Quick Questions with Errick Nunnally

The final interview before our event is with Errick Nunnally! Errick is the author of Lightning Wears a Red Cape, which Laird Barron called “brutal, dynamic, and action-packed.”

Come see Errick on October 24th at Trident Books! RSVP here.

Tell us about your latest release in five words or fewer, or in one image/gif.

What book do you wish more people knew about?

Shrinking The Heroes by Minister Faust or Dreadnought by April Daniels.

What was the first story you ever wrote?

“Who Bears The Lathe?” It was a short, post-apocalyptic story published in a now defunct magazine about an interrogation performed by a menacing cyborg on a rebellious woman.

What appeals to you about the genre you work in? (or a genre you work in?)

Anything is possible! Speculative fiction is a wild smear across all genres of storytelling. Much like horror, it can be a part of anything!

What do you like to listen to when you write?

Just about anything that doesn’t have lyrics. Ugh. Singing, rapping, any sort of human vocalizations tend to distract me.

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Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A designer by day, he earned a black belt in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing by night. His work has appeared in several anthologies and is best described as “dark pulp.” His work can be found in LAMPLIGHT, TRANSCENDENT, WICKED WITCHES, THE FINAL SUMMONS, PROTECTORS 2, the Podcast, NIGHTLIGHT, and the ChiZine novel, LIGHTNING WEARS A RED CAPE.

October 22, 2019October 9, 2019 by Andrea Categories: NewsTags: errick nunnally, horror, interviews, speculative fiction Leave a comment

Quick Questions with Bracken MacLeod

Our second author interview is with Bracken MacLeod! Curious about his work? Be careful! “MacLeod’s fiction is full of traps – some physical, some psychological, none easy to wriggle free of.” (Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review)

Come see Bracken on October 24th at Trident Books! RSVP here.

What book do you wish more people knew about?

I wish more people knew about The Secret Life of Souls by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee. Lots of people know about Ketchum, and a couple of his books are hugely popular in genre circles (The Girl Next Door being the most (in)famous) but Souls is the last novel he and his collaborator Lucky released before he died, and I feel like it deserved a much better life than it had. It’s a harrowing portrait of a disintegrating family, but also a sensitive meditation on the bond between children and animals. It’s such a wonderful book in every way.

What was the first story you ever wrote?

The first story I ever wrote was for a fifth-grade writing assignment. We were told to write holiday stories for the teacher to read aloud in class. I came up with a sci fi/horror piece about Santa Claus and H.R. Giger’s xenomorph from Alien doing battle in space. It was gory and nasty (SPOILER: Santa won), and the teacher reasonably refused to read it to the class. Fortunately, I grew up in a different time, and was only sent home with a sternly worded note about what I should be allowed to watch on television. I consider it my first literary rejection.

What do you like to listen to when you write?

I find lyrics distracting when I’m working, so I tend to listen to either instrumental music or something where the lyrics aren’t easily discernible (Black Metal, for instance). Typically, the style of music though is entirely dictated by the type of scene I’m writing. For action, I need something where the rhythm of the music reflects the rhythm of the words, line by line, so that tends to be metal, where during more intimate, personal scenes, I like to listen to ambient music.

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Bracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust, Stranded, and Closing Costs, coming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He’s also published two collections of short fiction, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and White Knight and Other Pawns. Before devoting himself to full time writing, he worked as a civil and criminal litigator, a university philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.

October 15, 2019October 15, 2019 by Andrea Categories: NewsTags: bracken macleod, horror, interviews Leave a comment

Quick Questions with Isabel Yap

We’re twiddling our thumbs impatiently for our next event… in the meantime, more tiny interviews with our upcoming authors!

Isabel Yap is the author of short stories that have appeared in Tor.com, Strange Horizons and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. “Windrose in Scarlet” is in the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine, and will be online on 10/17!

Come see Isabel on October 24th at Trident Books! RSVP here.

Tell us about your latest release in five words or fewer, or in one image/gif.

I’ll use five emojis: 🐺👭🏰🧚‍♀️🌲

What book do you wish more people knew about?

All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection this year, but I haven’t heard it talked about too much despite that. Priya’s an excellent, eerie writer–her stories have a visceral quality to them, while also being dreamlike and authentic. She has a knack for unexpected twists.

Also, The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox. It was originally published in 1998, but I only found out about it a few years ago. I was living in London then; Elizabeth came by as part of a writing festival, so I picked it up on my way to a workshop session she was hosting (I bought a ticket on the recommendation of a Twitter friend). It’s an astonishing book, beautifully written and structured, and the central relationship in it is heartbreaking, flawed, and believable.

What was the first story you ever wrote?

I’m not sure if it was the first, but I’ll embarrassingly admit that I distinctly remember creating a text file with the title “The Day I Got My Period.” I was reading Judy Blume at the time, I guess? And Paula Danziger, and Ann M. Martin. It seemed to me, as a seven-year-old, the capital-t Thing to write about. I didn’t get past page one: in which the heroine woke up, ate breakfast, and boarded the car that would take her to school. I think I either bored or disgusted myself after a while, trying to write it. I do sometimes wish I still had access to my old first or second grade “stories,” if only to try and understand what was going on in my pre-pubescent brain.

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Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter.

October 8, 2019October 2, 2019 by Andrea Categories: NewsTags: fantasy, interviews, isabel yap, poetry, short stories Leave a comment

Link Round-up: Max Gladstone

On Thursday evening, we welcome K. Chess and Max Gladstone to Trident for our summer reading series event, and it’s going to rock multiple parallel universes and possibly various time streams!

Max Gladstone is a very busy author. His latest releases are the standalone novel Empress of Forever (released in June) and the novella This Is How You Lose The Time War (released this month!), co-authored with Amal El-Mohtar. Today we’re bringing you a round-up of just a few of the interviews and reviews from recent weeks.

Come see Max on August 1st at Trident Books! RSVP here.

Empress of Forever reviewed at Lightspeed Magazine:

“As if Simon R. Green’s pulp Deathstalker novels and Iain Banks’ Culture novels had a glorious, star-smashing baby, one filled with amazing set-pieces that wouldn’t look out of place on a big-screen blockbuster, but also one filled with insights on sacrifice, fate, and friendship.”

A wide-ranging interview with Max at Den of Geek:

“I knew this would be a story about—well, a lot of things, but among them genius, power, personal will, and the way genre fiction relates to these things…. I also liked the underdog aspect: someone at the top of her game taken back to square one in an unfamiliar context. To get what she wants, she has to conquer the world—again.”

A co-interview with Amal El-Mohtar at Clarkesworld, by Chris Urie:

No one gave me this advice, but for years now I’ve had on my desktop a Post-it note saying in all caps: YOU DO NOT NEED PERMISSION. Obviously not comprehensive life advice! I mean, permission is important for any activity that involves more than one person! But when creating in solitude or in a tight pair, it’s important to remember that, yes, you can write this sentence, make this comparison, turn the scene in just this way.

And finally, Max and Amal interviewed each other at Bookish:

AE: What is Red’s ideal beverage? Her preference, I mean, given the vastness of all time and space.

MG: In all time and space, huh? I see Red as a whiskey-inclined individual. I was about to say “but you can’t drink whiskey forever,” but with her augments, she probably could!

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Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated twice for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. Tor Books published FOUR ROADS CROSS, the fifth novel in Max’s Craft Sequence (preceded by THREE PARTS DEAD, TWO SERPENTS RISE, FULL FATHOM FIVE, and LAST FIRST SNOW) in July 2016. Max’s game CHOICE OF THE DEATHLESS was nominated for a XYZZY Award, and FULL FATHOM FIVE was nominated for the Lambda Award. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine.  His most recent project is the globetrotting urban fantasy serial BOOKBURNERS, available in ebook and audio from Serial Box, and in print from Saga Press.

July 30, 2019July 19, 2019 by Andrea Categories: NewsTags: link roundup, max gladstone, scifi Leave a comment

Quick Questions with K. Chess

K. Chess is the author of Famous Men Who Never Lived, a fresh take on parallel worlds, refugees, and the power of art. Ian Mond at Locus called it a “nuanced, smart, and intimate” novel.

Come see K on August 1st at Trident Books! RSVP here.

Tell us about your latest release in five words or fewer, or in one image/gif.

What book do you wish more people knew about?

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer, a middle grade Afrofuturist adventure story about siblings from a wealthy Harare family on the run across the city’s slums and suburbs. I read it in seventh grade — the first speculative book I’d ever encountered with a non-western setting that incorporated non-Judeo-Christian mythology — and I’ve never forgotten it.

What was the first story you ever wrote?

It was Buffy: the Vampire Slayer fanfiction. That’s all you’ll ever get out of me!

What appeals to you about the genre you work in? (or a genre you work in?)

At an event recently, I was sitting next to someone who was being really dismissive of the worth of any writing that wasn’t literary. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, my formal writing education focused on literary fiction, too, but my allegiance to sci fi feels deeper and older. I wish I’d told this person is that what I most value about speculative fiction is the immense freedom — a freedom of imagination, but not a freedom from logic or consequences or human truths. (Of course, I couldn’t come up with that at the time.)

What do you like to listen to when you write?

I listen to the same albums on repeat — if I already know the words, they don’t distract me. I wrote Famous Men Who Never Lived to Angel Olsen’s album Burn Your Fire for No Witness and edited to Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager.

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K Chess is the author of FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED (Tin House Books, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row Journal, PANK, Salon, Tor.com and other outlets. Her short stories have been honored by the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Pushcart Prize. K earned a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Southern Illinois University. She was awarded a W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She reads fiction for Quarterly West and teaches writing at GrubStreet in Boston and Rhode Island.

July 23, 2019July 19, 2019 by Andrea Categories: NewsTags: debut, interviews, k. chess, scifi Leave a comment