Upcoming: “Six-Gun Snow White” by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)

Coming at the end of January 2013, Catherynne M. Valente’s latest novella is a reinvention of one of the best known fairy tales, transposed onto the Old West:

A plain-spoken, appealing narrator relates the history of her parents – a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. With her mother’s death in childbirth, so begins a heroine’s tale equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have.

Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, readers will be enchanted by this story at once familiar and entirely new.

I’m quite looking forward to this, and hope to make it part of my Weird Wild West series of reviews and interviews, which I’ll be highlighting throughout the year.

Also on CR: Interview with Catherynne Valente

“The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013”, Table of Contents (Prime)

I don’t think I’ve ever picked up one of the Year’s Best fiction books. I once bought one of the politics collections, because it had an article by Matt Taibbi in it. This year’s SFF collection, however, looks pretty good – not to mention containing authors whose work I’m both aware of and interested in. [I found out about it from SF Signal. The book is published by Prime Books.]

This could be a good end-of-year read, or gift for the SFF fan in your life, or even a good place to start for someone who wants to give the genres a try. When you consider that the book features such rising stars as Aliette de Bodard, a slew of (to me) unknowns, and more established authors like Ursula le Guin, Jay Lake and Robert Charles Wilson, this is a pretty solid selection.

Interview with CATHERYNNE VALENTE

Catherynne Valente has been writing genre fiction for quite some time now – even in my early return to fantasy et al, I would hear her name mentioned as someone I had to try (given that her novels are, sadly, not as widely available in the UK as they should be, this proved difficult). Nevertheless, I’ve been intrigued by her novels, and with the upcoming release of Deathless, I thought it would be a perfect time to interview Cat, and grill her about her writing practices, Russian folklore, and even her love of cheesy sports movies (an interest I share, as it happens)…