Saturday, June 11th

Nick Mamatas & Lisa Goldstein

We’ll be celebrating new book launches with two fantastic local authors!

6:00PM doors and cash bar open
7:00PM Event begins

Each author will read a selection from their work, followed by Q & A from the audience moderated by Terry Bisson; books for sale courtesy of Borderlands Books.

All bar and tip proceeds benefit Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California — to date, we’ve helped raise over $20,000 for the kids in our community!

Nick Mamatas is an American horror, science fiction and fantasy author and editor for the Haikasoru line of translated Japanese science fiction novels for Viz Media. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, including several Bram Stoker Awards, while he has also been recognised for his editoral work through World Fantasy Award and Hugo Award nominations. He is also online, with his own inimitable take on things, at Nihilistic Kid on Live Journal. (And, may we mention, he met his fiancee at SF in SF!! We love them both.)

Sensation, out from PM Press, tells the story of what happens when a woman slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum — where human history is retold within conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyper-intelligent spiders. This allegorical novel plays with the elements of the Simulacrum apparent in real life, posing the fascinating idea that displaces human beings from the center of the universe and makes them simply the pawns of two warring species.

Starve Better, out from Apex Books, is not your usual writers guide, promising riches and fame. Those just want to feed you a (near) impossible dream and take your money. Not Nick Mamatas. Well, he wants your money, but he won’t lie to you to get it. Starve Better is a no-nonsense survival guide by a professional writer who’s witty, acerbic, and full of truth. Starve Better is a must have for writers and fans of genre fiction.

Lisa Goldstein is the author of nine novels and two short story collections, including The Alchemist’s Door, Dark Cities Underground, and Travelers in Magic. She has published dozens of short stories in magazines such as Interzone and Asimov’s SF and in anthologies including The Norton Book of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy. Winner of the American Book Award for The Red Magician, she has also been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards. She has published two fantasy novels, The Divided Crown, and Daughter of Exile, under the name Isabel Glass and is a founding member of the women’s speculative fiction cooperative, the Brazen Hussies. She lives in Oakland, California.

Lisa will be reading from her long-awaited new novel, The Uncertain Places, just out from Tachyon Publications. In The Uncertain Places, an ages-old family secret breaches the boundaries between reality and magic, revealing the places between them. A long-lost fairy tale straight out of Grimm’s…except that it mysteriously was never included in their printed books…perhaps because it was, in fact, real. The Feierabend women believe that luck is their handmaiden, and so it is, almost as though they are living in a fairy tale. The price for such gifts turns out to be extremely high, making efforts to unravel the riddle of a supernatural bargain risky, even while they hope to save them from what appears to be an inescapable fate. A **starred** review from the May Library Journal: “Graceful storytelling and a knack for making the fantastic all-too-believable make Goldstein’s latest novel a treat for fantasy lovers and folk/fairy tale enthusiasts alike.”

Thanks again to our podcaster, Rick Kleffel, who’ll be on hand to record the evening for posterity.

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor — entrance between Quiznos and Citibank
582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery
San Francisco, CA 94104

Don’t Drive — BART/MUNI Montgomery Street station is right at our front door, and parking in San Francisco sucks!!! Street parking ($3.50 per hour) is metered M-Sat., til 6PM; find a parking garage here.