Jurassic London

Ending 2018/starting 2019 on a productive note, with a rant about resolutions and a long list of good books.

(The latter was inspired by an even better list of reading recommendations from Kirsty Logan.) 

But, here we go...

Crime and Thriller

• *Give Me Your Hand (Megan Abbott)
• Red Harvest and The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett)
• East of Hounslow (Khurrum Rahman)
• *Something in the Water (Catherine Steadman)
• All Her Father's Guns (James Warner)

SF and Fantasy

• Age of Assassins (RJ Barker)
• The Drowning City (Amanda Downum)
• The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
• *Paris Adrift (EJ Swift)
• *The Stars Now Unclaimed (Drew Williams)

Romance

• Miss Wonderful (Loretta Chase)
• *A Princess in Theory (Alyssa Cole)
• A Lady's Code of Misconduct (Meredith Duran)
• The Masqueraders and The Reluctant Widow and all the other Heyers (Georgette Heyer)
• Once Upon a Marquess (Courtney Milan)

Young Adult

• Overheard in a Tower Block (Joseph Coelho)
• *Slay (Kim Curran) (BOY BAND VS DEMONS)
• The Way You Make Me Feel (Maurene Goo)
• Ghost (Jason Reynolds)
• This Lullaby (Sarah Dessen)

Gold Medal (that's a publisher, not a genre, but they're my comfort reading and deserve the recognition - plus, my rules!)

• The Turrett Room (Charlotte Armstrong)
• The Expendables (Richard Avery)
• Castle Ugly (Mary Ellin Barrett)
• Meet Morocco Jones (Jack Baynes)
• The Magnolia Murder (Wyatt Bell)
• The Hideaway (Nikki Content)
• Smoky Valley (Donald Hamilton)
• Guns Along the Brazos (Day Keene)
• Sinner Take All (Wade Miller)
• Steal Big (Lionel White)

Genre categories are self-defeating and diminishing and, more importantly, I don't know how to categorise these

• "Dr Frankenstein" (Selma Dimitrijevic)
• *There's a Witch in the Word Machine (Jenni Fagan)
• The Talisman Ring (Georgette Heyer)
• *And the Ocean Was Our Sky (Patrick Ness / Rovina Cai)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 

• Made in Bradford (M.Y. Alam)
• Hold Everything Dear (John Berger)
• Community (Peter Bloch)
• The Nasty Bits (Anthony Bourdain)
• The Age of Jihad (Patrick Cockburn)
• Poverty Safari (Darren McGarvey)
• State of Insecurity (Isabell Lorey)
• The Mosaic of Islam (Suleiman Mourad)
• Bloody Nasty People (Daniel Trilling)

*: published in 2018

For more recommendations (and rants), subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter.

And for some recommendations for 2019, check out this massive list at Tor.com. I chimed in with a few.

A couple of pieces (somehow) -

Review of AfroSFv3, edited by Ivor Hartmann:

“Discovery” implies an element of challenge; a hint that these stories might be a bit too far out on the edge, or potentially unpalatable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A bit on Stormzy, publishing and the importance of evaluation metrics:

Hype alone isn't going to convince an entrenched industry that they need to change everything about their audience/marketing/recruitment/sales/retail approach. There will be a lot of people ready and willing to talk about how Merky 'fails', based on the traditional metrics. "I didn't see a single copy at Hay!"

And, for the hell of it - a new website for www.bestbritishfantasy.co.uk

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

The publishing industry has spent a generation - if not longer - relentlessly milking one particular demographic, with 'innovative' 'outreach' campaigns based around the occasional field trip to Harrogate and #civilisedsaturday. 

This week's newsletter also features the meaning of life (and the methodology for evaluating it).

Book updates:

• Pleased to see Literary Landscapes in the New York Times' gift guide
• I've pounced on the www.bestbritishfantasy.co.uk URL, because, seriously, if you leave that open, I'm takin' it. 
• And, as to the above - submissions are now closed for The Best of British Fantasy.

Mahvesh and I share a bit about the editorial process - and the full author/story list for The Outcast Hours  - over on Tor.com:

As with any anthology, not every story will be for everyone. The dark side (excuse the pun) of our shtick is that our approach is especially high-risk / high-reward. There’s no sameness; no certainty. In The Outcast Hours, we have gambled on the unexpected: there are no cozy evenings inside. Instead, we want every reader to find a story or two that they can be deeply passionately about—to experience the night of their lives.

Mahvesh and I reveal the full table of contents for The Outcast Hours over on Tor.com. 

It also includes a little guff about our editing approach, because everything starts with a brief.

The key message that we're trying to land in our all our, uh, PR, is that we've gone 'high risk/high reward':

In The Outcast Hours, we have gambled on the unexpected: there are no cozy evenings inside. Instead, we want every reader to find a story or two that they can be deeply passionately about—to experience the night of their lives.

Perhaps leading with 'you probably won't like every story in this book, but, hey - you might love one of them' is definitely a marketing gamble. But it is also true, so let's see where that takes it.

Buy it.