REVIEW | The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

Ekaterina Sedia, over the course of only a few novels, has assembled a body of work that has continually left me in awe of her creative and daring power. Some authors use mythology to merely accentuate their worlds, while Sedia makes mythology grow and change to her whims in lyrical and poetic ways that make them feel like all her own creation.

If you think you've read it all in Fantasy than think again.  Sedia's latest The House of Discarded Dreams gathers odd mythology from around the world to create one of the most unique novels in Speculative Fiction today. Sedia shuns conventionality for a story that seemingly has no connective tissue to form something more than the sum of all its parts. It is the story of a young woman trying to find herself in a country that doesn't feel like her own. It is a modern melding of old and modern mythology and fears. It is a story of dreams and nightmares coming to life.

The story centers around Vimbai, a college student and daughter of African immigrants. Vimbai is drawn to a house in the sand dunes of New Jersey as an escape from her family as she searches for who she wants to be.  Sedia brings some of her own experiences as an immigrant coming to America and living in New Jersey to the fore, but lots of research shows though as well. Africa has a mythology very unlike the style most Fantasy readers are use to, which makes The House of Discard Dreams a very impactful and original read.

Vimbai moves in with two other people who are given sketchy backgrounds, at best, one of which, Felix, has some sort of black hole in place of his hair and the other, Maya, a bartender in Atlantic City, who is the epitome of distant for much of the novel. Soon after moving in the house begins to change and odd things start to appear along the lines of ghosts, Psychic Energy Babies, and talking crabs and fish all of which barely scratches the surface of the complete and utter strangeness of it all.

Even amid all the originality there are some downside issues. The characters come off as distant and unknowable for too much of the story. What drives the other roommates? Maya's dark closet eventually comes out after much cajoling, but Felix comes off more as window dressing and often gets lost in the background.  Sedia also missed an important scene near the beginning where Vimbai tells her parents that she is moving out as she goes from looking at the house to a couple weeks later living there.  And I wasn't completely satisfied with the explanation on the black hole hair-do or how easily everyone accepts the changes in the house.

As the novel closes a good sense of growth is felt for Vimbai as she discovered the confidence and strength she was always looking for. It is an emotional journey that will leave you perfectly satisfied.  All you fans of Charles De Lint take notice. You've got a new favorite author and their name is Ekaterina Sedia. I give The House of Discarded Dreams 8 out of 10 hats. I can't wait to see how Sedia surprises me next and with Heart of Iron coming later this year it won't be too long.

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Cover Unveiled for Ekaterina Sedia's Heart of Iron

Art by Marcin Jakubowski 

This is a mock-up for Ekaterina Sedia's Heart of Iron, which is expected sometime this Fall from Prime Books.  An official description has not been released as of yet, but the cover does tantalize us with few facts. This is looking more and more like Steampunk, but quite different from what Sedia did with The Alchemy of Stone.  The art really captures the imagination, but the grey treatment needs some work around the title. The novel is supposed to be focused on Russia and China somehow.  And what is up with the guy in the cape? More news I have it and this reminds me I really need to get around to finishing my review of Sedia's The House of Discarded Dreams. It has to be her weirdest book to date, which says a lot if you've read her other works.

UPDATE: Heart of Iron is schedule for a May 2011 release and here is the description:

In a Russia where the Decembrists' rebellion was successful and the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed before 1854, Sasha Trubetskaya wants nothing more than to have a decent debut ball in St. Petersburg. But her aunt's feud with the emperor lands Sasha at university, where she becomes one of its first female students—an experiment, she suspects, designed more to prove female unsuitability for such pursuits than offer them education. The pressure intensifies when Sasha's only friends — Chinese students — start disappearing, and she begins to realize that her new British companion, Jack, has bigger secrets than she can imagine.

Sasha and Jack find themselves trying to stop a war brewing between the three empires. The only place they can turn to for help is the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, newly founded by the Taiping rebels. Pursued by the terrifying Dame Florence Nightingale of the British Secret Service, Sasha and Jack escape across Siberia via train to China. Sasha discovers that Jack is not quite the person she thought he was...but then again, neither is she.

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NEWS | Ekaterina Sedia sells new novel

Congratulations go out to Ekaterina Sedia who just sold a new novel to Prime Books via her agent Jennifer Jackson.  It is currently titled Heart of Iron and it is an alternate history set in Russia and China and is steampunk of some kind.  No word yet on a release date, but it will most likely be out in the second half of 2011.  Sedia's next novel The House of Discarded Dreams will be released this November from Prime Books as well. Also, Aidan just posted a very incisive review of Sedia's clockpunk tale The Alchemy of Stone. Even though it is not the most positive review it makes me want to read The Alchemy of Stone all over again.

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The creation of anthologies have always intrigues me.  Some are definitely better than others and generally if you have an editor who holds to a certain level you'll end up with a quality selection even if you don't love every story.  I've been following Ekaterina Sedia's work for the last couple of years ever since a friend told me about The Secret History of Moscow. Since then Sedia put out the outstanding The Alchemy of Stone and is now working on her third anthology after the World Fantasy Award winning Paper Cities and the just released Running With the Pack.  With all her recent work with anthologies I invited her to discuss her process for selection.  We also discussed a "What is Urban Fantasy" post, which she touches on as well.


All You Need To Do To Get Published is Haunt Your Editor's Dreams

Putting together an anthology is an interesting proposition – and I suspect that methods differ widely from anthologist to another. I, of course, can only talk about my approach. I'm currently working on BEWERE THE NIGHT, another urban fantasy antho I'm doing for Prime. This is my third solo urban fantasy anthology, and I'm starting to feel that I finally have some idea of what I'm doing.

The stories that I select are chosen by a highly idiosyncratic method – if I love it, I buy it; there's no telling in advance of what I'm going to love. Usually, there are more good stories than I have openings, so I retain the stories I like until everything is in, and then make my final selections. Keep in mind that some slots are allocated in advance – to solicited reprints and originals. And the process of selection is just like that – but generally, if I think the story is good, I'll buy it.

Many writers seem to get hung up on irrelevant details though – recently, I've been getting a lot of questions about my formatting requirements, what exactly do I mean by urban fantasy, etc etc. And the thing is – I don't think anyone was ever rejected for wrong font or an extra space after a period, or a summary of the story in the cover letter. All of those things don't matter if the story is good. Also, most editors (I'm guessing, although it is certainly true for me) don't know what they're looking for until they read it. So asking me whether I want ass-kicking chicks-urban fantasy or Charles de Lint-urban fantasy is a tad unnecessary – unless the guidelines specify some very narrow niche, you should just send in anything that you think might fit. Editors know when they cast a wide net – vague guidelines usually is not an oversight that needs to be corrected or clarified but an invitation. I've certainly acquired my share of stories that were neither urban nor particularly fantasy at that. But it's a sin to turn away a great story because it didn't meet some silly limitation, you know?

Now, what makes a story good? Usually, the stories I pick have surprised me somehow. For example, Molly Tanzer's story "In Sheep's Clothing" (from Running with the Pack) surprised me by an ingenious way it fused some very modern concerns with the werewolf myth. Others, like Kaaron Warren's "The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfalls" (which will be reprinted in Bewere the Night), delighted and shocked with their very strangeness, with the language and imagery that created an uncanny, dreamlike feel. I even dreamed about the story the night after I read it, and the next day emailed Kaaron asking her for the reprint. See? All you have to do is to haunt editors' dreams.

And since the host of this blog asked, I'd also like to touch on the whole what-is-urban-fantasy thing. The supernatural detective who kicks ass and sleeps with whatever it is she's investigating became as much a cliché (or a convention, if you will) as a magical school or a put-upon orphan who is secretly royalty. None of those are necessarily better or worse than the others. But here again we come against the issue of unnecessary limitation. Why write about vampires when everyone is writing about vampires? Why artificially narrow the genre, which is completely self-described in its own name? Fantastical happenings in (modern) cities are so much richer and more inspiring than whatever the current mold happens to be. It's like people who argue that steampunk has to take place in Victorian England – they are certainly entitled to their opinion but it doesn't mean that everyone else agrees.

So to me, urban fantasy can be pretty much anything, as long as it's somewhat modern day and somewhat fantastical. Same with were-creatures – if there's a change from a human to animal or vice versa, it fits. Genres are really just for the book shelving convenience; don't let anyone tell you that these are scriptures. Too strict adherence to rules can be misguided; adherence to the rules that don't really exist is just puzzling.


Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one,The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in November 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor ofPaper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack just released and Beware the Night coming in 2011.

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Cover Unveiled for The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

Cover Unveiled for The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

Vimbai moves into a dilapidated house in the dunes, trying to escape her embarrassing immigrant mother, and discovers that one of her new roommates has a pocket universe instead of hair, there is a psychic energy baby living in the telephone wires, and her dead Zimbabwean grandmother is now doing dishes in the kitchen. When the house gets lost at sea and creatures of African urban legends all but take it over, Vimbai has to turn to horseshoe crabs in the ocean, to ask for their help in getting home to New Jersey.

The House of Discarded Dream is one of those books it feels like I've been talking about forever. Ekaterina Sedia has quickly become one of my favorite Fantasy author as she is will to push things in new and sometimes strange directions.  The cover treatment this time around is gorgeous and steps away from the look of Fantasy books with more of a lit look that works for Sedia. I love the title font as well as the coloring of the imagery. The font is the same used on the recent reissue of The Alchemy of Stone from Prime Books.

The House of Discarded Dream is set for a November publication from Prime Books.

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What is the Weirdest Book You've Ever Read?

Every so often a book comes along that leaves you shaking your head. Whether that shaking is a good or bad thing can often be very subjective as well. In some ways aren't the books that confound you the very books that stay with you because they provoke much thought even long after you've finished? Well, I am always curious about these books, which is why I asked more than a dozen authors: What is the weirdest book you've ever read? The earliest response by Lavie Tidhar is already up, but seeing all the different takes gives some wonderful perspective of what people consider weird.

The last entry is my own as Gail Carriger politely asked whether I was going to participate.  Me thinks she was merely goading me into taking a bit of my own medicine, but I laud her for it.  Please feel free to chime in with your own weirdest read in the comments.

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Mark Teppo

In many ways, I prefer weird, but at the same time, there are levels of weird. Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is weird, but it's a comprehensible weird. William Burroughs gets really weird, but you sign on for that ride when you open one of his books, and part of the ride is the alien landscape. The truly weird are books that I realize I don't have the right cipher keys to completely decode. Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books fall into this category. I understand the words on the page, but I'm very conscious that I'm not fully grokking the sub-text. You have to keep coming back to these sorts of books because they test your growth as a reader and as a thinker. It's only been in the last year that I feel that I've finally unlocked most of the secrets in Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

These are the sorts of things that are constantly fascinating to me: how a writer can bury story in their language, how much meaning can be imparted by a single word choice, how they rely on the knowledge of the reader to supply context and meaning. These books stop being story--a defined tale with a beginning, middle, and end that communicates a linear progression of events that lead to a authorial summation of human nature--and become a clandestine transmission--a secret message passed between two people that is unique to their connection. What is written and what is read are never the same thing, really.

Mark Teppo is author of the Codex of Souls series which includes Lightbreaker and the recently released Heartland both published by Night Shade Books.

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Blake Charlton

Okay, so, so far the strangest book I've ever read I'm actually reading right now. It's titled Kill as Few Patients as Possible: and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to be the World's Best Doctor by Oscar London.

It's a bit dated, creative-nonfiction humor. Sometimes funny, sometimes not. Never laugh-out-loud funny. But it is often insightful--albeit sometimes in an ironic or roundabout way--regarding the medical life (so far as I know as a med student). But what's odd about it is how earnest it is. One gets a sense of how much the author cares about and loves medicine. Most other medical humor I've encountered (many will be familiar with the laugh-out-loud House of God by Samuel Shem) is cynical and ultimately corrosive, using medicine's foibles to tear medicine into pieces. Reading London, however, is both frightening and encouraging.

I'm presently writing a novel with a physician protag, and I'm hoping to make her cynical, witty, and yet sympathetic (i.e. _not_ House MD). Add on to that the fact that in a few years I'll enter the hospital as a clinical med student, and try to get a hold on when and how to use humor appropriately. So reading this book feels a bit like my present is smashing up against a possible future in a disconcerting but at least interesting way.

Currently, Blake Charlton is writing fantasy novels, science fiction short stories, and academic essays on medical education and biomedical ethics. His debut Spellwright is due to be published in March by Tor. His short story Endosymbiont is featured in the anthology Seeds of Change.

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Lev Grossman

I initially said The Falls, by Peter Greenaway, but I'm reneging. It is, undoubtedly, a strange book, but I think some of the strangeness comes from its connection to the film of the same name. (Which I haven't seen.) Seems like cheating.

So instead I'm going to go hearken back to a time when I actually almost knew French well enough to read novels in it, at which time I read Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. It's about a guy who sees another man, a stranger with a long neck, get into a disagreement with somebody else on a bus. Later that day he sees the same man in a railroad station. The man is explaining to a friend that he should get a button put on his overcoat.

That's it for action. It takes about two pages. For the rest of the book Queneau goes on to retell the same pointless story 99 times, in 99 different literary styles. He tells it from all points of view, in all tenses and moods. He tells it as a sonnet, as a word game, as a telegram, in anagrams, in different dialects, as a blurb for a novel, without using the letter 'e,' and on and on and on.

It's also impossible to say, when you're done, whether or not you enjoyed it, or what it meant, or if it meant anything. But it is unquestionably weird.

Lev Grossman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians and Codex.  He is hard at work on the sequel to The Magicians currently titled The Magician King.  Grossman is senior book reviewer for Time and also the creator of the Nerd World blog.

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Ekaterina Sedia

Boy, that's a tough one. I have to say, for me it's a toss up between Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, and Michael Cisco's The Traitor. Both are difficult to describe, but manage to create a very profound sense of surreal displacement within one's own skin -- these two books permanently tilt your point of view some imperceptible degrees, and you feel like you have a new set of eyes to look at the world with. This is not a pleasant feeling, necessarily, but for me these two books were terribly effective. They were so strange that they could not exist in the world as I perceived it, and thus the world needed to be expanded to accommodate them.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor of Paper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack forthcoming.

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Lou Anders

The weirdest book I ever read was Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, his debut novel, published in 1984 and written without the middle initial. Oddly, it's the only Banks I've ever read, but it made a huge impression on me. It's impossible to talk about without spoiling, but its a deeply disturbing novel with a most unusual, and most unreliable, narrator/protagonist. I think if I didn't work in SF&F, I'd be a Chuck Palahniuk kind of reader, and Banks was in that space before there was a space. But since I do work in SF&F, I'll take a moment to shameless plug James Enge's Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. As books that evolve directly out of the sword & sorcery stories of the Weird Tales tradition, these would be the "Weirdest" books we publish!

Lou Anders is the three-time Hugo nominated editor of Pyr Books, as well as the editor of 9 critically-acclaimed anthologies. He has been nominated for the PKD and WFC awards, and won the Chesley Award for Best Art Director.

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Sam Sykes

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read was Talyn by Holly Lisle. It had a very cool setting (two armies at war) with a very neat premise (fought entirely through magic). Somewhere along the line, though, the story began a very dramatic change that I will describe through my reactions in parentheses: it began as a war story (cool), a war story with MAGIC (COOL), a sudden peace breaks out (oh), a brief view of soldiers trying to cope without the war that gave them identity (very cool), a romance story (uh), a bondage fetish story (wait), a betrayal by a bondage fetishist mind controlling wizard (I said wait!), and then the last hundred pages were basically any excuse to do a strange sex scene at all points. By the time I read a character say (paraphrased): "Shit, she's (the main heroine) in shock! Get her naked! GET HER NAKED RIGHT NOW!" this book had basically secured the top list in my most unforgettable reads. It wasn't so much the weird sex fetishes that came out, but rather how abruptly they came out. Basically, it was like going to a dinner theater to watch a magician, only instead of seeing the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat, my waitress hopped up on my table, hiked up her skirt and peed on my steak. I was surprised, but not necessarily in a good way.

I also keep a running list of weird sexual phrases from books I've read. Currently topping that list is the phrase "his clockwork balls" from Andy Remic's Kell's Legend, with "the whorl of his anus" and "the root of his cock" from Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold coming in second and third, respectively.

Sam Sykes is the author of Tome of the Undergates, published in the UK by Gollancz in April of this year. He once wrestled an African White Rhino to the ground, can defeat nine out of ten Prime Ministers and is largely suspected to be the chief culprit behind reality television.

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I have a lot of contenders for the weirdest book I ever read. I thought of including some truly strange books, including things I’d read in galleys that were nearly unreadable, but then decided that wouldn’t be fair. Then I decided to define “weird” my way, which is “I can’t believe someone published this” primarily because the book breaks a bunch of rules. The problem is that most of the books that I define as weird in that way have become classics or familiar to us now, but they were so revolutionary in their time that people talked about them. I’m thinking in particular of Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which is all diary entries, homework assignments, and e-mails, and yet manages to have a great voice and a riveting style. (Now everyone is doing this.) By that definition, though, the weirdest book I can remember reading is Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale. It’s an historical romance novel, so our handsome hero and our beautiful heroine should suffer the slings and arrows of love, separating and getting together again, with a happily ever after. But...her hero, while handsome and rich, has just suffered a stroke. In Regency England. While alone. So everyone thinks he went crazy—and he’s put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where our heroine, a Quaker, helps her father care for the demented. Kinsale portrays the insane asylum in a historically accurate way—in other words, it’s a horrible place—and the romance continues from there, as our hero slowly recovers from the stroke, but doesn’t really recover the power of speech. It goes from there. It’s now considered a romance classic, but when it was published, it was revolutionary. (I really love this book—and recommend Kinsale to everyone who likes to read. She did some paranormal stuff before it became popular too, for you who like fantasy with your romance.)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written some weird books in her time as well, including a romance (as Kristine Grayson) whose hero is a garden gnome, kinda. (Completely Smitten) Her current novel is Diving into the Wreck, which is science fiction adventure, and was published by Pyr. Her next book is a collection of her award-winning short stories, called Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories to be published in the spring from Golden Gryphon. An even weirder Grayson novel, The Charming Way, in which Prince Charming (one of them, anyway) falls in love with the Evil Stepmother, will be published in Spring of 2011.

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Gail Carriger

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my first pick. It wasn't until I read this book that I realized how utterly acid-trip bizarre a story could be and get away with it, especially if it also happened to be side-achingly funny. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is right there in the same arena.

Ms. Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. She is the author of the Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

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Jeffrey Thomas

I've read a lot of bizarre books, perhaps more bizarre than my choice, but I also have to consider literary merit...so the book that comes to mind is the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos. Bernanos was the son of the well known French author, George Bernanos, and if I recall correctly he was a troubled soul who died young. My aunt gave me this novel when I was a teenager, and its haunting imagery and desolate atmosphere have remained with me over the decades. The story itself is simple: a merchant vessel becomes becalmed at sea, and then wrecked, the only survivors being the young protagonist and an older cook. They reach an eerie island, where the trees all bow down to the ground at night, and where the statues (or are they statues?) of human beings can be found on the slopes of the island's ominous central mountain. Did the characters survive the wreck after all, or are they actually in Hell? Their efforts to survive are both depressing in their futility, and inspiring, in that the characters never cease to struggle against their circumstances, and their friendship sustains them where nothing else can. The story can be seen as a descent into madness (the author's?), and its hellish feel may have been inspired in part by the fact that Bernanos' father was a devout Catholic. The novel was republished a few years ago by Cherokee Publishing Company; it's a short read and I encourage readers of horror, dark fantasy, and the surreal to check it out.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Punktown, Letters from Hades, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and the forthcoming The Fall of Hades. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Alex Bledsoe

The strangest book I've run across is a slender little volume called Dragons: The Modern Infestation, by Pamela Wharton Blanpied, first published in 1980.  I discovered it in one of those remainder stores that pop up every so often in otherwise abandoned shopping centers. This one was in Florence, Alabama, in the late 80s. They had two big stacks of the book, probably fifty copies in all. I picked it up because the title seemed intriguing, and when I flipped through it, it perplexed me even more. It seemed to be a straight non-fiction book, complete with diagrams, a bibliography, and photographs detailing the current efforts to understand dragons, real fire-breathing dragons, throughout the world. Yet even with helpful arrows indicating where the dragons were supposed to be in the photos, I couldn't see them. Or could I? Because if you stare at anything long enough, you start to see what you're looking for....

It wasn't until the advent of the internet a decade later that I finally learned the book was intended as a parody of scholarly works poking fun at their seriousness by applying it to a ridiculous topic like dragons. And I guess in a sense the joke was on me, because even after reading the book and realizing it couldn't be legitimate (one dragon converses, Pern-like, with a researcher) I still didn't understand the point.

When I began researching dragons for my novel Burn Me Deadly, I tried unsuccessfully to track down Ms. Blanpied. She is evidently as elusive as the beasts in her book, if she even truly exists (if you read this, Ms. Blanpied, I'd still love to talk to you). But whoever she is, wherever she is, I hope she finally got her laugh.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I now live in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls. The author of the Eddie LaCrosse high fantasy/hardboiled mysteries (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly and the forthcoming Dark Jenny), two novels about vampires in 1975 Memphis (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the first Tufa novel, The Hum and the Shiver, due in 2011.

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Victor Gischler

In the broadest sense of the word "weird" I shall pick Joe Meno's wonderful The Boy Detective Fails. I think there are many books that are much, much weirder, but Meno's book was an odd, strange little fairy tale that I enjoyed so much it still stays with me. What struck me as most "weird" was less the story itself and more the way I enjoyed the book. Usually I want to be driven through a story. I want the pace to keep me flipping pages. But I found myself sort of gently floating through The Boy Detective Fails as this gentle, whimsical story unfolded.

Victor Gischler is the author of author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. including his debut novel Gun Monkeys which was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His fifth novel Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and most recent novel Vampire A-Go-Go actually have nothing to do with one another. He is also hard at work on many Deadpool comics for Marvel.

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Jesse Bullington

Upon first being asked my mind started turning to William S. Burroughs and other experimental authors that seemed way out on the outer fringes, but upon reflection I think that one book that really struck me as intrinsically weird when I first read it was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is a weird book full of weird stuff, sure, Invisible Cities actually caught me off guard as a teenager--it wasn't that crazy stuff happened or the style was unusual, it was that the entire book as a whole seemed alien to me. The book consists of Marco Polo describing cities he has supposedly encountered to Kublai Khan but the novel is so much more than that--in addition to being a superficially fun read it's also an intricate puzzle, an incredibly nuanced work passed off as a casual series of descriptions. While not as well known as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (the single best piece of post modern fiction ever written) or The Baron in the Trees (a comparatively straight-forward fable), Invisible Cities remains a masterpiece, and quite possibly the weirdest book I've ever read--it was certainly the weirdest I'd ever read at the time, and don't know of any book that has matched it since.

Jesse Bullington is the author of the novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, as well as numerous articles and pieces of short fiction.  He is currently at work on his second novel The Enterprise of Death.

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Michael, The Mad Hatter

For me it would have to be The Shape We're In by Jonathan Letham. It is a bit of a cheat as I asked everyone else to stick to novels, and The Shape We're In is a novelette at best.  Yet, it is the story that had me scratching my head days after finishing.  Told from the point of view of an alcoholic garbage man charged with moving trash from one section of a giant immobile vessel shape of sorts to another it is cynical yet hilarious at the same time. In search of his missing son the garbage man ventures into far off sections of the shape and meets hordes of odd cultures that have evolved there. I hesitate to say more as there is a big reveal that is worth uncovering on your own.

Michael, The Mad Hatter is an elusive hat and book collector spending far too much money and time on both.  He is secretly planning to open the world's first Haberdashery and Book Emporium. He also runs a little book review blog of some sort.

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MISHMASH | Dresden Files RPG, ToC for Running With the Pack, and Free Bacigalupi

Four years into development and Evil Hat Productions has finally announced the impending publication of The Dresden Files RPG.  The RPG will be based off the FATE system which I am not familiar with, but it certainly sounds workable for this world.  The game has now grown into at least two volumes: The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 1 – Your Story and The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 2 – Our World.  Fred Hicks from Evil Hat has this to say:

“Originally, we were planning to do this game in a single volume. As time went on and word count grew…so did the amount of flat-out awesome we knew we had on our hands. And so our game grew out of the confines of one book, into two gorgeous volumes.”

Ryan Macklin, head developer-wrangler of Evil Hat added:

"The thing is jam-packed with great rules for making your campaign & playing all sorts of different beasts and badasses from the Dresdenverse, supported by loads of advice for players & GMs as well as a lot of characters and creatures from the books statted out. (To give you an idea of what we mean by A LOT, Fred got to about the 75% mark on the first pass through layout and saw he already had 460 pages of material. The final combined page count of the two books together could break 600. Over 140 pages of that is our comprehensive tour of the characters of the first ten novels, complete with stats where they’re stattable.)"

A preview of Harry Dresden's character sheet is available here.  Evil Hat is hoping to have pre-orders up in June so be on the lookout, but it seems like you may not  have product in hand until July as they are first releasing it at a convention.  Visit the official site for the game for more details as they are released as they've gone all out on the development details.




Ekaterina Sedia has released the table of contents for her second anthology Running With the Pack, which will be released this May from Prime Books.

INTRODUCTION

WILD RIDE by Carrie Vaughn

SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE by Steve Duffy

COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES by Marie Brennan

BEAUTIFUL GELREESH by Jeffrey Ford

SKIN IN THE GAME by Samantha Henderson

BLENDED by C.E. Murphy

LOCKED DOORS by Stephanie Burgis

WERELOVE by Laura Anne Gilman

IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING by Molly Tanser

ROYAL BLOODLINES by Mike Resnick

DIRE WOLF by Genevieve Valentine

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT by Lawrence Schimmel

MONGREL by Maria Snyder

DEADFALL by Karen Everson

RED RIDING HOOD'S CHILD by N.K. Jemisin

ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? by Geoffrey Goodwin

THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST by Mike Brotherton

THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL by Amanda Downum

BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE by Jesse Bullington

THE BARONY AT RODAL by Peter Bell

INSIDE OUT by Erzbet Yellowboy

GESTELLA by Susan Palwick

Stories by Jesse Bullington, N.K. Jemisin, and Amanda Downum definitely move this collection up on my list. Also, I love the title of Geoffrey Goodwin's story Are You a Vampire or a Goblin?

iO9 in conjunction with Night Shade Press is giving away the ebook version of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which keeps garnering praise left and right.  So if you haven't picked it up yet now is your chance to grab it for free.  This looks to be a limited time offer to coincide with iO9's book club event for The Windup Girl, so put a request in while you can.

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REVIEW | Paper Cities ed. by Ekaterina Sedia
LOOKING FORWARD | Big Anthologies Coming in 2010
REVIEW | The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

LOOKING FORWARD | Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Steampunk to Watch for in 2010

Culling this list was quite difficult compared to the anthology edition and the Fantasy list. For the purposes of this list I've put any Zombie related titles under Urban Fantasy. Be forewarned spoilers do exist in these descriptions if it is a long running series. Everything is listed in publication order by category.

Urban Fantasy is definitely top-loaded for the first few months of 2010 with many major releases for long-established series with a new Dresden Files and Nightside. We've got some big guns with Mieville checking in with Kraken, which is a standalone. Amelia Beamer's debut The Loving Dead sounds like a great twist on zombies. One theme I noticed was very few Sci-Fi books piqued my interest that weren't from either small houses such a Powell's Silversands and Jason Stoddard's Winning Mars or those that only have a UK publication scheduled as with Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. In the Steampunk area we've got Lavie Tidhar's debut novel The Bookman, which is also the start of a trilogy. George Mann is treating us to two helpings of his Steampunk world with Ghosts of Manhattan and The Osiris Ritual while we should see the next two volumes of Gail Carriger's series this year as well. All in all this should be a jam-packed year and this only comprises releases up to September for the most part.

URBAN FANTASY

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (Nightside 10) by Simon R. Green
Release Date: January 5 |  Publisher: Ace

Things were going so well for P.I. John Taylor, that it was only a matter of time before everything hit the fan. Walker, the powerful, ever-present, never to-be-trusted agent who runs the Nightside on behalf of The Authorities, is dying. And he wants John to be his successor-a job that comes with more baggage, and more enemies, than anyone can possibly imagine.

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Heartland (Codex of Souls 2) by Mark Teppo

Release Date: January  | Publisher: Night Shade Books

Seek the Light! Embrace the Heartland! Markham returns to Paris where he lost his love - and nearly his life! The ancient order of manipulative magicians that once cast him out is now in turmoil... a turmoil made all the greater by the swaths of destruction that Markham tried to avert in the Pacific Northwest. Teamed with an unlikely partner, Markham seeks to overturn the corrupt remains of an order no longer able to police its own practitioners. Yet, he can't escape the feeling that he's still just a pawn in a larger game. The second novel of the Codex of Souls further explores the strange occult world first introduced in Lightbreaker. Mark Teppo's vision of a magical underworld is a non-stop adventure that continues to bring new light to the occult origins of our history.

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Where Angels Fear to Tread (Remy Chandler 3) by Thomas E.Sniegoski
Release Date: March 2  |  Publisher: Roc

Six year-old Zoe York has been taken and her mother has come to Remy for help. She shows him crude, childlike drawings that she claims are Zoe's visions of the future, everything leading up to her abduction, and some beyond. Like the picture of a man with wings who would come and save her-a man who is an angel.

Zoe's preternatural gifts have made her a target for those who wish to exploit her power to their own destructive ends. The search will take Remy to dark places he would rather avoid. But to save an innocent, Remy will ally himself with a variety of lesser evils-and his soul may pay the price...

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Changes (Dresden Files 12) by Jim Butcher
Release Date: April 6  |  Publisher: Roc

Long ago, Susan Rodriguez was Harry Dresden's lover-until she was attacked by his enemies, leaving her torn between her own humanity and the bloodlust of the vampiric Red Court. Susan then disappeared to South America, where she could fight both her savage gift and those who cursed her with it.

Now Arianna Ortega, Duchess of the Red Court, has discovered a secret Susan has long kept, and she plans to use it-against Harry. To prevail this time, he may have no choice but to embrace the raging fury of his own untapped dark power. Because Harry's not fighting to save the world...

He's fighting to save his child.

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Kraken by China Mieville
Release Date: June 29 |  Publisher: Del Rey

Kraken is a standalone with a very Lovecraftian twist. Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

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The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

Release date: July 2010  |  Publisher: Prime Books

Sedia is always mixing things up from book to book and this description is no different.

Vimbai moves into a dilapidated house in the dunes, trying to escape her embarrassing immigrant mother, and discovers that one of her new roommates has a pocket universe instead of hair, there is a psychic energy baby living in the telephone wires, and her dead Zimbabwean grandmother is now doing dishes in the kitchen. When the house gets lost at sea and creatures of African urban legends all but take it over, Vimbai has to turn to horseshoe crabs in the ocean, to ask for their help in getting home to New Jersey.

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Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn - Series Debut
Release Date: July  |  Publisher Tor

When Evie Walker goes home to spend time with her dying father, she discovers that his creaky old house in Hope’s Fort, Colorado, is not the only legacy she stands to inherit. Hidden behind the old basement door is a secret and magical storeroom, a place where wondrous treasures from myth and legend are kept safe until they are needed again.

The magic of the storeroom prevents access to any who are not intended to use the items. But just because it has never been done does not mean it cannot be done. And there are certainly those who will give anything to find a way in. Evie must guard the storeroom against ancient and malicious forces, protecting the past and the future even as the present unravels around them. Old heroes and notorious villains alike will rise to fight on her side or to undermine her most desperate gambits. At stake is the fate of the world, and the prevention of nothing less than the apocalypse.

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The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer - Debut
Release Date: July 15  |  Publisher: Night Shade Books

Girls! Zombies! Zeppelins!

Locus Editor Beamer's debut has been pitched as if Shaun of the Dead and Garden State had a love child living in San Francisco, you'd have this sexy novel, set at the outbreak of a zombie plague.

Kate and Michael are roommates living in the Oakland hills, working at the same Trader Joes supermarket. A night of drunken revelry changes their lives forever, but not in the way that anyone would expect. A slow-spreading plague of zombie-ism breaks out at their house party, spreading amongst their circle of friends, and simultaneously through the Bay Area. This zombie plague - an STD of sorts - is spread through sex and kissing, turning its victims into mindless, horny, voracious killers. Thrust into extremes by this slow- motion tragedy, Kate and Michael are forced to confront the choices they've made in their lives, and their fears of commitment, while trying to stay alive and reunite in the one place in the Bay Area that's likely to be safe and secure from the zombie hoards: Alcatraz.

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Pariah by Bob Fingerman
Release Date: August 3 | Publisher: Tor

A frightening, darkly comedic look at people surviving a zombie onslaught, from award-winning comics sensation and novelist Bob Fingerman.

The world is in chaos. A zombie plague has devoured every nation on the planet. New York City is no exception. Imagine eight million zombies. Shoulder to shoulder. Walking the streets, looking for their next meal. The residents of one apartment building have bonded to keep themselves safe from the onslaught, but their inevitable demise lurks right outside their window, a constant reminder of the doom that awaits them. Forced to remain in the safety of the building, the tenants find themselves at each others’ throats. When they spy a lone teenage girl who walks among the hordes, unattacked by the undead, their world opens up.

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Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll - Series Debut
Release Date: August  |  Publisher: Tor

When New York City jewelry designer Garet James stumbles into a strange antiques shop in her  neighborhood, her life is turned upside down. John Dee, the enigmatic shopkeeper, asks her to open a vintage silver box for a generous sum of money. Oddly, the symbol of a swan on the box exactly matches the ring given to Garet by her deceased mother. Garet can’t believe this eerie coincidence until she opens the box and otherworldly things start happening.…The precious silver box is stolen from Garet’s home. When she investigates, Garet learns that she has been pulled into a prophecy that is hundreds of years old. Opening the box has unleashed an evil force onto the streets of Manhattan. Gradually, Garet pieces together her true identity—one that her deceased mother desperately tried to protect her from. Generations of women in Garet’s family, including her beloved mother, suffered and died at the hands of this prevailing evil. Does Garet possess the power to reclaim the box and defeat this devastating force?

On her journey, she will meet fey folk who walk unnoticed among humans and a sexy vampire who also happens to be a hedge fund manager that she can’t stop thinking about. Can Garet trust anyone to guide her? The fairies reveal a desire to overpower mere humans, and the seductive vampire has the power to steal the life from her body. Using her newfound powers and sharp wit, Garet will muster everything she’s got to shut down the evil taking over her friends, family, New York City, and the world.

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STEAMPUNK

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar - Debut / Series Debut
Release Date: January UK/June US|  Publishers: Angry Robot

Tidhar has been making a name for himself in short form for many years now and with his first novel being the start of a steampunk series it is a must.  With his first novel length work being a Steampunk book I just have to try it.  A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees - there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack. For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure, The Bookman is the first of a series.

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Changeless (The Parasol Protectorate 2) by Gail Carriger
Release Date: March 30  | Publisher: Orbit

Soulless was one of the most fun I've had all year.  So Changeless will be a must for me to check out.  Plus I think this will have less of the romance angle that was a bit strong for me in the first book.

Alexia Tarabotti, now Lady Maccon, awakens in the wee hours of the mid-afternoon to find her husband, who should be decently asleep like any normal werewolf, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he disappears - leaving her to deal with a regiment of supernatural soldiers encamped on her doorstep, a plethora of exorcised ghosts, and an angry Queen Victoria.

But Alexia is armed with her trusty parasol, the latest fashions, and an arsenal of biting civility. Even when her investigations take her into the backwaters of ugly waistcoats, Scotland, she is prepared: upending werewolf pack dynamics as only A soulless can.

She might even find time to track down her wayward husband, if she feels like it.

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The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee
Release Date:  March 30  |  Publisher: Orbit

A steampunkish tale with a Inuit protagonist is what caught me here.  At the edge of the known world, an ancient nomadic tribe faces a new enemy-an Empire fueled by technology and war.

A young spiritwalker of the Aniw and a captain in the Ciracusan army find themselves unexpectedly thrown together. The Aniw girl, taken prisoner from her people, must teach the reluctant soldier a forbidden talent - one that may turn the tide of the war and will surely forever brand him an outcast.

From the rippling curtains of light in an Arctic sky, to the gaslit cobbled streets of the city, war is coming to the frozen north. Two people have a choice that will decide the fates of nations - and may cast them into a darkness that threatens to bring destruction to both their peoples.

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Pinion by Jay Lake
Release Date: March 30 | Publisher: Tor

The final book in Lake's clockpunk series following the events of Mainspring and Escapement.

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Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann
Release Date: April 27 | Publisher: Pyr

Ghosts of Manhattan is a spin off of sorts to Mann's Newbury & Hobbes series only placed in the US and pushed forward in time, which should make for a very interesting setting. Lou Anders has also mention it should harken to something close to The Shadow.

1926. New York. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. Flappers. Prohibition. Coal-powered cars. A cold war with a British Empire that still covers half of the globe. Yet things have developed differently to established history. America is in the midst of a cold war with a British Empire that has only just buried Queen Victoria, her life artificially preserved to the age of 107. Coal-powered cars roar along roads thick with pedestrians, biplanes take off from standing with primitive rocket boosters, and monsters lurk behind closed doors and around every corner. This is a time in need of heroes. It is a time for The Ghost. A series of targeted murders are occurring all over the city, the victims found with ancient Roman coins placed on their eyelids after death. The trail appears to lead to a group of Italian American gangsters and their boss, who the mobsters have dubbed "The Roman." However, as The Ghost soon discovers, there is more to The Roman than at first appears, and more bizarre happenings that he soon links to the man, including moss-golems posing as mobsters and a plot to bring an ancient pagan god into the physical world in a cavern beneath the city. As The Ghost draws nearer to The Roman and the center of his dangerous web, he must battle with foes both physical and supernatural and call on help from the most unexpected of quarters if he is to stop The Roman and halt the imminent destruction of the city.

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The Osiris Ritual (Newbury & Hobbes 2) by George Mann
Release Date: August 3  |  Publisher: Tor

Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, imagines life can be a little quieter from now on after his dual success in solving The Affinity Bridge affair. But he hasn't banked on his villainous predecessor, Knox, hell bent on achieving immortality, not to mention a secret agent who isn't quite as he seems...So continues an adventure quite unlike any other, a thrilling steampunk mystery and the second in the series of "Newbury & Hobbes" investigations.

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Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Release Date: September(est)  |  Publisher: Tor

Follow-up to the wondrous Boneshaker, Cherie has thus far described the alterna-world Civil War era Steampunk adventure Dreadnought as more gruesome than the first.  The Clockwork Century books are meant to be standalone so it wouldn't be inappropriate to read them out of order.

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Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
Release Date: October | Publisher: Simon Pulse

Follow-up to Leviathan.

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SCIENCE FICTION

Absorption by John Meaney - Series Debut
Release Date: February | Publisher: Gollancz

The universe is dark. And it is alive.

People across the universe are glimpsing shards of darkness moving at the edge of their vision; hearing echoes of a dark, disturbing musical chord; and dreaming of becoming crystal, and joining the Ragnarok Council. Absorption is the first of a new space opera trilogy packed with space warfare and mindblowing rationale for Norse mythology. This is SF to rival Peter F. Hamilton.

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Winning Mars by Jason Stoddard - Debut
Release Date: March 1 | Publisher: Prime Books

Jere Gutierrez is bucking the trend at the dying art of "linear" entertainment - what we know today as TV shows. His combination of astounding stories, captured in the moment, are captivating millions. Of course, every one of his stories are fabricated and engineered and orchestrated, even though they're sold as "real." Unfortunately for Jere, his backers have begun to see through his tricks. Desperate for another story, one large enough to capture the attention of the world, he teams up with a retired TV executive to create an ad-supported mission to Mars, complete with corporate sponsors and extreme sports events. What Jere doesn't know is just how captivating his Winning Mars will be.

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Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
Release Date: February | Gollancz

No announced US publication as of yet, but the interesting description and setting has piqued my interest greatly.  Also a video game is planned based around the book which is slated to be released on Xbox and for the PC in 2010.

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend. More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.

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Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley
Release Date: March 23  |  Publisher: Pyr

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth's forces loot their cities, settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the 'Outer problem'. But Earth's victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by Avernus, the Outers' greatest genius, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn't as easy as he thought. And in Greater Brazil, the Outers' democratic traditions have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war - especially the victors.

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Silversands by Gareth L Powell - Debut Novella
Release Date: April | Publisher: Pendragon Press

In an age where interstellar travel is dangerous and unpredictable, and no-one knows exactly where they’ll end up, Avril Bradley is a Communications officer onboard a ship sent to re-contact as many of these lost souls as possible.

But a mysterious explosion strands her in a world of political intrigue, espionage and subterfuge; a world of retired cops, digital ghosts and corporate assassins who fight for possession of computer data that had lain undisturbed for almost a century. . .

This is the debut novel from the critically-acclaimed author of the short story collection The Last Reef, Gareth L Powell, with stunning cover artwork by Vincent Chong.

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Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds
Release Date: June 1 | Publisher: Ace
Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different - and rigidly enforced - level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains ...Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels - and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality - and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability.

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ODD ONES

Sleepless by Charlie Huston
Release Date: January 12 | Publisher Ballantiine

A gripping and imaginative work of speculative fiction about an epidemic of sleeplessness from the bestselling author who Stephen King calls "one of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century," for fans of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk.

The world is in the grip of an epidemic of sleeplessness. In L.A., a cop named Parker Haas is working undercover to stop black market trade of a drug called Dreamer, the only thing that helps the sleepless. But his interest in the drug is more than professional. His wife is sleepless, and they don't know yet if their infant daughter is also sick. Then Park discovers that the black market he's trying to stop is the creation of the very company that makes the drug. But how can a lowly cop go after the son of one of the world's richest and most powerful men?

Trapped by these things--a dying wife, an infant daughter, a truth that could unravel his career--Park risks all for one chance to do his part in repairing a broken world.

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The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni
Release Date: March 4 | Publisher: Putnam

Sebastian Prendergast lives in a geodesic dome with his eccentric grandmother, who homeschooled him in the teachings of futurist philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. But when his grandmother has a stroke, Sebastian is forced to leave the dome and make his own way in town.

Jared Whitcomb is a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old heart-transplant recipient who befriends Sebastian, and begins to teach him about all the things he has been missing, including grape soda, girls, and Sid Vicious. They form a punk band called The Rash, and it's clear that the upcoming Methodist Church talent show has never seen the likes of them. Wholly original, The House of Tomorrow is the story of a young man's self-discovery, a dying woman's last wish, and a band of misfits trying desperately to be heard.


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