The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories, a short story collection by sci-fi writer and fantasy writer John Kessel, is a new freebie from Small Beer Press. Download it here.
Small Beer, in Northampton, Massachusetts, earlier promoted Kelly Link that way. She and her husband manage the Press, which published her Stranger Things Happen, a well-reviewed short story collection that you can get here in the freebie edition.
Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein overlaps
Click on the image for a larger view of the cover of The Baum Plan. Small Beer’s description: “An astonishing, long-awaited collection of stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Includes John Kessel’s modern classic ‘Lunar Quartet’ sequence about life on the moon.”
Friendly with another K
John Kessel, who was born in Buffalo and now teaches at North Carolina State in Raleigh, has won the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards for other works. That photo is of him with another K—a Kafka statue.
Think about buying his p-book if you like the E. You can download the Baum Plan as a printable PDF, an HTML file, plain text or an RTF, or even check out some audios of it and other works.
DRMless—and format conversions encouraged
No DRM! What’s more, if you follow the rules on the download page, you can convert it to other formats—just so you avoid “protection.” Hello, large publishers? As I keep telling you, DRM is a sales and lit toxin, and in the case of the Baum Plan, someone Gets It from the start. Tomorrow I’ll be publishing a long piece on access and business models for libraries; reduction of a dependence on DRM is among my major recommendations.
Kessel as quoted by Publishers Weekly: “The people who know and like my work—the ones who have anticipated the book’s publication and been looking forward to it—are pretty likely to buy a copy of the physical book anyway. But allowing free downloading will, I hope, help the stories reach people who would never seek out the collection in a bookstore.”
Related: Other free fiction from John Kessel. Also see list of Small Beer e-books—all DRM-free.
