Welcome to 2012! I return from an extended online hiatus (more on that later) to bring you tidings of Jack Yap, as promised in You don’t know Jack!, in which the author discusses the making of the audiobook itself. Jack Yap is “his Marm’s good boy, maple-syrup mouth, toffee-tongue, such sweetness” — or is he? He’s a rascal, a rapscallion, a downright ragamuffin, and he’s one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever read. It is therefore with great delight that I announce the release of the audiobook of “Stone Shoes”, the first of the two tales that make up Jack o’ the Hills, read by author C.S.E. Cooney and arranged by Jeremy Cooney. Many thanks go out to Jeremy, who also helped with “this GarageBand mumbojumbo”.
The audiobook can be purchased exclusively from Papaveria for the outrageously low cost of £1.69 — that’s approximately $2.99 for our American friends. Visit Circle Six to get a copy of your own.
But wait… I’m not quite done. To celebrate the release of the audio, I’ve made the paperback more widely available. You can now purchase Jack at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or my personal favorite, The Book Depository. You’ll probably find it at other online sellers as well — the more independent, the better.
But wait… I’m still not done. Because I love Jack and want you to love him, too, I have also dropped the cost of the ebook edition. You can purchase the epub or mobi from Circle Six for only £.99 — that’s around $1.55USD. The mobi is floating around the Amazons, too.
Is that enough Jack for you? I hope so. Although to be honest, there is never enough Jack for me. Next up we’ll get the audio of “Oubliette’s Egg” released, complete with hanging bone garden.
Part of the ongoing Synthesis Series, these were created for Magick 4 Terri, an auction to benefit artist, author and editor Terri Windling. Eventually I’d like to catalogue all of my book art here, so we’ll start with these.
Original book art with poem “The Grand Finale of Mr. Fox” by C.S.E. Cooney, author of Jack o’ the Hills (soon to be released as an audiobook).
Original book art with poem “The Tall House of Mr. Fox” by Caitlyn Paxson, who I hope will write something for me in the future.
In each of these pieces I’ve used the rib bone of a fox as the ‘spine’ of the book, backed the piece with lokta paper, and used natural elements that compliment the poems themselves. The pages have been coffee-stained, gently sealed and tied to the spines withe faux sinew, the frames stained mahogany and decorated with ivy leaves.
There are two more of these in progress. A theme of foxes, a sub-series of the series, perhaps. Hopefully all of them will go to good homes.
One of the books I’ll be releasing next year is a handbound, limited edition of Mike Allen’s novella “The Quiltmaker”, a sequel to his Nebula Award-nominated horror story “The Button Bin”. I’ll be working with Mike’s wife Anita Allen again — recall it was Anita who created The Honey Month Corset, a spectacular piece of wearable book-art made from spare pages of Amal El-Mohtar’s collection The Honey Month.
Anita has issued the following call for fabric:
I need 18 people to send me fabric that matches their skin tone as exactly as possible. If you have a distinguishing birthmark, tattoo or other visual feature that marks your skin as distinctly yours, I’d like photos. I’ll recreate said mark on the fabric and use it to create the buttoned-together “Quiltmaker” book covers for Papaveria.
If you’re twisted enough to want in on this (and surely you must be if you’ve read this far) contact me at anita[dot]d[dot]allen[at]gmail[dot]com (replace bracketed words with corresponding characters) to get the finer details.
If you are interested in collaborating with us on this project, please contact Anita directly.
Thank you!
C.S.E. Cooney, author of Jack o’ the Hills, has been busy cooking up a little treat for those of us who (like me) can’t get enough of Jack Yap…
Jack Yap was his Marm’s good boy, maple-syrup mouth, toffee-tongue, such sweetness, wasn’t he? His Marm’s pride was Jack Yap, so Marm told her neighbors – so she told him every day.
“Jackie, love,” she said into his muteness, “such a laddie, such a cuddlewump! Always smiling, aren’t you? Always helping your poor old Marm around the house.”
Jack Yap’s duties, which he did each day with seeming cheerfulness, were to bake the bread in the morning, bring his Marm her tea, unchain his brother Pudding from his bed and then take him to the outhouse.
Recall, Jack o’ the Hills is a fairy tale novella released by Papaveria Press earlier this year that includes two tales in one: “Stone Shoes” & “Oubliette’s Egg”.
Jack Yap once had his mouth sewn shut for talking too much. His brother Pudding has to wear stone shoes or he’ll just wander off. Will little obstacles like these keep the boys out of trouble? Not for the twinkling of an eye. There is magic in the hills, shapechangers and monsters, and Jack Yap has a hankering to meet them all and maybe kill a few. What he and Pudding find in the hills, however, changes both their lives, taking them out of the country and into the cruel and wonderful world, where witches and princesses await. Sometimes they are even the same person.
While reading Jack o’ the Hills is a pleasure only experienced by those who have, well, actually read it, hearing C.S.E. Cooney read Jack Yap would be a treasure indeed. And that is exactly the mischief being brewed right now. Here is what Ms. Cooney tells us about Jacks in general, about her Jack and about how to aim for the moon:
“One of my brothers (my brothers are Legion; just trust me when I say it was one of the younger ones, the next one down from me in fact, otherwise known as Aidan) wanted to be called Jack when he was a kid. I mean, I sympathized. I wanted to be called Mabel. Too much Pirates of Penzance or something. So I called my brother Jack for as long as that phase lasted. When I remembered.
Then there was the Jack of the movie Legend, a rag-and-tatters woodland boy who jumps from trees and communicates with Gumps. Well, a Gump, anyway. The Gump. There was Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas and Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer. And, of course, Sondheim’s Jack from Into the Woods, who had a “sunny, though occasionally vague disposition” and a Thing about Cows.
All of these Jacks informed me, but they are none of them my Jack. My Jack Yap has a little to do with Loki and a little to do with Mr. Fox. He has a lot to do with the violence that begets violence, but also with a fierce and feral kind of love. Love for family, love for friends, love for beauty that can’t be tamed. He’s a red-head. Lethal with a poker. Guardian to an elder brother (name of Pudding, by the way, speaking of “sunny, though occasionally vague” dispositions). Breaker of eggs and devoted swain of a shapeshifter named Tam.
I wrote “Stone Shoes” in college and “Oubliette’s Egg” after. When Papaveria Press agreed to publish them both under the title Jack o’ the Hills I was beside myself. I’ve been toting my sweet little (horrid little) Wonder Tale to conventions and open mics, giving readings and hawking wares. And you know what people keep telling me?
“As much as I like it, I like it even better when you read it out loud.” Or, “I keep hearing your voice in my head when I read it on the page.”
In fact, it was a fellow named Jack, whom I met at WisCon through writer Alexandra Erin, who said, “You should make an audiobook of this!”
I called my brother. No, not that brother. My other brother. One of them. Let’s call him Jeremy. Because that’s his name.
“Remi? Uh, will you help me with this GarageBand mumbojumbo? Puh-leeez???”
My awesome brother (well, they’re all awesome; that is the nature of my brothers) taught me all sorts of things. Purple tags and exports and splits and stuff. And also, ’cause he’s a musician, he agreed to set the section breaks of my audiobook with a little tune we’re composing together. After all, if Neil Gaiman can intersperse his Graveyard Book chapters with the Danse Macabre on banjo, we can try and be at least as cool. Aim for the moon, right?
Of course, if Jack Yap ever aimed for the moon, it’d probably be because he thought it looked like an egg, and felt a huge, hungry desire to break it into itsy bitsy pieces.
He can’t wait to meet you.”
Jack Yap isn’t just a character. He’s a situation, and, I kid you not, he is real. He’s the kind of real you lock your windows against at night, or put a chain around your refrigerator to protect your eggs. He’s a natural disaster, waiting to happen, and you really, really want to get to know him. And soon you’ll be able to hear C.S.E. Cooney read Jack to you!
I’m a bit afeared, because last I heard, Jack Yap was heading north.
I live in the north…
and I like eggs.
A Mayse-Bikhl, “a little book of stories”, contains twenty poems that first appeared in such fine venues as Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Not One Of Us, Dreams & Nightmares and more, and “Domovoi, I Came Back!” was nominated for the 2011 Rhysling Award. These poems, as Jeannelle says in her introduction, are “are deeply and completely Jewish poems”. Sonya pulls her material from the deep wells of Jewish myth and history, combining words to create a landscape both familiar and strange. She follows in that tradition of Yiddish literature most popularly published as chapbooks: stories of the fantastic, stories of romance, stories for women. It is entirely fitting that the front cover image, by A. Glixman, is of the Torah scrolls in England that had been rescued from Eastern Europe during World War II. The photograph was taken in 1969 when the scrolls were being restored by the Westminster Synagogue.
When Sonya asked if we could put the title and publisher information on the back of the chapbook in Yiddish, my lesson in the history and beauty of that language began. This was synchronicity at work, for I had just finished watching an episode of Fry’s Planet Word in which Fry spoke to an Israeli man about why they hadn’t chosen Yiddish as a state language. It seems to me Yiddish is the underdog of languages, and I’m pleased to have done this tiny bit to help keep it in the public eye.
During the course of the making of this chapbook, I also discovered The Joe Fishstein Collection of Yiddish Poetry, with its wonderful exhibit of periodicals and books including some from the P.E.N. club. If you click through, you will be presented with a vision of many beautiful books, each with a unique place in history. We had a conversation about YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, which has in its library “over 385,000 volumes in twelve major languages”. That’s not including the archives. And finally I was led to the Yiddish Book Center, which works to “rescue Yiddish and other modern Jewish books and open up their content to the world.”
Armed with the knowledge gleaned from these sites and from Sonya, Rose and Jeannelle, I felt almost competent in using Yiddish on the back cover. I can’t thank them enough for their assistance.
This title falls under the ‘handbound’ section of Papaveria’s catalogue. The pages and cover have been cut and folded by hand, but more importantly, each chapbook has been tied, not stapled. For the spine I used off-white cotton embroidery thread, tied in four knots, a tiny and I hope respectful acknowledgement to years of tradition.
Purchase from Circle Six.
Mark your calendars for on Monday the 7th of November we will be releasing this beautiful chapbook, a collection of 20 poems by Sonya Taaffe that will delight and enchant you. My intent was to release this title today, but upon returning home from a long weekend away late Tuesday night, there were naturally a ton of emails to answer (still doing that) and orders to ship with more coming in every day and to be perfectly honest with you, I am tired.
One of my business/art philosophies is to not do a thing unless I can give it everything I’ve got, and today I’ve got too little to give.
Forgive me for this slight delay, and trust me when I tell you that next week I’ll be back with a vengeance.
Front cover.
A Mayse-Bikhl by Sonya Taaffe came to Papaveria as an unexpected surprise, and I’m so glad it did. This is a collection of 20 poems, published as a special edition chapbook by Papaveria Press. The introduction, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira, says it all.
“Here are almost a decade’s worth of poems, curated by the author and Rose Lemberg. They tap an abiding cultural well; they are folk tales, mermaid-mayses, they are the richly hued wares of those who have traded in small, bright, enduring objects for a thousand years. Ms. Taaffe knows how to please the reading eye and linger in the senses, to charm by a sound, to sketch an inheritance with ash and fire and with sweetness. By turns intimate, elegiac, singing, and seeking, these poems are full of truth. They are deeply and completely Jewish poems, though to say that is to reach above one’s height for the emet written in the clay. Perhaps all Jewish texts look backward, inward, into dreams and the dark: better the wolf you know. These are poems for those who have known the wolf. Memory, wire-sharp and gallows-cold, is here, and the last notes of songs the whole world has forgotten. Orpheus is here too, Amazons, tzaddikim, dybbukim, small gods, and tummlers; the weighted grey of the diaspora; the warm golden stones of Jerusalem. It is all yours for the taking.”
– Jeannelle M. Ferreira
Many thanks to Rose Lemberg, who helped me with a lot more than curation, and to Jeanelle for finding the words when I could not.
This title will be released next week, when I return from a weekend away where I may, or may not, have internet access.
Back cover.
Interesting facts:
The Honey Month is back in stock.
There is only one copy of The Lucifer Cantos remaining.
Shiny Thing is now available directly from Papaveria Press.
Chanteys for the Fisherangels is on sale.
Oh and by the way, we have a new shopping cart. The old one was not doing its job and I couldn’t fix it, so I installed a new one. I can’t have unhappy customers, so that’s that. You can now create an account with Circle Six, but it is not required.
Stay tuned for more… rumor has it Jack is coming back. Hide your eggs!
If you see a shiny thing lying on the ground, do you stop to pick it up? I do, and I usually keep it. This Shiny Thing is different — I want to share it with the world. Papaveria is very pleased to announce the release of Shiny Thing, Patricia Russo’s first collection of short stories. I’m even more pleased that Patricia agreed to talk with me about her writing, and about the triangle below Blue Street, that ever-changing region in which many of her stories take place. You can read about the book and find out more about the author over on www.shiny-thing.com.
And if you like Patricia’s work, then please help spread the word about this fantastic collection of both previously published and unpublished work.
This title is available to purchase online at your favorite sellers, but is not yet available directly from Papaveria Press. You’ll hear more from me when it is.
One of Glastonbury's Holy Thorns
Papaveria’s next appearance will be at the Glastonbury Conference for the Fantastic in Literature, hosted by our friend and colleague Liz Williams. This is going to be “A Feast for the imagination”. Here’s a quote from the British Fantasy Society website: “Imaginary, supernatural and magical worlds in literature feature in Glastonbury’s first Conference for the Fantastic, Saturday 3 September, from 10.00am-6.00pm, at The Grail Centre in Chilkwell Street.
The Write Fantastic will offer inspiring and thought-provoking talks, evocative art, and beautiful, unusual books. Speakers include guest of honour, best-selling fantasy author Freda Warrington; Liz Williams, a well-known Glastonbury figure and popular fantasy novelist, who will be bringing occultist and author Dion Fortune back to life; writer Kari Maund, an expert on Celtic Britain, will shed light on the colourful Arthurian tradition; and local author Paul Weston will explain the work and philosophy of John Cowper Powys.”
I, too, will have many books available, both the paperbacks and a few of the limited editions, as well as the very first copies of Shiny Thing which just arrived this morning. Shiny Thing has a release date of 20 September, so this will be the only chance to purchase a copy between now and then — after this, they go back into hiding until their day arrives. We’re attending the conference as vendors, but fortunately Dis will be with me, so I’ll be able to run off and listen to the speakers whenever I please (or sneak away for a pint!). We love Glastonbury, we think of it as a home away from home, and we’re very much looking forward to seeing everyone there.
