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Sweepstakes

#TorChat May 2012 Sweepstakes

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Did you participate in today’s #TorChat? We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to your participation in next month’s chat on June 20th!

In the meantime, here’s your chance to win some books. Three lucky winners will receive a copy of The Weird and Glamour in Glass, recent titles from today’s #TorChat guests! Leave a comment below to enter.

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And again we’d like to thank Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, and Mary Robinette Kowal for joining us on Twitter today.

Sweepstakes closes to new entries on May 23rd.

To find out who the guests will be for next month’s #TorChat before anyone else, check out the #TorChat sidebar in our newsletter! In the meantime, keep your eye on our Facebook and Twitter where we’ll have details as they’re available. We’ll see you all next month!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins May 16, 2012 at 4:30 p.m. ET. and ends May 23, 2012, 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

What's New

May #TorChat Lineup Revealed

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This month, #TorChat is talking about short stories, with two premier editors and one award-winning short story author. Joining us on May 16th from 4 to 5 PM EST are Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, and Mary Robinette Kowal!

Tor Books (@torbooks) is thrilled to announce the May #TorChat, part of a monthly series of genre-themed, hour-long chats created by Tor Books and hosted on Twitter.

#TorChat has been going on for over a year now (where did the time go?!), and we realized that we’ve spent most of our time talking about novels. We love novels, don’t get us wrong, but we thought it was time to give a little love to short stories by chatting with two of the premier anthology editors out there, as well as an award-winning short story writer. Ann VanderMeer (@AnnVanderMeer) and Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) are a husband-and-wife team who have, between them, won a Hugo Award (Ann) and a World Fantasy Award (Jeff), and has edited anthologies such as Best American Fantasy, Steampunk, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, and most recently, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Jeff is also an accomplished novelist, with his most recent novel, Finch, receiving a nomination for Best Novel for the 2010 World Fantasy Award.

Joining them will be Mary Robinette Kowal (@maryrobinette), who in addition to Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass has written a variety of short fiction. Her short story “For Want of a Nail” won the Hugo Award in 2011, and this year her novella “Kiss Me Twice” is a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. She’s also a cohost on the podcast “Writing Excuses,” with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, and Jordan Sanderson. Mary knows her way in and out of the online world as well as the world of short fiction, so we thought she’d be the perfect choice to chat with the VanderMeers about editing anthologies, short fiction, and the digital world.

The chat will be loosely moderated by Tor Digital Marketing Manager Cassandra Ammerman (@leanoir). We hope that short fiction fans, as well as fans of the VanderMeers and Mary Robinette Kowal, will follow the chat and join in using the Twitter hashtag #TorChat!

About the Authors

ANN VANDERMEER and JEFF VANDERMEER are both active teachers who have taught at the Clarion and Odyssey writing workshops and the teen summer camp Shared Worlds, where Jeff serves as the assistant director. Ann VanderMeer is a Hugo Award-winner, and Jeff VanderMeer has won the World Fantasy Award. They have recently co-edited such anthologies as Best American Fantasy; Best American Fantasy 2; Steampunk; Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded; The New Weird; Last Drink Bird Head; Fast Ships, Black Sails; and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. They are the co-authors of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals: The Evil Monkey Dialogues.

Jeff’s latest books include Finch, a World Fantasy and Nebula Award-finalist; the short story collection The Third Bear; the non-fiction collection Monstrous Creatures; the coffee table book The Steampunk Bible (co-authored with S. J. Chambers); and the writing guide Booklife. Ann is the editor-in-chief of Weird Tales magazine, the oldest fantasy magazine in the world, and is a regular contributor to the popular science fiction and fantasy web-site io9. Together, they have been profiled by National Public Radio and online at Wired.com and the New York Times’s Arts Beat blog. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with too many books and four cats. Their most recent anthology is The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo winner for her story “For Want of a Nail.” Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary is an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and currently serves on the board of directors as vice president. A professional puppeteer and voice actor, Mary grew up in North Carolina and spent twenty years as a professional puppeteer, including several national tours. She recently moved to Chicago with her husband, Rob, their cats, and over a dozen manual typewriters. Her most recent novel, Glamour in Glass, was published in April.

About #Torchat
#TorChat is a genre-themed, hour-long chat series created by Tor Books and hosted on Twitter. Guest authors join fans in lively, informative and entertaining discussions of all that’s hot in genre fiction, 140 characters at a time, from 4 – 5 PM EST on the third Wednesday of every month. Each #TorChat revolves around a different genre topic of interest, often of a timely nature, and strives to provide a new media opportunity for readers to connect with their favorite authors.

About Tor Books
Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, is a New York-based publisher of hardcover and softcover books. Founded in 1980, Tor annually publishes what is arguably the largest and most diverse line of science fiction and fantasy ever produced by a single English-language publisher. In 2002, Tor launched Starscape, an imprint dedicated to publishing quality science fiction and fantasy for young readers, including books by critically acclaimed and award winning authors such as Cory Doctorow, Orson Scott Card, and David Lubar. Between an extensive hardcover and trade-softcover line, an Orb backlist program, and a stronghold in mass-market paperbacks, books from Tor have won every major award in the SF and fantasy fields, and has been named Best Publisher 24 years in a row in the Locus Poll, the largest consumer poll in SF.

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Author Features

The Weird: It’s Weird… And You’ll Like It!

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The Weird edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer

Written by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors

Our latest book is The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, out from Tor this month, and it’s the only anthology we’ve ever edited that literally almost killed us. Imagine having nine months to put together a 750,000-word collection of weird fiction from literary and genre writers of the last 100 years, from over 20 countries, and commissioning several original translations. The process of just getting permissions for 116 stories is monumental—sometimes you can’t even easily contact the rights holder. One estate’s lawyer even told us that the rights holder was in a coma, and there were no provisions for that: the woman would have to regain consciousness or pass away for us to acquire the necessary rights. At another point, we could not track down the agent for the great surrealist painter who lived on the coast of Mexico. We hatched a plan to get the help of a friend in the Mexican circus who would travel by horse to the author’s house and deliver the contract and our offer in person.

Then there are the questions some of the estates and others asked, like “What is weird fiction?” This is the risk you run when mixing mainstream and genre. Robert Bloch’s estate and agent know what weird fiction is, but the agent of Ben Okri or even Angela Carter might indeed be curious. In the end, though, we persevered, and one of The Weird’s great accomplishments is the side-by-side publication of writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortazar and Fritz Leiber; writers from diverse backgrounds who nonetheless shared a common impulse in their fiction.

Indeed, by the end of our research phase, we discovered that “the weird” was much broader than we had thought. H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings may have defined a “weird tale” as a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both of which were popular in the 1800s. But we also found a strong strain of weird fiction emanating from Franz Kafka and his heirs. In these kinds of weird tales, the reader is often already within the nightmare of the weird at the story’s start, rather than encountering the weird later in the story. Between the Lovecraft and Kakfa strands, the weird can be transformative—sometimes literally—and it entertains monsters while not always seeing them as monstrous. We also found fiction allied with the supernatural that achieves the same effect without a supernatural element. Admittedly, this last distinction is going to be controversial, but we found weird SF stories and weird ritual stories that gave us the same feeling as supernatural weird. Certainly, George R.R. Martin’s “Sandkings” and Michael Shea’s “The Autopsy” are horrific, strange, and bizarre.

Regardless of where in the world they came from, the stories we thought of as part of “the weird” possessed a quality of something other, almost ghostly, that came through the pages—an almost visionary sense of a world beyond that science and religion cannot completely explain. In a sense, whereas fairy tales were a way of making sense of the world in past centuries, The Weird may be a more modern impulse to tell us instead that we can only make sense of part of it.

Our goal is to transport readers out of their comfort zones and into something new and different, where the world will change before their eyes as they are drawn into the stories, and where, we hope, they will be entertained. Now, did our friend in the Mexican circus really wind up having to ride out to Leonora Carrington’s house? It’d be tempting to tell you, but perhaps some things are actually too weird to share…

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