Speculative Boston Reading Series: Dark Fiction at Trident Booksellers & Cafe

Speculative Boston is a quarterly event, featuring authors of scifi, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us on October 24th at Trident! Our guest authors will be Errick Nunnally, Bracken Macleod, and Isabel Yap!

Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A designer by day, he earned a black belt in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing by night. His work has appeared in several anthologies and is best described as “dark pulp.” His work can be found in LAMPLIGHT, TRANSCENDENT, WICKED WITCHES, THE FINAL SUMMONS, PROTECTORS 2, the Podcast, NIGHTLIGHT, and the upcoming ChiZine novel, LIGHTNING WEARS A RED CAPE.

 

Bracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust, Stranded, and Closing Costs, coming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He’s also published two collections of short fiction, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and White Knight and Other Pawns. Before devoting himself to full time writing, he worked as a civil and criminal litigator, a university philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.

 

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter.

Speculative Boston Reading Series: K. Chess and Max Gladstone

Speculative Boston is a quarterly event, featuring authors of scifi, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us on August 1st! Our guest authors will be K. Chess and Max Gladstone, who will be talking about their latest works and the wonders of speculative fiction!

K Chess is the author of FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED (Tin House Books, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row Journal, PANK, Salon, Tor.com and other outlets. Her short stories have been honored by the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Pushcart Prize. K earned a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Southern Illinois University. She was awarded a W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She reads fiction for Quarterly West and teaches writing at GrubStreet in Boston and Rhode Island.

Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated twice for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. Tor Books published FOUR ROADS CROSS, the fifth novel in Max’s Craft Sequence (preceded by THREE PARTS DEAD, TWO SERPENTS RISE, FULL FATHOM FIVE, and LAST FIRST SNOW) in July 2016. Max’s game CHOICE OF THE DEATHLESS was nominated for a XYZZY Award, and FULL FATHOM FIVE was nominated for the Lambda Award. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine. His most recent project is the globetrotting urban fantasy serial BOOKBURNERS, available in ebook and audio from Serial Box, and in print from Saga Press.

Speculative Boston Reading Series

Speculative Boston is a free quarterly reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us at Trident Books & Cafe in Boston, when our guests will be Julian K. Jarboe, Christopher Golden, and Theodora Goss. The night includes short readings, a lively discussion and Q&A, and plenty of time for signing books and hanging out.

Julian K. Jarboe lives in Salem, Massachusetts. They are an Associate Editor at PodCastle magazine, a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and most recently a fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, where they also sit on the board. Their writing can be found in The Atlantic, Strange Horizons, The Fairy Tale Review, and anthologized in the LAMBDA award-winning Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction series, among others. They also produce and co-host Mothers & Others, “the podcast about maternal figures and mommy issues.”

Christopher Golden is the New York Times #1 bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ararat, Snowblind, Dead Ringers, Of Saints and Shadows, and many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of two fan favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As an editor, his anthologies include Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, Seize the Night, and The New Dead, among others. He has also written screenplays, video games, radio plays, an online animated series, and much more. He lives in Massachusetts.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the collections In the Forest of Forgetting and Songs for Ophelia; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and its sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Locus awards.

Fantastic Fiction Reading with Speculative Boston

Speculative Boston is a free quarterly reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us at Trident Books & Cafe in Boston, when our guests will be the YA novelist Lyra Selene, and fantasy writers N.S. Dolkart and Elaine Isaak (writing as E.C. Ambrose). The night includes short readings, a lively discussion and Q&A, and plenty of time for signing books and hanging out.

Lyra Selene was born under a full moon and has never quite managed to wipe the moonlight out of her eyes. When she isn’t dreaming up fantastical cities and brooding landscapes, Lyra enjoys hiking, rainstorms, autumn, and pretending she’s any good at painting. She lives in New England with her husband, in an antique farmhouse that’s probably not haunted. Amber & Dusk is her debut novel.

N.S. Dolkart is the author of the Godserfs trilogy of theological epic fantasy novels, beginning with 2016’s Silent Hall and concluding with this past October’s A Breach In The Heavens. In non-writing life, he has taught dementia care and Israeli folk dancing (but not at the same time), sung as Darth Vader in an opera, and sired two children who will one day enslave all the nations of the earth as foretold by prophecy. His website is nsdolkart.wordpress.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @N_S_Dolkart.

Elaine Isaak is the author of The Singer’s Crown and its sequels. As E. C. Ambrose, she wrote The Dark Apostle historical fantasy series about medieval surgery, which concluded in 2018 with book 5, Elisha Daemon, and as E. Chris Ambrose, the Bone Guard international thrillers. Elaine has written how-to articles for the Writer Magazine, and non-fiction at Clarkesworld, and taught at the Odyssey Speculative Fiction Workshop. An art school drop-out, Elaine continues to create wearable art and sculpture. Elaine also works as part-time adventure guide. Under any name, you still do NOT want to be her hero.

Speculative Boston presents JULIE C. DAY, HILLARY MONAHAN, and PAUL TREMBLAY

Speculative Boston is a free quarterly reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us on October 25th at Trident Books & Cafe in Boston, when our guests will be Julie C. Day, Hillary Monahan, and Paul Tremblay.

JULIE C. DAY has published over thirty stories in magazines such as Interzone, Podcastle, Black Static, and Split Lip Magazine. Her debut collection Uncommon Miracles is available from PS Publishing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine and a Masters of Science in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts.

HILLARY MONAHAN is the New York Times Bestselling author of the YA horror MARY: The Summoning through Disney-Hyperion and the acclaimed THE AWESOME under her pen name Eva Darrows. A multi-genre author, Hillary writes everything from horror and comedy to SFF and romance, for young adult and adult audiences alike. 2019 sees her twelfth novel in print.

PAUL TREMBLAY is the author of the novels Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts. His other novels include The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (co-written with Stephen Graham Jones). His fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Supernatural Noir, and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor the Creatures anthology (with John Langan). Paul is currently on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards as well.

Local nonfiction author POPE BROCK presents Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow’s Moon

Porter Square Books welcomes local nonfiction author POPE BROCK, who has published Indiana Gothic (about the murder of his great-grandfather), and now, Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow’s Moon—a work of what might be called speculative nonfiction.

Now that we’ve pretty much ruined planet Earth—no big secret—science tells us the human race could be doomed. Well, not all science, but some of it, enough to have sparked a lively interest in setting up someplace else.

But where?

The answer is the moon of course, and that’s what this book explores: the many ways in which today’s scientists, entrepreneurs, architects and, yes, a few loonies are working to get colonies established there ASAP. Filled with research, interviews and expert projections, these pages reveal how a web of fantastic new technologies could give mankind a brand new start off-world.

This event is free and open to the public.