Gerald Kersh Reprints Coming This Fall

   Looking back, I'm not sure why Gerald Kersh's books weren't all over the paperback racks here in the US during the sixties.  But I can remember seeing only Men Without Bones, and later Nightshade & Damnations.  Another collection, On an Odd Note, had appeared in the late fifties.  All three were collections of Kersh's fantastic tales.  Of his many novels, I can recall seeing only Night and the City and The Secret Masters in paperback on the shelves of second-hand dealers.  It's strange that Kersh's own books weren't all over the racks because his short stories were featured so often in books that were widely available.  Kersh's stories were regularly found in Judith Merril's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, in the numerous anthologies that appeared under Alfred Hitchcock's byline, and in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. 

   The first time I noticed Kersh was in a 1966 science fiction paperback called Star of Stars edited by Frederik Pohl; the book was a selection of the best stories from Pohl's Star Science Fiction anthologies and Kersh was represented there with one of his finest, "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?," the story of a soldier made immortal centuries ago and what his immortality did to him.  By the time that book appeared, Men Without Bones and On an Odd Note had vanished from the mass market racks; what Kersh I found was in the Merril and Hitchcock anthologies.  In 1968, Fawcett brought out Nightshade & Damnations, a collection of eleven of Kersh's best stories, selected and with an introduction by Harlan Ellison.  Within a few years after that Kersh went out of print in the US and stayed that way for a long time.  Finding Kersh titles here meant a lot of digging in used book shops or ordering them from overseas.  Later, the internet and Amazon made them easier to find; a number of his titles are fairly pricey these days, but at least you can find them.  Two of his novels and a short story collection (Prelude to a Certain Midnight, The Secret Masters, and Men Without Bones) are available in paperback here from Black Mask and Men Without Bones is also available for the Kindle.  Small presses such as Crippen & Landru and Ash-Tree Press have issued short story collections, and most recently Centipede Press published London Stories and a new edition of Night and the City, but it's been quite some time since there was a large reissue of Kersh's work.

   That may change this fall.  According to the listing pulled up in Amazon's advanced search function, Faber Finds will reissue several of Kersh's books in trade paperback starting in September -- no word yet on ebook editions, but many Faber Finds titles have appeared both in print and ebook formats.  Listed for release are Sgt Nelson of the Guard, The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories, and The Best of Gerald Kersh; Amazon UK also shows The Song of the Flea, and The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small.  Another novel, The Implacable Hunter, may also be scheduled.  If we're lucky, Faber will reprint even more of Kersh's backlist -- there's a lot of wonderful material there that's been unjustly neglected for too many years.

   Kersh was a terrific writer, inventive and engaging, equally at home with fantastic stories and with tales of soldiers or street hustlers and his rediscovery by a wider audience is long overdue.  Don't take my word for it -- take it from Harlan Ellison's introduction to Nightshade & Damnations, "Kersh, The Demon Prince":

   "By the excellence of what he has done, Gerald Kersh infuriates and spurs other writers to try and beat him at his own game.
   "Perhaps one day, one of us will realize that it is impossible to beat a Demon Prince.  The sonofabitch uses magic.  No mortal can write this well."

Late to the Party

I'm not always late to the party.  For instance, when Robert B. Parker started hitting the best-seller lists with his Spenser novels I was already a fan.  I'd followed Roger Zelazny since his first two books appeared as Ace paperbacks, well before he began the Amber series.  Before Jorge Luis Borges was being commonly mentioned here in the US as a likely Nobel Prize recipient (and it's a crime that he never got it), I was following some of his work (which was featured in Judith Merril's collections of the year's best sf and fantasy, and in Terry Carr's New Worlds of Fantasy anthologies).  Not always late.

But when I'm late, I'm really late.  Watched my first episode of Doctor Who last month on Netflix; this year marks 50 years since the first episode.  (And if you're even later to the party than I am, the series is delightful and you should give it a look.)  Didn't check out Stephen King until 'Salem's Lot was out in paperback and The Shining and Night Shift were on the hardcover racks.  Didn't pick up a John D. MacDonald book until the mid-1970s.  Didn't read William Goldman until Marathon Man came out in paperback and Spider Robinson's rave review of The Princess Bride ran in Galaxy magazine.  Am only now starting on Neil Gaiman's work.

And then there's Jonathan Carroll.
 
He's been around a while, and when his first novel, The Land of Laughs, appeared in paperback I picked up a copy and before I got around to reading it, Voice of Our Shadow, his second, had also been issued in softcover.  Read them both, but for some reason, they didn't make a big impression at the time.  I'll assume that I zipped through the books too quickly to appreciate them.  Maybe I wasn't exactly late to the party, but when I got there, I stuck around a few minutes and motored before I knew what a terrific party it was.

The Wikipedia page devoted to Carroll mentions a comment from a reviewer who says if Carroll were a Latin-American writer with three names, his books would be described as magical-realist.  True enough, but probably not all that important here. 

What's important is his characters -- funny, quirky, damaged, frightening, witty, always engaging, always interesting, and wonderfully human.  The people who inhabit the pages of Jonathan Carroll's fantasy novels are as achingly real as those you'll find in the work of Theodore Sturgeon or Don Robertson, and by me that's high praise.

You want to know how good Carroll is?  After revisiting his work when Open Road reissued a number of his titles as ebooks several months ago, I visited Carroll's web site and read every blog entry (the archive goes back to July 2004), and it was time well spent in the company of a writer with a gift for character, a terrific eye for detail, and a ready supply of quotes from other writers as well.

If you want a nice introduction to his work grab a copy of his short story collection, The Woman Who Married a Cloud.  Or The Land of Laughs.  Or The Voice of Our Shadow.  Or The Ghost in Love.  Or...well, pick one -- I don't think you'll be disappointed.  And don't forget to check out his blog too.



Find links to Jonathan Carroll's books and blog (and more) at:
www.jonathancarroll.com

And More Backlist Coming...

Open Road Media continues to release good backlist titles as ebooks.  Coming this month are several titles by British novelist Barbara Pym, among them Jane and Prudence, No Fond Return of Love, and A Glass of Blessings.  Also scheduled for January are a number of titles by James M. Cain; while he's best known for Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, his later work is well worth checking out -- The Institute, The Magician's Wife, and Rainbow's End are among the Cain titles due in January.  And this month will see three of William Goldman's best novels: Marathon Man (for my money the finest thriller of the 70s, and if you know this one only from the movie be advised the book is a LOT better), Boys and Girls Together, and The Temple of Gold (his first novel); Goldman is known today mainly as a screenwriter, and his best known book is the delightful The Princess Bride, but before he began spending most of his time on scripts he was primarily a novelist, and the Open Road releases coming this month are three of his best.  I've written about Goldman in this space before and you can find that post here.

Not long ago, I noted that the entire Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald would be released as ebooks this month; even more of MacDonald's backlist will be coming to the Amazon Kindle store in June.  34 titles, among them The Damned, Murder in the Wind, The End of the Night, April Evil, The Deceivers, Cancel All Our Vows, and Cry Hard, Cry Fast.  When these are released, most of MacDonald's backlist will be available as ebooks; still not scheduled are MacDonald classics like The Executioners (aka Cape Fear), A Flash of Green, and End of the Tiger -- with any luck by the end of 2013 they'll all be available.

UPDATE, Jan 6 -- End of the Tiger, one of MacDonald's short story collections, is now listed in the Kindle store as a June release; this one's worth grabbing for the title story alone.

Impending bankruptcy has never looked so good...


A brief commercial: for the next few months my own ebooks will be available exclusively in the Amazon Kindle store; right now they're not available at Smashwords, B&N, or Sony, but they may be back there this summer.  The Kindle editions are sold without DRM so you should be able to read them on other devices as well.

I'll be running a free promotion on one of those titles this weekend, Jan 5-6.  For these two days The Other Iron River, and Other Stories will be free at the Kindle store; the collection includes three stories: "Acts of Faith," "Ghost Writer," and "The Other Iron River."  You get zombies, a ghost story, and in the title piece, a time travel story that I like to think catches a little of the Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel.  Grab it while the price is right, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

And bests to all.

So Long, Fictionwise and EReader

On December 4, Fictionwise and EReader will no longer be offering ebooks for purchase, and customers will no longer be able to access their bookshelves after December 21.  They'll be missed.

Fictionwise and EReader (simply FW for the rest of this post) got all my ebook business from the time I started purchasing ebooks in 2000 until 2010, a bit after the sites were acquired by Barnes & Noble and fewer selections were made available in multiple formats or secure ereader/mobipocket.  Even though I didn't purchase from them nearly as frequently after that, I still checked their new release listings religiously every Monday.  I can recall few real problems with purchases from FW (2 or 3 in 10 years, and I bought a lot of ebooks there) and never had a problem that wasn't fixed quickly.  It was a pleasure to do business with FW, and I hope every member of their staff that wants to keep working in the ebook world either has another gig lined up or finds one quickly.  My best wishes to their whole crew.

And about those bookshelves going away after December 21: there's an option out there to move your purchases to a B&N Nook library account if you like, so even after FW closes down, you'll still have access to your books.

One more thing: the ereader format.  Some people didn't care for it.  I don't recall that it handled illustrations particularly well, for instance.  But that format had the most wonderfully customer-friendly DRM you could want.  If you wanted to read your book on more than one device, fine.  If you wanted to read it on 173 different devices, fine.  If you wanted to put it on your friend's PC so he could read it, you could do that too even though you shouldn't.  The DRM wouldn't stop you.  But before you could open that ebook on any PC or handheld device, you had to enter the ebook's unlock code.  The unlock code for each ebook was the name and account number on the credit card that you used to purchase it.  Neat, simple, easy for the customer.  And how many people were going to "share" their ebooks and the unlock codes on the internet if it meant giving their credit card number to thousands of strangers?  It was a DRM method that assumed that the customer was honest -- nice attitude for a company to take; if there had to be DRM, this was a nice way to handle it.

Bests again to the gang at FW.


 UPDATE: It's being reported in posts at MobileRead and KindleBoards that B&N isn't importing all the titles from Fictionwise/EReader bookshelves.  So if you're a Fictionwise/EReader customer with a large bookshelf, make sure you download your titles and the software you use to read them on your PC & handheld devices.

A Little More Backlist News, and a Brief Commercial

    It's a nice time for backlist in ebooks.  The big news in genre fiction is probably the scheduled release date for all the titles in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, coming in January. 
    But there's a lot of backlist material in the pipeline.   John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 will be released here in 2013; Barbara Pym's Less Than Angels is already available.  Both these writers have a number of titles available as ebooks in the United Kingdom, but not much available yet in the U.S.; if we're lucky, their other novels and collections of short works will follow soon.
     Library of America has begun to publish ebooks as well, with editions of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Lincoln's writings, Ambrose Bierce's selected works, and a few others available.

    On November 6, Open Road (which has published backlist titles from Lawrence Block, Budd Schulberg, Jonathan Carroll and many more) will release ebook editions of several titles by Malcolm Lowry.  The initial Lowry offerings will include: the short story collection Hear Us, O Lord, from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place; his first novel, Ultramarine; his posthumous novel, October Ferry to Gabriola; and the book that is regarded as his finest work, Under the Volcano.
Under the Volcano chronicles the last day in the life (that's not a spoiler) of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic ex-consul drinking himself to death in the Mexican town of Quahnahuac; scan a few lists of the best novels in English, and you'll generally find Under the Volcano ranked there.  It isn't always an easy read -- the novel takes some effort to get into, but it's worth it.  Also worth a look is John Huston's film version with Albert Finney and Jacqueline Bissett.
    There's a story that goes with Under the Volcano, if memory serves, that recounts one of the gutsier moves a writer can make.  Lowry worked for a long time on this book, more than a decade.  It made the rounds of publishers, and Lowry would often decide portions of the book still weren't quite right and go over them again.  While Lowry revised and tightened his book and approached publishers, Charles Jackson published his novel The Lost Weekend, which concerned an alcoholic.  After the publication and success of Jackson's book, even houses that had seen earlier versions of Lowry's manuscript rejected his final version, regarding any book dealing with an alcoholic character as an attempt to cash in on the success of Jackson's novel.  Finally, Jonathan Cape in England agreed to take the book but wanted changes to address issues raised in the publisher's reader's notes on the manuscript.  Rather than agree to the changes in this novel that he'd been writing and revising and trying to publish for the past decade, Lowry sent a letter back to Cape explaining why it was necessary to the novel for the specified sections to stand as they were.  That letter, as I recall, takes up about thirty or forty pages in Lowry's Selected Letters.  And after consideration of the points Lowry made, Cape agreed to take the novel as it stood.
     Not yet announced for Kindle are Lowry's Selected Poems, Selected Letters, Lunar Caustic, Psalms and Songs and Dark As The Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid.  Later, maybe.

-------

A brief commercial announcement:

    The short story collection I mentioned at the end of my last post is finally available in the Amazon Kindle store and at Smashwords (from where it should find its way into other ebook retailers before long). 
    A SOUVENIR FROM THE WAR, AND OTHER STORIES sells for $1.99 and it includes eleven stories, mostly dark.  Six of the stories are new to this collection, one had been included in a previous collection that is no longer available, three have been available as individual stories in the Kindle store, and one was previously published in this blog on the occasion of Ray Bradbury's passing.  Give it a look if you get a chance.
    Find it at:
    Smashwords - A Souvenir from the War, and Other Stories  and at
    Amazon - A Souvenir from the War, and Other Stories

John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee Coming to Kindle

Barring accident, act of God, the collapse of Amazon, or a catastrophe to be named later, most of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series will be released as Kindle ebooks on January 8.  Sixteen of the twenty titles are listed as being available on that date, and I imagine the other four will either be released the same day or very soon thereafter.

For some time now, the only MacDonald titles in print have been the McGee series and (if memory serves) his novels A FLASH OF GREEN and THE EXECUTIONERS (perhaps better known as CAPE FEAR, and better than either of its film versions).  With any luck, Kindle releases of his work won't be limited to the Travis McGee novels; MacDonald was a giant in the mystery and suspense field, and books like THE EXECUTIONERS, THE END OF THE NIGHT, APRIL EVIL, THE NEON JUNGLE, THE DAMNED, MURDER IN THE WIND, and CRY HARD, CRY FAST are not to be missed.


And speaking of APRIL EVIL, that novel (again if memory serves) contained a bit of description that poet Donald Justice used in writing his poem "The Tourist from Syracuse."  It's worth a look, a nice short piece with just the right touch of chill at the finish.  Find it at:
The Tourist from Syracuse, by Donald Justice

Just a Couple of Announcements

My short story "Saturdays That Might Have Been" will be free in the Amazon Kindle Store for two days, July 22 & 23.  After that, it's back to 99 cents.  Find it in the US Amazon Kindle Store here and at the UK Kindle Store here.

Recently I was interviewed on two web sites.  You can find these interviews at:

http://www.gryeates.co.uk, the web site of G. R. Yeates, author of The Eyes of the Dead, Shapes in the Mist, and Hell's Teeth.
(http://www.gryeates.co.uk/?p=1034 links directly to my interview, but then you'd miss other interviews and samples of Greg's work, and why would you want to miss those?)

http://www.pennydreadnought.com, the web site of The Abominable Gentlemen, a group of four writers -- James Everington, Iain Rowan, Aaron Polson, and Alan Ryker.  In addition to my interview, you'll find an interview with indie writer Cate Gardner and links to the Penny Dreadnought short story anthologies, which are well worth a look.

Had fun with both sets of questions, and I'd like to thank Greg and James for their invitations to be interviewed on their pages.

I've got another short story collection in the works that will gather the stories not included in The Other Iron River and Other Stories and a number of new stories.  Working title is "A Souvenir from the War: Dark Stories."  It should be available in August, and I'll post an announcement here when it's out for sale.

And bests to all.