This year, as every year, we asked our contributors who have a book out to bring it by the SmokeLong table and take away $10. We gave away a bundle of NINE books this year. So many of our contributors had a book out, and we were thrilled to give one lucky bookfair attendee some killer reading material. But with the rising prices of books, we understand that $10 doesn’t go a long way–so we’d like to do more for the authors who brought their words to our table.
For those of you–both publishers and readers–who weren’t able to be in San Antonio, we’d like to encourage readers to buy the books we gave away at AWP. If you buy any (or all, you amazing person!) of the books below directly from the publisher and purchase dated after the posting of this announcement, SmokeLong will donate $3 to San Antonio Youth Literacy–for each book. The deadline to send your proof of purchase is March 31. Please send proof of purchase (screenshot, forwarded email, etc.) to callen@smokelong.com. Simply click on the links below to buy these books from the publisher. Please no Amazon receipts.
Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses by Jen Julian
In nine stories and one novella, author Jen Julian explores realms of the surreal and speculative: from two sisters cleaning out their father’s house as it grows and shrinks, to an aunt who watches on anxiously as her niece forges an interdimensional connection; from a small town populated by animate sex dolls, to an eerie near-future in which AI co-opt the social media accounts of the dead. By way of ghosts and fish-men, nuclear threats and giant spiders, each story seeks to capture the inherent otherworldliness of feeling displaced, while at the same time illuminating the intimate and tenacious beauty of human beings in constant search of human connection. Winner of the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.
Moon Trees and Other Orphans by Leigh Camacho Rourks
Moon Trees and Other Orphans is a gritty collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love. Filled with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions as they go. Populated by gun toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, both beautiful and dangerous.
Hole the Middle by Kendra Fortmeyer.
Have you ever felt like part of you is missing?
Morgan Stone was born with a hole in her middle: perfectly smooth patch of nothing where a something should be. After seventeen years of fear and shame, doctors and nurses, “peculiar” not “perfect,” she has had enough of hiding.
Feisty, feminist and downright different, Hole in the Middle is the story of what happens when a girl who is anything but normal confronts a world obsessed with body image and celebrity.
Little Feasts by Jules Archer
Following her successes from All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had, critically-acclaimed flash fiction writer, Jules Archer, returns to the dinner table with Little Feasts, her debut short story collection. The stories are a table-long buffet of femininity, a lying tree, childhood innocence, toxic masculinity, and a 20-pound cast-iron skillet. Works within have been featured in Five:2:One, SmokeLong Quarterly, Maudlin House, PANK, and more.
Under Nushagak Bluff by Mia C. Heavener
Against the backdrop of the rising commercial fishing industry in an Alaskan Native village, Under Nushagak Bluff is a powerful mid-century tale of women, love, loss, resilience, and the unexpected strength found in storytelling.
In 1939, everything changes for Anne Girl when outsider John Nelson grounds his sailboat on the shores, into Anne Girl’s skiff, and into her life during a rare storm in the Alaskan fishing village of Nushagak. When Anne Girl and her mother, Marulia, find their skiff flattened by John’s boat, Anne Girl decides she both hates and wants him. Thus begins a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the bluff side and the missionary side, the cannery side and the subsistence side.
This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. by Jennifer Wortman.
This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. contains thirteen stories, full-length and flash, that explore love—sexual, platonic, filial, and beyond—in its gritty and beguiling forms. A small-town teenager pursues an eccentric pinball wizard after her grandfather’s move to her home shakes up her parents’ marriage; a chronic depressive turns to a TV animal psychic in hopes of mending her relationship with her dog-loving dad; a middle-aged recovering alcoholic goes back to college and becomes fixated on his stern professor. Throughout the collection, as characters in various stages of life try to navigate love, they court obsession, madness, and transcendence.
Meet My Haze by Meg Tuite
“Meet My Haze is filled with stories that live between fire, family, the torque of a heart, and tenderness. Meg Tuite shows us the inside-out of our domestic lives, loves, and misadventures, making the hairs on my arms shoot up, or a knot made of art and fuck get stuck in my throat. These are the micro moments that make us. This book made my whole body vibrate.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
In Transit by Krys Malcolm Belc
A memoir in fourteen flashes, Krys Malcolm Belc’s In Transit presents the story of a self in transition. Part travelogue, part personal history, In Transit offers a meditation on shift and social meaning. Taxis, airports, gas stations, tattoos, teaching, wrong trains, stolen buses, old homes, identity cards, kitchen conversations—none are as simple as they first appear. Instead, Belc’s compact nonfictions palpate the pressure points and complexities of trans identity, probing the way in which memory, movement, and apperception lodge in the same space.
The Classroom by Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich
Eerie and haunting as feral children at play, this brilliant collaborative collection coheres around themes of childhood, technology, consent, and pleasure. Each story concocts a complete world, believable characters steeped in complex ethical dilemmas, at once humorous and disturbing, compassionate and distorted. Parents build children byte by byte; children vanish into subterranean classrooms where recess is their only hope of engineering an uprising; a bee enrolls in school to escape the groupthink of the swarm. I loved reading this sly, edgy collection. It made me look for hidden seams, signs of an imaginary world as dazzling and delirious as this one.
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