It’s available in both hardcover and ebook editions. As you can see, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag did a really nice job on the jacket design. The German translation, as with my previous novels, is by Ditte and Giovanni Bandini.
Unfortunately I won’t be coming to Germany on book tour this time around. Maybe for the paperback.
Meanwhile, I’m still hard at work on Lovecraft Country, currently writing the “Jekyll in Hyde Park” portion of the story. More news soon…
Just got my complimentary author’s copies of the Polish translation of The Mirage. Aren’t they sexy?
They had a rough time getting here. The first batch got stolen or eaten in transit, and all I received was an empty mailsack with a big hole in the bottom. (Fun fact: the U.S. postal service will still deliver parcels that are obviously missing their contents, even if what’s left of the packaging resembles windblown debris.) The folks at REBIS Publishing very kindly sent a second round by special delivery, heavily armored in multiple layers of cardboard, and this time the books arrived safely.
The translation is by Zbigniew A. Królicki and the cover design is by Michał Pawłowski.
(P.S. The long-awaited German translation of The Mirage is due on March 1.)
A heads-up for my German fans who’ve been emailing to ask if and when The Mirage would be available in translation: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag has officially set publication for March 2014. The novel will be available in both hardcover and ebook editions.
Also:
* The American ebook of The Mirage is still on sale for $1.99.
* Just finished watching season 2 of The Borgias. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, this is like the non-fantasy version, with Charles VIII’s army replacing the ice zombies and Machiavelli’s The Prince serving as the tie-in book. Really well done.
* Last Saturday was the 2013 championships for the Rat City Rollergirls. Grave Danger beat the Sockit Wenches 202-167 in a close-fought bout. But the best moment of the evening came during the mid-bout break, when Method of Madness proposed to Jalapeño Business. Jalapeño said yes, and the crowd went wild. This tops the previous coolest thing to happen off-track this season, Nancy Pearl’s Feb. 9 halftime appearance where she did a live reading of Where the Wild Things Are. Mazel tov to the happy couple!
The regular derby season is over, but the post-season bouts start next month, with visiting Montreal and London teams going up against the Rat City all stars. Full schedule is here.
A note to my Italian fans, the Italian edition of The Mirage (translated by Lisa Maldera and retitled False Verità) goes on sale tomorrow, November 29.
…aka, A Bunch of Stuff I Meant to Post About Earlier, but I’m out of Practice with This Whole Blogging Thing, aka, Twitter is Bad For Discipline.
• Last Friday I was in Portland, Oregon for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ annual Feast of Authors. This is a banquet/speed-dating event in which each of twenty authors is assigned to a table of local independent booksellers. You get fifteen minutes to pitch and answer questions about your latest work. Then a bell rings, and you change tables and do it again, and again, and again, visiting seven tables in all. It’s a bit daunting at first, especially if you’ve just spent the last several years alone in a room talking to yourself, but the PNBA are a friendly bunch and by the third or fourth table the only issue is a powerful sense of déjà vu.
As a bonus for participating, you get a take-home swag bag filled with signed copies of your fellow authors’ books:
• While I was in Portland, I also stopped into Powell’s City of Books and signed stock, including a first edition Sewer, Gas & Electric and several copies of the British paperback edition of Bad Monkeys with the cool Alice-in-Wonderland cover. If you’re in town and looking to expand your Matt Ruff collection, now’s your chance.
• Sdera (הוצאת שדרה), the Israeli publishing house that was planning to bring out a Hebrew-language translation of Bad Monkeys, has gone out of business. It’s too bad—I was really looking forward to scoring a new alphabet. Also, according to Google Translate, “sdera” means (among other things) “spine,” so this would have been the spinal edition.
• The Mirage book tour is starting to come together. I want to wait for a few more confirmations before I start posting dates on the web site, but the launch event will be February 9 at the Elliott Bay Book Company.
