Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press wrote: “Today, April 15, 2008, is tax day in the USA and we all need cheering up. We’re celebrating at Small Beer Press by publishing John Kessel‘s first collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, as well as releasing it as a free download in a number of completely open formats—with, of course, no Digital Rights Management (DRM).” Well, it was yesterday, but the sentiment still holds.
The book includes Kessel’s Tiptree Award winning “Stories for Men” (gender inequality meet Fight Club… on the Moon); “Pride and Prometheus,” a mashup of Frankenstein and Jane Austen; and “Powerless,” an amazing mix of pulp fictions, paranoia, and academia. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) 3.0 license, and available as a low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, or text file.
The table of contents is:
“The Baum Plan for Financial Independence”
“Every Angel is Terrifying”
“Downtown”
“The Last American”
“The Invisible Empire”
A Lunar Quartet: “The Juniper Tree,” “Stories for Men,” “Under the Lunchbox Tree,” and “Sunlight or Rock”
“The Snake Girl”
“It’s All True”
“The Red Phone”
“Powerless”
“Pride and Prometheus”
Kessel is the co-director of the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and a winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree Awards. His books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1992. Most recently, Kessel and James Patrick Kelly edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology.