This Week in Chicago:
Who's That Detective?
Couch-Carrying Odyssey: OR, WA, MT (we can't spell)
JWH
Cloud. And: Ashes.
Artists Wanted
New Books

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This is the first newsletter we've sent out since President Obama was
inaugurated and it has been a relief to see him and his government
reverse some of the dark ages policies of the previous
administration. It has also been hilarious to see the nominees
brought down by the tax code -- perhaps someone could work on
simplifying the code? And, can someone tell us why Tom Daschle and
all the others only had to pay the interest on their back taxes and
not penalties?
It has sucked to see the Republicans still suck at family. How can
they expect businesses to do well if they refuse to fund education
and health care? Tax cuts won't stimulate the economy: everyone
working will save the extra money in case they're fired and it won't
help those looking for work. Adding Federal funding to states for
education and health care would have meant more people keeping their
jobs. Nice move, party of the idiots.
So there is still much to rail against. The death penalty, global
warming, poisonous peanuts (a symptom of the FDA not having enough
inspectors and not doing enough follow through), outsourcing of jobs,
the lack of decent cars in the USA while the same companies sell good
cars abroad.
Enough with the railing (Actually: more railing! Spain's high speed
rail system is working and we should copy it!) and on with the news
about books. And, it is good!

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This Week in Chicago:

Thursday: 43° F | 27° F, Partly Cloudy
Friday: 40° F | 27° F, Mostly Cloudy
Saturday: The AWP Bookfair is free and open to the all at the Chicago
Hilton, 9 AM - 5 PM.

Small Beer Press has a table at the AWP conference. No, we don't know
the number, but it is the one featuring a handsome young fellow
toting his first novel. (More on that below.)
If you're in (or near) Chicago we recommend going by: this is the
best place to see hundreds of indie presses all in one spot with tons
of great books and magazines that you may or may not have heard of.
One Story, Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, there's tons of good
reading. Sorry to be missing it, but what fun if you go. And that's
not even counting the parties....

And, at that fair, that handsome young fellow is selling books.
Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. (No birds, though.) If you'd like to buy our
books Cheap Cheap Cheap (and the usual free shipping in the USA),
here's a link to the mail order form. Note that it's a PDF. Yep, this
link goes straight to the pdf. This page doesn't exist (well, until
Google crawls it) on our website, only on paper in Chicago and
(maybe) on your computer.
http://lcrw.net/AWP2009.pdf

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Who's That Detective?

Q. Who is this handsome young fellow?
A. Jedediah Berry
Q. Who's that?
A. Small Beer Press's assistant editor! Jed's first novel, The Manual
of Detection comes out in a couple of weeks from Penguin and it is a
doozy. We've added his readings to our reading calendar but you can
also see if he's coming near you on the ever-so-handy booktour site:
http://booktour.com/author/jedediah_berry
http://www.thirdarchive.net

If you act fast, you might be able to pick up early copies from
Powell's"
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=26490&cgi=product&isbn=9781594202117

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Couch-Carrying Odyssey: OR, WA, MT (we can't spell)

Couch is back at the printer for a second printing (yay, celebrate,
move your couch around tonight!) and poor Benjamin Parzybok will be
adding many steps to his (http://walkertracker.com/ben) count as we
are sending him out On the Road Again next month.

You can download the March Tour Flier PDF (another pdf!) and do with
it what you will here:
http://lcrw.net/parzybok/parzybok_march_tour.pdf

Or it's here: http://booktour.com/author/benjamin_parzybok

Monday, March 16, 5:00 PM
Powell's Books
1005 W. Burnside Street, Portland, OR, 97209

Tuesday, March 17, 7:00 PM
Orca Books
509 E. 4th Ave. Olympia, WA 98502

Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 PM
Garfield Book Company at PLU
208 Garfield St., Suite 101, Tacoma, WA 98444

Thursday, March 19, 6:30 PM
BALLARD PUBLIC LIBRARY
5614 22nd Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107

Saturday, March 21, 7:00 PM
Village Books
1200 11th Street, Bellingham, WA, 98225

Monday, March 23, 3:00 PM
Fact & Fiction
220 North Higgins, and On Campus, Missoula, MT 59802

Tuesday, March 24, 7:00 PM
The Bookstore, Dillon, MT
26 N Idaho St, Dillon, MT 59725

Wednesday, March 25, 7:30 PM
Auntie's Books, Spokane, WA
402 W. Main, Spokane, WA

Tuesday, April 07, 7:00 PM
St. Helens Book Shop
58527 Columbia River Hwy., St. Helens, OR

Buy the book here:
http://lcrw.net/parzybok

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Randomization

If you are a writer of fiction, go and apply for one of these. The
deadline is March 5th:
http://www.arts.gov/grants/apply/Lit/Calendar.html

This has nothing to do with our forthcoming Writers Daily Planner,
but it is the kind of info that will be in it!
http://lcrw.net/lcrw/preorder.htm

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Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content (http://questionablecontent.net)
had a great post on the state of daily comics in newspapers and on
the web which makes for interesting reading for people like us trying
to sell books:
http://qcjeph.livejournal.com/100732.html

Speaking of webcomics, here's one from Tor.com from Andi Watson:
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=comic&id=11345

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JWH

John Wesley Harding has a new CD, "Who was Changed and Who was Dead,"
out next month and it has the best list of tiered pricing options
we've seen for a while. (Also: some great pop songs!)

http://www.johnwesleyharding.com/rspcjwh.html

But you can buy the album, not to mention download and hear it,
immediately. There are various offers available to you.
"Who was Changed and Who was Dead" was recorded in Portland, OR and
New York City, with The Minus Five, not to mention many of JWH's
oldest and best musical friends and allies: Scott McOi, Peter Buck,
Steve Berlin (producer of Why We Fight), Kurt Bloch (producer of Trad
Arr Jones), Mike Viola, Robert Lloyd (who needs no introduction),
Kelly Hogan, and many more.

These orders are available as of now
BASIC: $15.98 (+ $2.50 postage & packing)

DOWNLOAD plus CD with BONUS LIVE DISC!
The BASIC package also includes a copy of the finished CD mailed
directly to your home as soon as we get them in our hands, which
means that you will receive them comfortably in time for Christmas.

BASIC PLUS: $29.98 (+ $5.00)
DOWNLOAD plus CD with BONUS LIVE DISC and T-SHIRT!

FANCY: $49.98 (+ $5.00)
DOWNLOAD plus CD with BONUS LIVE DISC, T-SHIRT and limited edition DVD!

SUPERFANCY: $79.98 (+$9.99)
DOWNLOAD plus CD with BONUS LIVE DISC, T-SHIRT, DVD and signed ARTWORK!

CRAZY DELUXE & PERSONAL: $5,000.00
DOWNLOAD, plus CD with BONUS LIVE DISC, T-SHIRT, DVD and signed
framed ARTWORK plus READ ON!
Includes the entire SUPERFANCY package PLUS, and it's a BIG PLUS:

John Wesley Harding will come and perform at your house, for you and
your friends, on a mutually agreeable date. NO JOKE! If it's near,
he'll even pay the transport; though if it's far, you'll have to pay.
The price of this epic package, including your own personal John
Wesley Harding concert, is $5,000, and at that price, we're waiving
the postage and packing. This is the only offer of its kind, and
quite possibly the only offer of its kind ever.

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Wandering in the bookshop and can't remember what you wanted to read?
Print this out!
http://www.locusmag.com/2009/2008RecommendedReading.html

If you are wandering online, please consider supporting an actual
bookshop such as Powell's or your local bookshop through IndieBound.
Yes, you may pay a couple of dollars more per book, but as with any
other internet bookshop (even the supermarket known as Amazon) the
bookshop will still pay your shipping so it's free to you. So you pay
a few dollars more, which is directly paying someone at Powell's (or
your local bookshop).

Couch
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=26490&cgi=product&isbn=9781931520546

Ed Park's novel, Personal Days
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=26490&cgi=product&isbn=9780812978575

Or on IndieBound, look, cough, you can set up wish lists:
http://www.indiebound.org/users/gavingrant/wishlist

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Cloud & Ashes Update

Greer Gilman is working on the last set of tweaks for her superdense
masterpiece, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales. We got a nice
number of pre-orders, thank you, so their names will be found on the
reverse side of the jacket. The cover moves along slowly but all
things being equal, the book should come out in May and Greer will be
doing some readings then.
Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: "Jack Daw's Pack" (Nebula Award
finalist), "A Crowd of Bone" (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and
the new third part, a whole novel, "Unleaving."

You can read a little about the book here: http://lcrw.net/gilman/
And order it here: http://lcrw.net/lcrw/preorder.htm

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Artists Wanted

The Interstitial Arts Foundation is searching for cover art for our
second literary anthology, Interfictions II. All visual artists are
invited to submit images for possible use as the cover art of the
anthology.

Check it out here:
http://www.interstitialarts.org/wordpress/?p=65

And upload pics of your art here!
http://www.flickr.com/groups/interstitialarts/

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We, well, mostly Michael (http://mjd.joskinandlob.com/wordpress), are
working on a new website. We expect it to be llive in time for the
end of the world in 2012, or in time for you to jack right into it
and swim through it in cyberspace, whichever comes first.

It will probably not look like this: http://www.miauk.com

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The Serial Garden in the LA Times:

"The incessant collision of the fantastic and the familiar make these
stories immediately engaging.
"Aiken never bores. She delights in names: Regina Queenscape, Dunk
R. Spoggin , Admiral Lecacheur, Mrs. Nutti, P.G. Zero -- not to
mention "Armitage" itself. (Aiken was the daughter of the poet Conrad
Aiken; her parents divorced, and her mother married the writer Martin
Armstrong, whose surname the young Aiken then skewered.) She has fun
with place names as well. In "The Serial Garden," Mark reads on the
package: "In case of difficulty in obtaining supplies, please write
to Fruhstucksgeschirrziegelsteinindustrie (Great Britain), Lily Road,
Shepherds Bush."
"Antic lists are unleashed -- we don't just get one kind of poison
mushroom but "deathcups . . . stinkhorns, false blushers, sickeners,
devil's boletus and lurid boletus." (In one story, Mark is so
lavishly, if cryptically, insulted by his formidable great-uncle
Gavin that he starts transcribing the elaborate billingsgate.)
""The Serial Garden" is my happiest discovery this year. I say this
without being influenced in the least by what happens to Mr. Armitage
in "The Frozen Cuckoo." As I conclude my hymn of praise, I am
certainly not thinking of how, shortly after Mr. Armitage pans A.
Whizzard's "shockingly bad book on spells and runes," the incensed
author requisitions the Armitage house, then turns him into a bird
that later gets trapped in an ice cube."
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-caw-astral-
weeks25-2009jan25,0,5457988.story

I know you’re a big mouth but what are we?

Did we mention this? is this a repeat? Who cares? Publishers Weekly
introduced our new imprint, Big Mouth House, to the world in a nice
piece ("Small Beer, for Children") that also mentioned Kelly’s new
collection, Pretty Monsters:

"When Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, founders of Small Beer Press in
Easthampton, Mass., first considered publishing children’s books
several years ago, they had a problem: the name of their press
sounded like a brewery."
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6595908.html?nid=3329

What We Talk About When We Talk About Beer? Anyway, it’s true: we are
slowly and carefully opening out a new imprint for readers of all
ages: Big Mouth House (http://www.bigmouthhouse.net). At some point
soon the Big Mouth web site will become better. We've put up a little
about forthcoming books, guidelines (queries only, no picture books
for the foreseeable future), and so on.
For the moment, The Serial Garden is Big Mouth House: one book that
is so lovely and has been such fun to work on that we can’t wait to
get it back from the printer.
http://lcrw.net/aiken/index.htm
http://www.bigmouthhouse.net

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Get ready for The Ant King. It looks like Benjamin Rosenbaum will be
on tour here in May.
More info TK!
http://lcrw.net/rosenbaum/

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New Books

We are in the process of signing up some new books. Some of them are
even at the contract stage. But they are not signed yet, darn it. So
you can't know about those.
There is one we can tell you about: a debut mystery we're publishing
in September, Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey:

Death was, after all, the way Henry Sullivan made his living.
Henry is a book hound, content to evade life by escaping into the
books he sells to other dealers. But the murder of an ex-lover pulls
him out of his familiar circles and leads him both to examine his
past and to investigate the murky depths of literary Boston.
Hound, the first novel featuring Henry Sullivan, is the debut novel
by a long-time Boston bookseller and it lays bare both the city and
the literary world in a classic slow-burning style.

Vincent McCaffrey has owned and operated the Avenue Victor Hugo
Bookshop for more than thirty years, first in Boston, and now online
from Abingdon, MA. He has been paid by others to do lawn work, shovel
snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt,
dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has since chosen at
various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. He
can still remember the first time he sold books for money in 1963—and
what most of those books were. Hound is his first novel.

Vincent is a great guy and we're incredibly happy to be publishing
this book. He's started a website and is getting warmed up with some
nice thoughtful pieces on books, bookselling, the world, and so on.
We have some hilarious bits to post later, but in the meantime,
here's Vincent's site:
http://vincentmccaffrey.com

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Thanks for reading our books.

--
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
413-203-1636
http://www.smallbeerpress.com



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