New: In Springdale Town by Robert Freeman Wexler

Reconciliation, longing, and ambiguity combine in one astounding locale: Springdale. Is it a mundane New England town on a picturesque river, or the nexus of the paradoxical?

Springdale appears to be a quiet village, unblemished by shopping mall or mega-store. The town sits in a fertile valley, surrounded by countryside rich in natural wonder. Summers, tourists attend the area’s many arts and music festivals, and hikers crowd the trails. In the fall, reds and yellows of turning leaves decorate the landscape, and in winter, mountain resorts fill with avid skiers.

But some say Springdale exists only on the contoured highways of our collective imagination. Others point to references dating back to Colonial Boston, to multiple versions of a ballad telling a story of remorse and disgrace.

Here are three facts:
1. Maps cannot be trusted;
2. All History is awash with fraud and hoax;
3. Springdale is an absence of identity.

For two people, a lawyer named Patrick Travis and a television actor named Richard Shelling, Springdale is home and anti-home, a place of comfort and a distortion of everyday life. They are strangers to each other, yet connected. Their lives will intersect with a force that shatters both.

This edition includes a specially written afterword by the author.

In Springdale Town by Robert Freeman Wexler is available in ebook format from:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• and other ebook retailers

“Springdale is told in a deceptively muted style and cunningly crafted so that the story appears to assemble itself around the reader like a trap he or she has sprung, yet remains innocent-looking until the end, when a spring-loaded hammer smashes down.” —Lucius Shepard, from the introduction to the original print edition

“For some writers, prose is a means with which to construct an analogue of reality. For Robert Freeman Wexler, fiction is a means with which to de-construct reality. Yet his stories have such a strong sense of linguistic integrity, it’s hard to believe that he isn’t reporting his experiences from a parallel universe.” —Rick Kleffel, from an interview at fantasticmetropolis.com.

“…In a list comprising some of the biggest names in contemporary genre fiction the appearance of a novella by a virtually unknown author causes a certain interest. In Springdale Town represents its author’s first book publication (after only a handful of short stories) and yet it fits into the PS Publishing list with such subtle skill that its presence on the shelf feels as if an invisible gap in the collection has been suddenly filled.”—Lavie Tidhar, Dusksite

“…no need for Lovecraftian monsters or rampaging serial killers to transform Springdale into a seriously creepy place. An old ballad suggests that one death haunts this village, but Wexler deviously, almost casually, creates a sense of wrongness that goes well beyond some past saga of jealousy and murder. Don’t read this one right before bedtime–or your next road trip.”—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine, October 2003

“The basic idea is familiar, almost banal, but Wexler’s treatment is witty, his writing is excellent, his characters are really well captured—I was very impressed with the story.”—Rich Horton, Locus Magazine, November 2003

“…Other writers, wiry and wry, as lithe as dragonflies, may seem more vulnerable, but their grace, their maneuverability, becomes its own kind of tensile strength. They can travel farther, faster, and in disguise.”—Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online

“…lovely Americana set-piece turned on its ear.”—Jay Lake, Tangent Online

“…An emotionally scathing yet tender insight into the frailty, ignorance, and misplaced motivations of that most ridiculous of animals, the human being.”—William P. Simmons, Infinity Plus

“…Robert Freeman Wexler dives into the heart of Americana in his chilling and tender novella.”—Rick Kleffel Agony Column

Another one for August

Another of the four titles we have lined up for August is Robert Freeman Wexler’s wonderfully strange Bradbury-esque carnival novel, Circus of the Grand Design:

When a man named Lewis rents a vacation house on Long Island for a few days, he doesn’t expect to end up on a crazy circus train ride to nowhere.

His one night in the house, he burns it down. Then he meets charismatic Joseph Dillon, manager of the Circus of the Grand Design. Knowing he needs to leave the area in a hurry. Lewis agrees to join the circus as a publicist, despite Dillon’s warning that he might not be able to return to the place he began. The circus’s private train travels an infinite dream-loop to unknown lands, and Lewis becomes lost amongst crazy acrobats, sexy elephant riders, a magical mechanical horse, a giant woman and her savage, prehistoric rodent bears, an egotistical juggler, and…a fertility goddess who takes exceptional interest in him.

The train, its residents, and the places they visit form a complex puzzle that Lewis feels compelled to solve.

“Robert Wexler is an author who walks between the sea and the sand.  He has a genius for configuring the state between waking and dreaming, and the delicious anxiety of never confirming which of these states presides.  It’s a superb trick, used to brilliant effect in Circus Of The Grand Design.” Graham Joyce

“Circus of the Grand Design belongs up there with Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell and Robert Silverberg’s Son of Man. A swell, almost-hallucinated novel that moves with a logic all its own.”  Howard Waldrop

“In the great tradition of the Fabulists, Wexler has found a path that is totally original and unforgettable. Circus of the Grand Design is a journey of self discovery in which no twist is familiar, no turn anticipated.” Richard Bowes

“Robert Wexler works without a net in Circus of the Grand Design. Smooth writing, a vibrant vision, and beautifully rendered characters makes this show well worth the price of admission.” Jeffrey Ford

Four infinity plus ebooks for August

That’s the intention.

We launched infinity plus ebooks with sixteen full-length titles in late 2010 and the first few months of 2011, but recently we’ve taken a bit of a break from it so I can concentrate on my new novel. Our current plan is to hit twenty titles by the end of August, with one a week during that month.

The first of the titles we have lined up is Meridian Days by Eric Brown. This was Eric’s first novel and it’s great to be making it available again.  Once again, we have a lovely cover by Dominic Harman.

Here’s a bit more blurb about the novel:

‘ I survive. I live from day to day – a Meridian day which humanity has created from one eternal stretch of daylight.’

Meridian, twenty light years from Earth and with just a tiny scattering of inhabitable islands, seems the perfect place for Bob Benedict to escape the tragedy of his past.

Here he can live out his days in drug abuse, despised by and despising the self-obsessed community of artists who make up the population of the colony planet: the Altereds who have swapped human form for animal, and the Augmenteds who have boosted their minds with computers.

But when Bob meets Fire, the daughter of the formidable Tamara Trevellion, the most ruthlessly ambitious of the artists, he is drawn into a world of corruption and murder that is far darker than his past.

Soon it’s all he can do just to survive…

“British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful” – New Scientist

“SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility… accomplished and
affecting” – Paul McAuley

“One of the very best of the new generation of British SF writers” – Vector

“Eric Brown has an enviable talent for writing stories which are the essence
of modern science fiction and yet show a passionate concern for the human
predicament and human values” – Bob Shaw

Later in August we’ll be publishing:

• the first ebook edition of Robert Freeman Wexler’s Circus of the Grand Design (“Wexler excels at lucid prose and provocative ideas, giving the Bradbury-ish carnival-comes-to-town theme a new twist and showing promise as an original fantasist” – Booklist)
• John Grant’s Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews, a bumper collection ‑ over 150,000 words! ‑ of book reviews, many of full essay length, by the two-time Hugo winning and World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and author, among much fiction, of such recent nonfiction works as Corrupted Science and (forthcoming) Denying Science.
• and another one from Eric Brown, Approaching Omega, described by SF Site as “an action packed novella of humans vs. cyborgs”.