Via Mysterious Galaxy, Lavie Tidhar, author of the John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION, celebrates his new book THE ESCAPEMENT with a conversation with New York Times bestselling Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Velvet Was the Night, on Saturday December 4 1PM PT.
The livestream is hosted by Crowdcast! To view and register for the event click here!
With INTERNATIONAL NOIR, STORYBUNDLE journeys through the shadows, in this world and beyond, to bring some of the finest crime fiction. The 10 extraordinary books include APOCALYPSE NYX by Kameron Hurley, Osama by Lavie Tidhar, The Vaccinator by Michael Marshall Smith, The Outcast Hours by edited by Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin, Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction by Pritham K. Chakravarthy, I Can Transform You by Maurice Broaddus, Liquid Crystal Nightingale by Eeleen Lee, and The Good Son and The Lost Sister Omnibus by Russel D. McLean.
Noir. Venetian blinds casting lines of shadows, the smoke of a cigarette curling in the air, a silhouette in the doorway signalling danger. There is something about noir that is both of its own aesthetic and transcends time and place. All we know is that there is a moral ambiguity at play, that small people in a corrupt world can too easily come to a messy end, even if they fight. I love noir in all its forms because it is so pliable, pure enough to be recognisable yet diverse enough to keep adapting. For as long as there are crooks there’ll be noir.
– Lavie Tidhar
Here, then, is a sample of the form. Some of it is hard, classical noir. Some veers into science fiction or fantasy. Some it’s impossible to categorise. Here are the delights of Tamil pulp fiction, the slow-building menace of strangers with secrets in a sleepy Mexican village in the 1970s, of Scottish hardmen and science fiction avengers.
Come in, try the water, though there might be sharks hidden under the calm surface of the sea. And there are things we only find during the autopsy.
For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay.
This bundle is available only for a limited time. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file
Via Mysterious Galaxy, Lavie Tidhar, author of the John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION, celebrates his new book By Force Alone with a conversation with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of the New York Times bestseller Mexican Gothic, on Sunday August 16, 1PM PT.
The livestream is hosted by Crowdcast! To view and register for the event click here!
Jack Deighton is puzzled about the lack of award attention toward Lavie Tidhar’s THE VIOLENT CENTURY.
THE VIOLENT CENTURY is admirably plotted and well paced, with
an atmosphere of menace throughout, I’m puzzled as to why this wasn’t
on any award shortlist for its year.
In THE TEL AVIV REVIEW OF BOOKS, Hagay HaCohen mentions Lavie Tidhar’s UNHOLY LAND in their joint review of Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature and Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba.
An example of this is Lavie Tidhar, an award-winning Israeli sci-fi writer, who published UNHOLY LAND
in 2018—in which the Jewish State was created in Uganda, riffing on the
Uganda Scheme, a British proposal from the early 1900s to turn a
portion of East Africa into a Jewish state. Few readers in Israel,
though, seemed to take interest. Imagine the interest that might be
shown if the book is made into a Netflix series or an Amazon Studios
production!
Tidhar, featured in Zion’s Fiction
and mentioned in Professor Gary K. Wolfe’s course as an exemplar of the
genre’s expansion in recent years, is a multiple award winning writer
who is fairly unknown in Israel by people other than hard-core fans of
sci-fi—meaning most of the population.
Cover art by Masato Hisa
Lavie Tidhar announces his new Japanese short story collection 金星は花に満ちて (Venus in Bloom).
Venus In Bloom collects five of my stories,
including an introduction and story notes. It is available as a slim
paperback, illustrated by Masato Hisa, who was my fellow Guest of Honour
at Hal-Con this year, and who also designs the monsters for the
Japanese Power Rangers! Which is about as cool as it comes. (I also have
one of his original pieces at home now, which I got at a secret room
auction… err, don’t ask).The book includes:
Tidhar, alongside Silvia Moreno-Garcia, is the new science fiction book columnist for The Washington Post.
Even
10 years ago, the fields of science fiction and fantasy were still
overwhelmingly American and white. And, if you grew up speaking Spanish
in Mexico City, (as I, Silvia, did), or Hebrew on a small kibbutz in
Israel (as I, Lavie, did), it meant that the world of science fiction,
filtered through translation, was as remote and alien as the other side
of the moon. The very idea we could be writing novels like these seemed,
well, fantastical.Yet,
somehow, here we are. The past decade has seen the science-fiction
world change as more international voices enthusiastically jumped into
the fray. Now, wonderful writers including Malaysian Zen Cho can write
smart, funny fantasies such as “Sorcerer to the Crown”; after years of
struggle, Nigerian Tade Thompson’s ambitious Africa-set novel,
“Rosewater,” was published to wide acclaim and recently won the
prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Chinese author Liu Cixin’s “The
Three-Body Problem,” translated by Ken Liu, has become a bestseller and
even has a recommendation from former president Barack Obama.In
our new column, we hope to highlight some of the fresh, exciting, weird
and wacky science fiction and fantasy from around the world and also
look back at some underappreciated gems from the past.
For more info about THE VIOLENT CENTURY, visit the Tachyon page.
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Covers by Sarah Anne Langton
The Spanish FANTASTICA FICCIÓN praises Lavie Tidhar’s UNHOLY LAND.
Tidhar’s prose is as wonderful as ever, with a lot of metaliterary games and references to his own work, as well as winks at the current situation in Israel establishing parallels with this mythical UNHOLY LAND of which the author speaks. But undoubtedly what is more striking are the different voices he uses. Varying between an unnatural first person, because he does not give the voice to the protagonist, a disconcerting second person and a third person that serves to stabilize us, the author gets a permanent state of confusion in the reader and demands a constant effort to place us in the plot.
The changes of environment are continuous but subtle. We see how Tirosh acts contrary to what we would expect from the situation he is in, because in reality he is not the same character at all times and I am not speaking only metaphorically.
UNHOLY LAND is a difficult but attractive novel, with a different perspective of an ukraine that could remind us of the Yiddish police syndicate because of its starting point but that it navigates completely different paths. It is not for everyone, but I think that for a regular science fiction reader it will be very attractive.
Translation from Spanish courtesy of Google
LEVAR BURTON READS shares an audio rendition of Tidhar’s “YIWU.”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Beautiful Ones, and Tidhar at Pandemonium Books & Games.
On his eponymous site, Tidhar shares the cover to the Italian edition of CENTRAL STATION and the short story collection Terminale Terra.
And secondly, my friend Francesco Verso has been running Future Fiction for a number of years now, putting out high-quality, single-author collections in gorgeous little paperbacks, so I’m delighted to say we’ve just done my very own exclusive collection in Italy! Terminale Terra collects several of my near-future stories, including “Terminal”. It is translated by Rita Demaria, with a cover by Simone Ferraro.
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Covers by Sarah Anne Langton
Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013
Lavie Tidhar, author the John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION and the forthcoming UNHOLY LAND joins Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Beautiful Ones, to sign on Thursday, October 4, 7 PM at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge, MA.
He is in the US to accept the first-ever Neukom Institute Literary Award from Dartmouth College.
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
SF IN SF, in partnership with Tachyon Publications and the American Bookbinders Museum, welcomes multiple Nebula and Hugo Award winner Nancy Kress, acclaimed novelist Jack Skillingstead, and British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst, and Aurora award nominee Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Nancy Kress (photo: Ellen Datlow), Jack Skillingstead, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Each author will read from a selection of their work, followed by Q&A with the audience, moderated by Terry Bisson. Schmoozing with the authors and book signing follows the end of the discussion.
Sunday, March 25
Doors and cash bar open 6:00PM
Event begins at 6:30 PM
The American Bookbinders Museum
355 Clementina
San Francisco, CA
$10 donation at the door (no one is turned away for lack of funds).
All donations benefit the American Bookbinders Museum
There will be an opportunity to have books signed at the end of the event. Books will be for sale courtesy of Borderlands Books, and attendees are welcome to bring books from home for signatures. There is no charge for autographs.
Podcasted by SOMA FM – SF’s internet radio station
At IN CASE OF ACTUAL DEATH, Kevin Fanning includes Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION among his best of 2017.
Books from previous years that I read and loved this year: CENTRAL STATION/Lavie Tidhar, Hammer Head/Nina MacLaughlin, The Stranger in the Woods/Michael Finkel
CAMESTROS FELAPTON cites the Sarah Anne Langton CENTRAL STATION cover as a work of interest in Book Cover Thing 2017: An Aside on Diagonals.
One aesthetic trick I think works really works nicely with book covers is the use of the diagonal implied by the oblong character of a book cover.
I’ve made this one into an extreme example but the elements need not create two regions quite as starkly or as abstractly as this one.
It seems to do a lot of things:
- create a sense of movement
- organises features of the cover into more areas
- allows for different colour contrasts without being too busy
- introduces shapes other than rectangular blocks
I mention it because I noticed most of the covers in this years list are a lot more centrally aligned – either creating a simple vertical line or implying one by using partial symmetry along the cover’s central vertical line.
Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013
Davide Mana on KARAVANSARA writes about the forthcoming Italian edition.
I am very proud to announce that in the next weeks I’ll be working on the translation of Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION, that Acheron Books will publish in 2018.
On his eponymous blog, Tidhar announces the publication of
Vol. 11, Winter 2018 issue of The Jewish Mexican Literary Review, edited by Tidhar and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Cover art: Angela Su
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013
Lavie Tidhar tweets a pic of the Hugo Award-winning Ian McDonald talking about CENTRAL STATION.
The great @iannmcdonald shilling a great novel to the grateful people of Spain
PLAN TO BE HAPPY praises the novel.
Many of the chapters were originally published as individual short stories, making CENTRAL STATION read like a hybrid between a single narrative and linked short stories. As a result of this structure, though, a few story lines felt unfinished. It also reads like a sci-fi classic, which is right up my alley.
The world of CENTRAL STATION is so realistically drawn by Tidhar that his descriptions of fantastical aspects of the future seem like references to completely commonplace occurrences. Of course there’s a robot priest, preaching to appliances, cyborgs, and robots in the Church of Robot. Of course people live their lives with a node embedded, connecting them to everyone else in the digital world.
The Spanish-language site SENSE OF WONDER reviews the book.
In short, wonderful novel that I loved from beginning to end and thoroughly recommend it . Tidhar has done an incredible job reflecting CENTRAL STATION a rich, vivid and humane society.
(Translation from Spanish courtesy of Google)
On his website, Tidhar announced THE JEWISH MEXICAN LITERARY REVIEW.
I’m delighted to announce THE JEWISH MEXICAN LITERARY REVIEW, with a brand-new issue live at thejmlr.com. This is a new (old-new?) ecclectic magazine, free online, co-edited by myself and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
We’ve got poetry from Bryan Thao Worra and Ng Yi-Sheng, fantastic new fiction from Naomi Alderman and Kuzhali Manickavel, and dual-language fiction from Nelly Geraldine Garcia Rosas (Spanish and English) and Shimon Adaf (Hebrew and English). Plus David Bowles with a Nahuatl dictionary.
Reviews come courtesy of Molly Tanzer and Orrin Grey. The fantastic cover art is by Jason Wright, who is the subject of this issue’s illustrated interview.
Jews! Mexicans! Bacon! Poetry! Multiple award winning authors! Imaginary films! Politics! Pornography! And zombies!
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
