Both of our fall titles are now available to download for review purposes from NetGalley. Signing up for NetGalley is free. Users receive a DRM-protected ebook and the opportunity to post their reviews on the NetGalley site. Reviewers can also post their reviews to Goodreads, Amazon, or their own blogs or other social media. We appreciate every review!
This post discussing some of the considerations in developing a House Style for Stelliform may be a bit nerdy for some. But in the context of current conversations about appropriate terminology and style for inclusiveness and equity, I thought it important to make process and position more transparent. Opening up discussions of how we approach the world around us necessarily includes the people around us. We can never be perfect in our approaches, but we can commit to being informed, to continuing our learning, and to valuing the lives and experiences of our authors and readers through what we publish.
For Pride Month 2020, we’re featuring a story by E. I. Richardson, a queer Black and Malay writer. “A Good Mother” is a powerful, subtly unnerving horror story about family relations, abuse, and the day to day tasks of living with and working through trauma.
Last month we were delighted to give away 5 printed ARC copies of Sim Kern’s DEPART, DEPART! (now available for preorder) and we’re excited to do it again for Michael J. DeLuca’s NIGHT ROLL, coming in October. Check out DeLuca’s Twitter thread and blog post for how to enter the contest.
This is a moment to make connections between racial and environmental justice and acknowledge and expunge that which feeds a violent system. The following are a collection of articles which connect racial injustice to the environment and environmental movements. Each of these articles demonstrates that necessity of approaching the problem of the environment through the application of a broader, more inclusive vision of justice.
At this time, we are selling our books on Amazon. Amazon has many negative impacts on our society, but it also provides some good: quick delivery of essential items for people with disabilities, or cheaper items for those who can’t afford to shop elsewhere. Amazon also provides some semblance of legitimacy for new authors. These authors need to be accessible to their readers at a central web location, not relegated only to the small-press-corners of the Internet. While we hope you will choose to support us and our authors by purchasing books from our website, it is important for our books — and our ideas — to be available to a wider public, which is access that Amazon provides. Indie publishers are beginning to make dents in this monolith. This is work to which we will contribute as we grow.
Michael J. DeLuca’s novella, NIGHT ROLL, is scheduled to be published in October. The book does an excellent job of expressing both the joy and struggle of rebuilding community after loss. In this blog post, DeLuca considers the message NIGHT ROLL has for a post-pandemic world.
In September, Stelliform will publish its first book, Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern, a cli-fi ghost story which considers Jewish and trans experiences intertwined with the changes wrought by climate destabilization. Climate change as a whole is slow, but some of its effects can change the world on a scale of minutes or hours. Not unlike the experience of a global pandemic.
In this post, Sim Kern writes about the links they see between experiences of climate change and experiences of the pandemic.
Every year, Earth Day affords an opportunity for us to collectively take stock of our relationship with the environment. The first Earth Day fifty years ago is the result of one such stock-taking. Environmentalists were inspired by the “Blue Marble” photo — an image which still reverberates through Western culture with nearly the same potency as when it was first viewed.
We are learning, if we did not know before, that there are different ways to be quiet: the quiet concentration of holding one’s breath; a silent prayer; deep breathing in the moments between acts of care-giving, or going through the now-displaced motions of our former lives. We’re not quite sure when this quiet will end.
I’ve been reading and listening to podcasts, but it’s difficult to think. Hard to reconcile big, transformative ideas into the strange quietness of this moment. But over the next few weeks, I will share some of the things I’m reading here, in case they are as helpful or inspiring or merely interesting to others as they have been to me.