Jul 8, 2022 5 min read Weekly Digest

Stone Soup Digest 07.08.22

Goop, stories, swerve

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

It’s been quite a week here! Just Like Home comes out in two weeks and the pot is starting to boil! Just Like Home got some amazing recognition on some really fantastic lists this week, including:

Lambda Literary’s list of July’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature
Bookriot’s list of the most anticipated Summer Scares
Teen Vogue’s 15 Best New Thriller & Mystery Books for Summer 2022
The July Loan Stars list, a list of books librarians from all over Canada deem essential for Canadian libraries
The American Booksellers Association’s August 2022 Indie Next List Preview
Bustle’s Most Anticipated Books Of July 2022
Buzzfeed’s list of The Best Books Releasing In July

If you're looking to stock up your TBR, go check out those lists. I am in wildly cool company.

Also, I spent a ton of time and effort making a promotional video in which I completely destroyed a finished copy of the book. When my finished copies arrived, one of them was badly damaged – so I figured, why not take advantage of the situation? I spent some time in the lab mixing up a non-newtonian fluid that I colormatched to the goop on the cover, and the result was (in my opinion) perfect:

@gaileyfrey Noises from under the bed have been keeping me up at night. Finally checked it out... #horror #scary #monsterundermybed #booktok ♬ original sound - Sarah Gailey

It would make me day if you’d share this video on social media, because honestly, I am really proud of the goop I made. Here’s where you can find it on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Let’s see if we can scare some people!

The Swerve by Cory Doctorow, Locus Magazine

This essay from Cory Doctorow is so powerful that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I first read it. A clear, concise explanation of where we are in the timeline of humanity, and what needs to be done to save us.

India Rose Crawford’s Frog and Toad on TikTok

@indiarosecrawford Knitting a tiny stripey jumper for Toad 🧶💖 Hope this one brings you a smile today 🌞 #frogandtoad #fibreart #knitting #knittok ♬ Married Life - Michael Giacchino

This is just nice.

Visit a Neighbor: Sunday Morning Transport

This week I want to highlight a relatively new short fiction outlet that I love. Sunday Morning Transport, edited by Fran Wilde and Julian Yap, is a newsletter that sends a piece of original short fiction to your inbox every week.

“Sunday Morning Transport readers are authors, thinkers, scientists, artists, dreamers. With a single science fiction or fantasy short story each Sunday, we connect across space and time. We deliver, right to your inbox: a moment of whimsy; a deep dive into an unknown world; a single illuminating transformation; a vibrant community of readers and writers built around the best new speculative stories each week.”

For the month of July, all four short stories are free (including one from me, one of my favorite things I’ve written recently). There’s also a 20% off sale on paid subscriptions running through the month of July. A paid subscription gets you access to a six-month archive of incredible original short fiction from authors like Michael Swanwick, Max Gladstone, Sarah Pinsker, and more. It’s a truly fantastic collection of stories already, and the rest of the year promises still more treasures to come.

This is especially dear to my heart because I love short stories more than I can say. With several short fiction outlets closing in recent years, it feels like the field is narrowing more and more all the time. With Sunday Morning Transport, Wilde and Yap have brought a fresh and fascinating editorial perspective to the world of short fiction. It’s truly a breath of fresh air. Go check it out – again, it’s free all month! – and see what kinds of worlds you end up transported to.

Check it out here!

I’m Reading: Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour

Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen, leaving behind the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern, yearning for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena.

The morning Emilie and Sara first meet at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But soon Sara's old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted, just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose. Will their love be more powerful than their pasts?

Featured New Release: The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Okay, that part was a little weird.

So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things - terrifying things - that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right?

Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she's making cuts.

Add The Pallbearers Club to your tbr here. Order it from your local independent bookseller, or order it via Bookshop.org to support independent booksellers throughout the US and the UK. For international shipping, you can try Barnes & Noble. If you prefer audiobooks, here’s a Libro.fm link. You can also request The Pallbearers Club from your local library — here’s how to get in touch with them. And if you need to order from the Bad River Website, here’s a link that will leverage your order for good.