What a Year!
Here at Pulp Literature, we delight in bringing you issues jam-packed with genres and bursting with literary brio! And we couldn’t do it without our amazing authors and artists.
So now, with a puff of Pulp pride, we are excited to share with you some of what our contributors created in 2021! From short stories to powerful poems, from memoirs to epic novels-in-verse, from barbarians to demons and beyond — wow!
Read on to round out your 2021 literary must-haves! (And hey, maybe you’ll get an idea or two for your holiday shopping list.)
And to stay up-to-date on our author news all year, subscribe to our newsletter!
Tomson Highway, Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir
Tomson Highway (Issue 27, ‘The Lover Snake’) is a Cree writer from northern Manitoba who also happens to be a classically-trained pianist. As such, he writes music in addition to his plays and novels, music that comes out as songs which he performs in cabaret with singers and such, wherever and whenever he gets invited. What makes his writing unique in all these forms is that his mother tongue, Cree, figures largely; one almost always reads or hears it. ‘The Lover Snake’ was published in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford University Press), and predates most of his published work. For more on all things Tomson, visit his website.
Tomson’s memoir, Permanent Astonishment, has just won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction! The jury called the book “a mesmerizing story rich in detail about growing up in a Cree-speaking family in Northern Manitoba and later in a residential school.” Described as “big-hearted [and] joyful”, this epic memoir from one of Canada’s most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performers is on our year-end must-haves list! Order your copy here.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Bramah and The Beggar Boy
Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Issue 28, ‘Man With Golden Helmet’) was the Surrey Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2018. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks. Her work has been adapted for opera and visual art. She teaches creative writing, and is the final judge for our Magpie Award for Poetry. Her ground-breaking poetry book about the bombing of Air India Flight 182, children of air india, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Renée’s second book, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, edited with Wayde Compton, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her book, Listening to the Bees, co-authored with Dr. Mark Winston, won the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award for Environment/Ecology.
Bramah and The Beggar Boy is book one of THOT J BAP, Renée’s epic poetry-in-verse, and features Bramah, a time-travelling locksmith and her orphan-apprentice, The Beggar Boy. Together, they use cunning and magic to outwit the evil Consortium and join seed savers and outcasts in a world ravaged by climate change and global disorder. This innovative work, published by Nightwood Editions, alchemizes fantasy, epic poetry, philosophy, climate change activism, and the politics of gender and race. The poem is simultaneously a dystopian tale, a family saga, an exploration of language, and a meditation on good and evil. Order your copy here.
Matthew Hughes, Barbarians of the Beyond
Matthew Hughes (Issue 13, ‘The Devil You Don’t’ and ‘Fishface and the Leg’; Issue 23, What the Wind Brings excerpt; and Issue 26, ‘The Bicolour Spiral’) has won the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada and been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K Dick, Endeavour (twice), AE van Vogt, and Derringer Awards. Matthew’s foray into historical fiction, his magnum opus What the Wind Brings, winner of the 2020 Endeavour Award, was published by Pulp Literature Press in 2019 and is available through our bookstore. Visit Matt on his website.
Barbarians of the Beyond is an authorized companion novel to Jack Vance’s iconic series, The Demon Princes, and is set during the time frame of the first two novels in the series: The Star King and The Killing Machine (both published in 1964). Barbarians of the Beyond is a return to “Jack Vance Space” and space-opera derring-do that follows in the science-fiction Grandmaster’s footsteps. Order your copy here.
Leo X Robertson, Unfortunates
Leo X Robertson (Issue 22, ‘Snapshots’, and Issue 30, ‘Bar Hopping for Astronauts’) is a Scottish process engineer, writer, and filmmaker, currently living in Stavanger, Norway. He has two novellas out this year: The Grimhaven Disaster and The Glow with Aurelia Leo. His new horror feature film, Burnt Portraits, takes place entirely in the creepy basement of a local art studio. Find him on Twitter @Leoxwrite or at leoxrobertson.wordpress.com.
In Unfortunates, Leo’s new collection of stories, a sadistic blogger gleefully documents the murders of Hollywood celebrities. A journalist infiltrates a sex club for the physically impaired, finding he has more in common with them than he first assumed. A soon-to-be-dad gets seduced by a water spirit, which questions everything he thought he could impart as a father. And a primary school teacher meets his most difficult class yet: a horde of undead children. In these stories, ordinary people must confront their biggest flaws and deepest fears in worlds eerily similar to our own. Because the worst horrors are the real ones we create for ourselves. Order your copy here.
CC Humphreys, One London Day
CC (Chris) Humphreys (Issue 1, ‘Where the Angels Wait’, and Issue 14, ‘The Ankle Bracelet’) has played Hamlet in Calgary, a gladiator in Tunisia, and a dead immortal in Highlander. He’s waltzed in London’s West End, conned the landlord of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street, commanded a starfleet in Andromeda, and voiced Salem the cat in the original Sabrina. A playwright, his plays have been produced in Calgary, Vancouver, and London. He has published 20 novels, and his novel Plague won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel in Canada in 2015. He is now writing epic fantasy with the Immortals’ Blood Trilogy, for Gollancz; the first book, Smoke in the Glass, was published in 2019. Book Two: The Coming of the Dark has now been published in the UK and Canada. He has just published The Tapestry Trilogy set around — and through — the fabulous medieval Unicorn Tapestries in New York’s Cloisters museum. For more, visit Chris’s website.
One London Day, a present-day thriller and modern noir, is a daisy-chain tale of characters and connections. Like noir’s ’40s origins, this story has its hood, its moll, its femme fatale, its fancy boy. Everyone is both protagonist and antagonist. No one gets out unharmed — and some don’t get out at all. Order your copy here.
Krista Wallace, Gatekeeper’s Key
Krista Wallace (Issue 6, ‘The Inner Light’) is a writer, singer, and actor. She writes short fiction in a variety of genres, and long fiction, primarily in fantasy. She sings jazz in a big band called FAT Jazz, and in a duo called the Itty Bitty Big Band. Krista also does audiobook narration and puts out a weekly podcast. Find out more at kristawallace.com.
Gatekeeper’s Key, Book One is out soon in paperback and ebook. And Books Two and Three are soon to be released in audio format. Outcast swordfighter, Kyer Halidan, walked out of a cornfield at the age of three. Now, she leaves to discover who put her there. And why. Along the way she makes mistakes and kills a man with powerful friends, while at the same time earning the respect of her greatest heroes. New enemies pursue her relentlessly, desperate to learn what she knows about their plans. Kyer’s impetuousness and disregard for consequences put the mission, and her life, in jeopardy. But to save a village, and possibly the continent, from a despicable evil, she must choose between adhering to duty and breaking the rules. Have a listen here.
Charlene Kwiatkowski, Let Us Go Then
Charlene Kwiatkowski (Issue 28, ‘they say you will teach me…’) is a city lover living in Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry has been published in Train, PRISM international, Barren Magazine, Long Exposure, and elsewhere. Her poem ‘they say you will teach me more than I will ever teach you’ won Pulp Literature‘s 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry. She has a master’s degree in English Literature and works at a contemporary art gallery. You can find her blogging (when new motherhood allows) at textingthecity.wordpress.com.
Let Us Go Then, published by Alfred Gustav Press, is Charlene’s first chapbook of poems. Available by subscription only, this beautiful hand-crafted collection had a limited-edition print-run. But be sure to follow Charlene on Twitter for news of her upcoming publications.
Summer Jewel Keown, Non-stalgia
Summer Jewel Keown (Issue 20, ‘Indebted’) is an Indianapolis native recently transplanted to Ithaca, NY. Her short stories have been printed in HoosierLit and Bikes In Space, Vol. 5, and she had a short play produced by IndyFringe. Follow her on Twitter @TheSummerJewel or visit her website.
Non-stalgia is co-edited by Summer Jewel and includes one of her stories. In this collection, fifteen authors blend memoir with imagination to unearth the truth buried in memories both fateful and fleeting. From honest to fantastic, from sweet to strange, these stories all have one thing in common: They are life rewritten. A hitchhiker, once left stranded, instead becomes an unexpected house guest. A family squabble over a sunken lawn chair becomes a very public courtroom battle. The rainstorm that felt like the end of the world actually was. This is not nonfiction. It’s non-stalgia. Order your copy here.
Carol Berg, A Summoning of Demons
Carol Berg (Issue 10, ‘Uncanonical Murder’) majored in mathematics at Rice University, in part so she wouldn’t have to write papers. But while earning her mathematics degree, she took every English course that listed novels on the syllabus, just so she would have time to keep reading. Somewhere in the midst of teaching math, raising three sons, earning a second degree in computer science at the University of Colorado, and a software engineering career, a friend teased her into exchanging letters written “in character.” Once Carol started writing fiction, she couldn’t stop. Carol’s eighteen epic fantasy novels have earned national and international acclaim, including the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, multiple Colorado Book Awards, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. She has been twice voted the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Writer of the Year. Carol lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with her Exceptional Spouse.
A Summoning of Demons is the thrilling conclusion in the Chimera trilogy. Carol’s newest work, written as her alter ego Cate Glass, is a fantasy adventure series about a rag-tag quartet of sorcerers who take on missions of deception and intrigue in a world where magic earns the death penalty. Order your copy here.
Congratulations to all! We can’t wait to see what you’ll have for us in 2022!
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