The History of Soul 2065, the debut from Nebula Award finalist Barbara Krasnoff, will be the next release from Mythic Delirium Books, available everywhere June 11, 2019.

The History of Soul 2065

by Barbara Krasnoff

Introduction by Jane Yolen

Scheduled for release June 11, 2019

ISBN 978-1732644014 | $15.95 | 220 pages

 

“This is storytelling at the top of the heap.”
—Jane Yolen, winner of the World Fantasy Award
for lifetime achivement

“Achingly familiar and wonderfully strange.”
—Samuel R. Delany, Hugo and Nebula Award winner

“Plunge into The History of Soul 2065, there’s nothing like it.”
—Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy Award winner

 

Available for pre-order (so far) at the following links:

 

Paperback: Amazon (forthcoming) | Amazon UK | Amazon CA (forthcoming)
Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Barnes & Noble

Ebook: Nook | iBooks | Kobo
 

You can also pre-order directly through Mythic Delirium Books.

Anita and I are, or if you will, Mythic Delirium Books is, proud to present the debut from Nebula Award finalist Barbara Krasnoff, which you could call a collection of interconnected stories, or a mosaic novel, that follows two Jewish families, one from Russia, one from Germany, who face persecutions in there homelands that bring them to Brooklyn, where they make lives for themselves and prove to have a knack for finding magical realist adventures.

Something that’s personally fascinating to me is that Krasnoff has been aiming at this larger work for years, publishing stories here and there that have all along been intended as part of a larger whole. In fact, we’ve published several of these stories ourselves (including “Sophia’s Legacy,” “The Ladder-Back Chair,” and the powerful, Nebula Award-nominated “Sabbath Wine“) without knowing they were connected. (Though, to be fair, some of these stories were revised for the book to strengthen their connections.)

Serendipity has it that The History of Soul 2065 ended up having some continuity with our previous 2019 release, Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora Goss, even though the works are otherwise unrelated — for example, both covers have a personal touch. In the case of Goss’s book, the author actually modeled for cover artist Ruth Sanderson. In the case of Krasnoff’s book, the author provided family photos to cover artist and designer Paula Arwen Owen, who incorporated those images into the finished art.

And once again, we’re grateful to Caldecott Medal-winning author Jane Yolen, who, after writing an introduction for Goss’s collection, turned around and wrote a deeply moving one for Krasnoff’s book.

Another bit of serendipity provides continuity with our 2018 release, the novel Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Latchkey is the sequel to Archivist Wasp, a book massively expanded from Kornher-Stace’s story in Clockwork Phoenix 4, “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse.” Krasnoff also had a story in that volume: “The History of Soul 2065.″ (Worth noting, too, perhaps, that the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter campaign is what shaped Mythic Delirium Books as it exists now.) I am happy to be republishing “The History of Soul 2065″ in its larger context, a process that has given me, as an editor, the intriguing experience of concluding two markedly different books with the exact same story.

About the book

Months before World War I breaks out, two young Jewish girls just on the edge of adolescence—one from a bustling Russian city, the other from a German estate—meet in an eerie, magical forest glade. They are immediately drawn to one another and swear an oath to meet again. Though war and an ocean will separate the two for the rest of their lives, the promise that they made to each other continues through the intertwined lives of their descendants.

This epic tale of the supernatural follows their families from the turn of the 20th Century through the terrors of the Holocaust and ultimately to the wonders of a future they never could have imagined. The History of Soul 2065 encompasses accounts of sorcery, ghosts, time travel, virtual reality, alien contact, and elemental confrontations between good and evil. Understated and epic, cathartic and bittersweet, the twenty connected stories in Nebula Award finalist Barbara Krasnoff’s debut form a mosaic narrative even greater than its finely crafted parts.

Jane Yolen, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master, says in her introduction: “If you, like me, love quirky and original fantasy stories, I advise you to dive right in. If you, like me, admire tough writing that’s not afraid of the grit, dive right in. If you, like me, want to hang out a while with characters rich in their own traditions, dive right in. This is storytelling at the top of the heap.”

Forthcoming in trade paperback, distributed through Ingram, as well as in e-book editions.

At present, review copies can be requested directly from the publisher. The book will be made available on NetGalley in the coming months.

Cover art by Paula Arwen Owen, arwen.myportfolio.com

#SFWApro