I just wanted to thank everyone who answered the call and offered up their photoshop skills to assist me. Al Bogdan worked up something for me, which I’m delighted with. I’ll reveal what the secret project was soon, after I see if my gambit worked.
Night Shade Books editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen sez:
So, I just found out that the Night Shade title THE LIVING DEAD made the NY Times best seller REPORTING "In Contention" list.
It doesn’t mean the book made the list (regular or extended), but what it probably means that it shifted enough copies at the distributors and wholesalers that it was one of the top books in its category (Trade Paperback adult fiction), and is thus considered "In Contention" and retailers are asked to enter the number of copies sold. Without this prompting, a book only gets counted if it is a "write in" title, and books that are write ins almost never make the list.
A Rough estimate shows that just under 100 books get pre-listed in this category each week.
I’ll find out on Tuesday if we made the extended list. But still. It’s kind of cool. For the last couple years, one of our company goals has been to crack the NY Times Extended list. This is a nice first step.
Oh, and if you were planning on buying The Living Dead, or get copies for people as a gift, if you were to all run out and buy it this week, That might help us for next week. If everybody who reads this message buys 2 copies, and posts this message to their blog, we’ll be on!
Yeah, so holy crap.
The Agony Column has a new audio interview with Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen, in which he talks about The Living Dead and zombies as the "liberal nightmare."
Download wallpaper for your computer featuring David Palumbo’s cover art for The Living Dead by right-clicking (and “save as”) on the images below, or by visiting the Night Shade Books downloads page:
Tell us a bit about your story, "She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave." What’s it about?
A trophy wife comes back from the dead and searches for the man who raised her.
What’s was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
The idea for this story actually came from the theme of the World Fantasy Con for 2007 which was “ghosts and revenants.” I didn’t know what a revenant was, so I wikied it and found that it was a person who came back from the dead and caused great trouble for the living. It’s that last part that intrigued me. What kind of trouble could they cause?
Book Spot Central (formerly Fantasy Book Spot) has a nice review of The Living Dead: “Standout stories in the collection are difficult to choose because this book contains the best selection of zombie fiction I’ve ever encountered. … A satisfyingly thick volume with excellent variety.”
Tell us a bit about your story, "Prairie." What’s it about?
Explorers from an earlier time travel into a country in which the dead reanimate. They experiment. As time goes on, starving, the narrator watches his companions and friends die and then come back into a sort of half-life, and the prepares for his own end.
What’s was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
I’d been reading Cabeza de Vaca’s 16th account of crossing North America after being shipwrecked and also had been rewatching Werner Herzog’s movie _Aguirre, Wrath of God_ which has a brilliant, mad ending. I was interested, too, in thinking about how certain places seem to have a dark but magical quality to them. Where the idea of bodies reanimating came from I don’t know.
On October 7, 2008, come join me and special guests David Barr Kirtley and John Langan to celebrate the release of The Living Dead. I will serve as MC for the evening, and John Langan ("How the Day Runs Down") and Dave Kirtley ("The Skull-Faced Boy") will read from their stories.
For more information, have a look at the poster Dave created for the event:
The event will take place at the Melville Gallery of the South Street Seaport in New York, NY. Doors open at 6:30 PM, event begins at 7:00 PM. The event is part of the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series, which is curated by radio show host Jim Freund.
Tell us a bit about your story, "Dead Like Me." What’s it about?
It’s a set of instructions, to a hapless protagonist, about how to survive the zombie plague by joining it.
What’s was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
The story was my attempt to get into the fabled BOOK OF THE DEAD III, then being compiled by John Skipp and Craig Spector; the tangled history of that volume being what it was, it didn’t see print until the book became MONDO ZOMBIE, by Skipp alone, a decade later.
The question that prompted it was, if Romero-zombies don’t breathe, how do they track their victims? Certainly not by scent! (Zombies smell badly in more than one sense.) If not by scent, how? If we know the method, can we fool them? And from there I got to, what will it cost?
The Living Dead is officially out and for sale at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com, and at better bookstores everywhere. The official website is now live, and it features a number of bonus features, such as:
(1) Free stories & excerpts. Including free stories by Kelly Link, Adam-Troy Castro, David Tallerman, and Dale Bailey, with more to come in the near future.
(2) Interviews with the authors.
(3) Zombie pop-culture commentary.
So swing on over to check it out, and tell all your friends!
