GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS de John M. Ford

Out of print for more than two decades, John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless is an award-winning classic of a “lost generation” of young people born on the human-colonized Moon.

GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS
by John M. Ford
with an introduction by Francis Spufford
Tor Books, September 2022

Matthias Ronay has grown up in the low gravity and great glass citadels of independent Luna―and in the considerable shadow of his father, a member of the council that governs Luna’s increasingly complex society. But Matt feels weighed down on the world where he was born, where there is no more need for exploration, for innovation, for radical ideas―and where his every movement can be tracked by his father on the infonets.
Matt and five of his friends, equally brilliant and restless, have planned a secret adventure. They will trick the electronic sentinels, slip out of the city for a journey to Farside. Their passage into the expanse of perpetual night will change them in ways they never could have predicted…and bring Matt to the destiny for which he has yearned.
With a new introduction by Francis Spufford, author of Red Plenty and Golden Hill.

John M. Ford (1957-2006) was a science fiction and fantasy writer, game designer, and poet whose work was held in high regard by peers ranging from Neil Gaiman to Robert Jordan to Jo Walton to Roger Zelazny, alongside innumerable others. His novels include the World Fantasy Award-winning The Dragon Waiting, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS, and the contemporary thriller The Scholars of Night. His debut novel Web of Angels (1980) has been called “cyberpunk before there was cyberpunk.” He spent the latter decade-and-a-half of his writing life in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

OF MANNERS AND MURDER d’Anastasia Hastings

The first in the delightful new Dear Miss Hermione mystery series from Anastasia Hastings. Set in 1885 London, it features complicated familial relationship, romance, and murder.

OF MANNERS AND MURDER:
A Dear Miss Hermione Mystery
by Anastasia Hastings
Minotaur Books, February 2023

1885: London, England. When Violet’s Aunt Adelia decides to abscond with her newest paramour, she leaves behind her role as the most popular Agony Aunt in London, « Miss Hermione, » in Violet’s hands.
And of course, the first letter Violet receives is full, not of prissy pondering, but of portent. Ivy Armstrong is in need of help and fears for her life. But when Violet visits the village where the letters were posted, she finds that Ivy is already dead.
She’ll quickly discover that when you represent the best-loved Agony Aunt in Britain, both marauding husbands and murder are par for the course.

Anastasia Hastings is a penname for Connie Laux who has, over a thirty-year career, published 65 novels in a number of different genres and under a number of names. She began writing historical romance, and has also written contemporary romance, YA, and a children’s book. Over fifteen years ago, she set her sights on writing in her favorite genre, mystery, and since then has published 30+ mysteries for Minotaur and Penguin Random House. As Kylie Logan, she wrote the Jazz Ramsey books for Minotaur as well as a number of cozy mysteries for Berkley, including the League of Literary Ladies series, the Ethnic Eats series, and the Button Box mysteries. She’s also written the Haunted Mansion mysteries as Lucy Ness and the Love is Murder mysteries (set in a romance bookstore) as Mimi Granger. As Casey Daniels, she authored the Pepper Martin mysteries, a series in which she put her knowledge of old cemeteries and the paranormal to good use. She is a Sherlock Holmes devotee, a Victorian England aficionado, and she enjoys learning about history as it applies to the everyday lives of the people who lived it. Connie learned to love mysteries at an early age thanks to her dad who was a Cleveland Police detective. He not only introduced her to the Holmes stories, he took her along on his days off and they went in search of stolen cars. Connie lives outside of Cleveland with her husband, David, and her Airedale, Eliot Ness, who is a ribbon-winning show dog when he’s outside and a couch potato when he’s home.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN de Griffin Hansbury

A gorgeous novel about what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN
by Griffin Hansbury
W.W. Norton, Fall 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the summer of 1984, teenage Mel becomes entranced with the trans woman who appears in her blue-collar American town. Through the world-expanding time she spends with the woman, Sylvia, and the changes of adolescence, Mel soon discovers she is not the girl she thought she was—in fact, she might not be a girl at all. In the wake of this revelation, Mel navigates gender, sexuality, and an intense friendship with her childhood best friend in a hostile time and place for both girls and queers.
Moving back and forth to 2019, Mel has become Max, a middle-aged trans man. He returns to his hometown in the wake of his mother’s death, still reeling from his own politically-incorrect, gender-related scandal at his workplace, and bearing the burden of guilt from that pivotal teenage summer. As he reunites with his wayward older sister, spends time with his preteen great-niece and reckons with his past, Max works to come to terms with what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

Griffin Hansbury is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017), based on the celebrated blog written under the pen name Jeremiah Moss. As Hansbury he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and Day For Night, a collection of poems. A two-time NYFA fellow, his writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Salon, and The New York Review of Books.

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES de Sabina Murray

From the PEN/Faulkner award winning pioneer of “ironic gothic” (Washington Post) comes a wry and spooky set of ghost stories, replete with original illustrations.

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES
by Sabina Murray
Grove Atlantic, March 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Since her acclaimed novel A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Sabina Murray has been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Sutralian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable.
From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.

Sabina Murray is the author of the novels The Human Zoo, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Slow Burn, and Valiant Gentlemen, as well as two short story collections, the Pen/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices, and Tales of the New World. She grew up in Australia and the Philippines and is currently a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a UMass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred R. Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, and a Michener Fellow at UT Austin. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a Norwegian Amanda Award.

CINEMA LOVE de Jiaming Tang

Pachinko meets Brokeback Mountain in Jiaming Tang’s sweeping debut, which follows the lives of rural gay men in China and the women who marry them. Combining the grit and heart of How Much of These Hills is Gold with the intricate and moving character work of The Leavers, CINEMA LOVE marks the arrival of a preternaturally gifted new voice in fiction.

CINEMA LOVE
by Jiaming Tang
Publication TBD
(via Neon Literary)

For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented The Workers’ Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his fellow countrymen (many in arranged marriages) found intimacy in the privacy of the Workers’ Cinema’s screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men—guarding their secrets, guiding them on their love lives, and finding her own happiness with the projectionist.
However, Old Second’s passion for his lover, Shun-Er, left Shun-Er’s young wife Yan Hua in the cold, and a desperate move to hold onto her husband set in motion a series of haunting events—causing the deaths of Shun-Er and the projectionist and propelling Yan Hua, Old Second, and Bao Mei towards an uncertain future in America.
Spanning three timelines—contemporary New York, late ‘80s Chinatown, and post-socialist China—CINEMA LOVE is a voice-driven, tender epic that bridges the interior landscapes of the disenfranchised with the physical, and sometimes foreign, spaces they inhabit.

Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer based in Brooklyn and works in editorial at Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Scribner. He holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and his writing has appeared in such publications as AGNI, LitHub, Joyland Magazine, The Masters Review, Epiphany Literary Magazine (where he won a “Breakout 8” Writer’s Award), and elsewhere.