I know what a lot of you are thinking: why publish yet another biography about John Lennon? There are easily 20 books already in print about the Beatles legend, some of them not much more than pamphlets, some veritable tomes. Lennon is the tragic pop rock icon who very likely has more words and paper devoted to him than any other rock star, perhaps with the exception of Elvis. So, indeed, why? The answer to…
It is one of the very rewarding joys of being a publisher, a least for me, to find a gem among the unsolicited queries and manuscripts that arrive in my email. That was the case with Michael R. Fletcher’s 88. Fletcher first approached Five Rivers in 2011 with a very raw, gritty near-future dystopia about an autistic boy who was sold for the ability of his brain. Not his body. Just his brain. And that…
It was Robert Runte who introduced me, virtually, to J.W. Schnarr in 2011. Schnarr apparently had an armful of novels and short horror collections in which we might be interested, some of them self- or previously published, some debut. J.W. Schnarrin one of his classier moments I have to admit I was a bit squeamish about considering a horror writer, having somewhat of an antipathy for the genre’s penchant for gratuitous violence and gore, particularly…
One of the joys of running a small publishing house is the ability you have to access unknown authors with that gem of a manuscript. It isn’t an every day occurrence, but I’d have to say it’s happy circumstance that Five Rivers has had an embarrassment of riches from debut authors. Such was the case when Michell Plested first approached us in 2010 with a story about a young boy determined to be the guardian…
From the Desk of Robert Runte I try to keep on top of developments in the Canadian SF community, and had noticed that Susan Forest was being published in the major short story markets: Analog, Tesseracts, AE Science Fiction Review and so on. Then she won first place in The Galaxy Project a major contest judged by Robert Silverberg, David Drake and Barry Malzberg. That certainly got my attention. Even though I hadn’t had a…