The Pleasures of Strangeness

Here's a good little piece on Small Beer Press and their aesthetic:  "a spirit of playfulness, of invention and adventure."

"At one extreme, you'll find writers like Greer Gilman, whose Cloud and Ashes (2009) is more akin to a beguiling fever dream than a standard-issue novel, an edifice of startling word and world invention. At another, you'll find works like Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song, a luminous tale of ancient and modern Cambodia rendered in more straightforward, if still compelling, prose. It's an elusive quality that unites the extremes of the Small Beer Press catalogue, but quality of a particular kind is the key: the works all spring from careful attention to that which surprises and delights in literature. That surprise and delight are often the stuff of invention—of language, of world, of imaginative territory."

Nine