Tag: Small Beer Press

Weekly Round-up, January 27, 2024

John Winkelman

After the chaotic beginning to 2024, this past week felt like the real start to the new year.

Reading

I finally, after 57 days, finished Dostoevsky’s Demons. It was a bit of a slog for the first half but I powered through. For reference, I read The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment each in less than 30 days, and they are both longer than Demons. I think Dostoevsky’s craft was more polished with the latter two, and the stories more focused.

Also, Demons leaned more into the lives of the Russian gentry and social climbers, whose lives revolve around giving the best impressions at social gatherings. In other words, wankers. And wankers, in any culture, in any time period, don’t always make for the most entertaining subjects.

With Demons complete I am looking for a “cool down” novel. Something more current, faster paced, and, well shorter. At the moment I am reading one of my old issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, published by Small Beer Press. It’s good to read something which can be completed in a couple of hours, rather than a couple of months.

Writing

Not a lot, though I am in the process of indexing (and re-indexing) my unpublished short stories, so I can set up a schedule of editing to try to knock some of them in shape for submission by the end of the year. To that end, I have signed up for the Critique Circle, on the advice of my friend the author Jean Davis.

Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Reincarnation
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Dystopian

Interesting Links

Still Kinda Cold Out

John Winkelman

New books for the week of October 9, 2022

Rumor has it that this winter will be long and cold, thanks to a weaker El Nino system out west. It isn’t apparent at the moment, as this whole week, the middle of October, was in the sixties and seventies during the day, with one night warm enough to sleep with the bedroom window open a crack. Still, even in the sunniest of afternoons, standing in the shadows reminds me that the days are indeed shorter than the nights.

Several new books arrived at the house in the past week.

First up is Planet On3, recently released by superb artist (and my good friend!) Ryan Lee.  He has been working on it for some time, and the character designs go back to doodles he has been working on for many years, so I am overjoyed to see this book in print.

Next is Look Again: A Memoir, by Elizabeth A. Trembley. I met Trembley years ago at at the informal open studio hosted by poet Jack Ridl. When Caffeinated Press was still around, I published some of her artwork in The 3288 Review. I knew she was drawing comics, but we fell out of touch and I didn’t know she was working on a book until Jack announced that Look Again had just been released.

Next is the new issue of Salvage which will join the small stack of unread issues which I will get to probably sometime in the spring of 2023.

Next, fresh from a successful Kickstarter campaign, is That Which Cannot Be Undone: An Ohio Horror Anthology, which arrived just in time for the Halloween season.

In reading news, at long last I have reached the end of my stack of The Paris Review. As I mentioned last week, reading so much literature in a compressed time-span can lead to some interesting coincidences. The most recent instance was with issue #239, which contained an excerpt from the journals of Annie Ernaux, who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I had never before read Ernaux, and indeed was barely aware of her existence before the Nobel, so to read these journal entries (which were exquisite, by the way, and exquisitely translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer) so recently after having heard of her Nobel win, felt kind of like the universe was telling me something; like I was, to crib from John Constantine, riding the synchronicity highway.

Relatedly, Ernaux’s journal excerpts, which I believe were pulled from her book Getting Lost, reminded me of Emmanuelle Pagano‘s beautiful Trysting, which I read several years ago.

Now that I am done with The Paris Review (barring a possible last issue which might appear at the end of the year), I have moved on to my small stack of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a small magazine of genre fiction published by Small Beer Press. So far, a couple of issues in, the stories and poems are delightful! I might even renew my subscription to LCRW after I clean out my back-log of other unread periodicals.

In writing news, NaNoWriMo looms on the horizon, and I have yet to complete, or even seriously start, my preliminary notes. The next two weeks will pass quickly.