Release Week: Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, Enchanted by Alethea Kontis, and more

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Release Week: Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, Enchanted by Alethea Kontis, and more

Posted on 2012-05-09 at 14:51 by Sam

Release week for Tuesday, May 8, 2012: My top pick this “week” is Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, read by Cori Samuel for Iambik Audiobooks. This is a bit of a cheat job, as the audiobook was actually released in audio in late April, but I missed its arrival then so I will trumpet it loud and clear now: this is the next book I’m listening to. (See that “currently listening to” sidebar? Yeah, that.) Originally published as the first novel in Wizards of the Coast’s Discoveries series in 2008, and re-issued in paperback and e-book by Apex Book Company in early 2011, the book placed 8th in the 2009 Locus Poll for First Novel and was shortlisted for an IAFA William Crawford Award and included on Amazon.com’s Top 10 Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2008. I’ve read some great reviews (by Kaolin Fire and John H. Stevens in particular), enjoyed meeting JM and hearing him read from his short fiction, and am looking forward to diving into this mosaic story of Zhan’s quest for vengeance in a world of bison-riders, shamans, heretic paladins, and betrayals. Choice review quote: “This fantasy adventure belongs in libraries where literary fantasy in the tradition of Gene Wolf, A.A. Attanasio, and Gabriel García Márquez is popular.” –Library Journal.

Last Dragon Cover Enchanted | [Alethea Kontis]

Though it’s fairly quiet week for new adult titles, it’s another week of strong YA releases to start the merry month of May, this time led by Alethea Kontis’s debut novel Enchanted, Narrated by Katherine Kellgren for Brilliance Audio, the Big Idea behind which she explains over on Scalzi’s Whatever blog as starting with fairy tales like the frog prince and then: “I took all those tales and rhymes you know and love (and some you’ve never heard of) at their word, and I rehydrated them. I filled in some blanks, came to some logical conclusions, and fit them together like John Nash puzzle pieces.”

The Gift of Fire & On the Head of a Pin: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion By Walter Mosley, Narrated by Dominic Hoffman and Beresford Bennett for Random House Audio. At 6 hrs and 29 mins in total, each novel is indeed a short one. There’s always been something about the old Ace doubles that never quite leaves the memory, and recent months have seen a few of these “two short novels” packaged in print in just that old way, where instead of reading from front to back and encountering book number two about halfway through, you read from front to middle, and then turn the book over and read from “front” to middle again. Here’s the print book “covers” instead of the audiobook cover:

These “doubles”, whether multiple authors (The New People/Elegant Threat) or, as in Mosley’s case, single-author doubles (The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss) have always intrigued me, and in the age of e-books and audiobooks they ask the question of how the reader experience changes, if at all. For other books that could have been doubles, such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell’s excellent The Alchemist and the Executioness, the shared world in audio is hard to experience in other ways than the order presented. For these “upside down” bound print books, the reader has a choice, and the choice seems so easily able to inform the reading, particularly in the case of Goss’s book, as each of the short novels share a world and overall story (and additionally for book-binding wonks uses the “accordion” style and comes with a box case), whereas here Mosley’s tales are each standalone. These kinds of double stories exist n the e-book world as well, for example Minister Faust’s The Alchemist of Kush, the author explicitly invites reading the storylines in a variety of orders — first one, then the other, or vice versa, or (for those very, very handy with e-bookmarks) in alternating chapters. But where am I going with this? I’m rambling. I’ll close by linking to Mosley’s recent essay, “The Case for Genre”.

Grim Tides: A Marla Mason Novel | [T. A. Pratt] 

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

EARLIER THIS WEEK:

SEEN BUT NOT HEARD:

  • The Returning (Saga of Davi Rhii, #2) by Bryan Thomas Schmidt (Diminished Media Group, May 4) — no audio news
  • Anthology: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer (Tor, May 8, 2012) — this huge (and multiple awards-nominated) anthology would be a daunting audiobook, but, hey, I can dream…
  • Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik (May 8, 2012) — published in Cairo in 2008, set in 2023, and reviewed here by Strange Horizons
  • Gears of War: The Slab by Karen Traviss (Simon & Schuster, 5/8) — the previous books in Traviss’s tie-in series have been produced in audio by Brilliance Audio, and this one is due in audio on June 12
  • Anthology: War and Space: Recent Combat edited by Rich Horton & Sean Wallace (Prime Books, May 8)
  • Collections: Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner, Volume 1 and Walk on the Wild Side: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner, Volume 2 (Centipede Press, May 8) — reviewed by Stefan Dziemianowicz in Locus Magazine
  • Anthology: Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction edited by Brit Mandelo — per the Locus Monitor: Publishers Weekly gives this a starred review, noting stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Sandra McDonald, and Terra Lemay
  • Middle Grade: Wuftoom by Mary G. Thompson (Clarion Books, May 8) — “Everyone thinks Evan is sick … Everyone thinks science will find a cure. But Evan knows he is not sick; he is transforming. Evan’s metamorphosis has him confined to his bed, constantly terrified, and completely alone. Alone except for his visits from the Wuftoom, a wormlike creature that tells him he is becoming one of them.”
LATER THIS WEEK:

NEXT WEEK (May 15):

TWO WEEKS (May 22):

THREE WEEKS (May 29):

FOUR WEEKS (June 5):

FIVE WEEKS (June 12):

SIX WEEKS (June 19):

SEVEN WEEKS (June 26):

EIGHT WEEKS (July 3):

 
Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged alethea kontis, enchanted, jm mcdermott, last dragon, release week, ta pratt, watler mosley