"Just give me your hand and we will wend our way..."

Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press announces:

I’m pleased to note that the first paperback edition of Greer Gilman’s amazing, immersive, enchanting, mind boggling, fever-inducing, death-defying literary tightrope walk, Tiptree Award winner Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales has gone to press and will be published in April of this year.

Greer will be reading and taking questions at the mighty Porter Square Books on April 21st at 7 pm along with one of her amazing first readers, Sonya Taaffe, who will be celebrating the publication of her own latest book, Ghost Signs, a collection of 36 poems and one story, published by our friends at Aqueduct Press.

Should you read Cloud & Ashes? Here is one reader’s response:

“Cloud & Ashes is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It’s also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.) There might seem to be a contradiction in those words, and there might well be, were every human to read. But to my, mind reading is an effort that exists outside its own exercise; that is when we read, it may feel like an internal, unshared, indeed unsharable experience. But that is not, I think the case. When we read, we go to the place where writing comes from, and in so doing, I think we leave something of ourselves behind as readers. Greer Gilman found whatever it is that is left behind, she has captured it in her net of words and managed to write it down and get it published. That is a herculean feat. It may only happen once in her lifetime or in ours. But it’s happened here and now. What you do with it is up to you. For eternity, as it happens.”

—Rick Kleffel

And Ghost Signs?:

Sonya Taaffe writes hauntingly of edgelands. Her poetic world lies on both banks of the Acheron, which may be crossed both ways. In Ghost Signs, she writes of uncompleted lives, of the lingering and commingling of the dead with us, the living. Where we meet are borderlands, uncertain spaces: in a saltmarsh, in the mud of trenches, in the realm of numbers, on the edge of sleep. There is darkness; but the journey is upward, into light. A transcendent book.

—Greer Gilman

Nine