two.
The fall release season is almost upon us, and we’re kicking off the positive press with a lengthy and detailed review of Kelland and interview with Paul G. Bens at Edge (warning: contains some spoilers!), and a shorter review at Lavender Magazine. More links to follow!
Gary has two appearances scheduled for later this month:
Terence Hawkins, whose novel “The Rage of Achilles” we are publishing this fall, will be attending the SPF Expo 2009 on Saturday July 18, 2009, and Sunday July 19, 2009, from 12:00pm – 6:00pm at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15221 representing Casperian Books.
Terence will have sample copies of all our titles, which you’ll be able to browse through, as well as inventory of select titles available for purchase. So if you are in the Pittsburgh area and always wanted to check out our books, now’s your chance! Entry to the Expo is completely free of charge and $5 buys you an all-weekend pass to panels and workshops (which is less than a matinee these days!).
