Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’m here with a final round of new releases (major publisher and indie) for you to check out for this last newsletter of October. Tonight, I get to enjoy a Halloween dinner with my best friend’s family — and then we’ll see how many trick-or-treaters come to the neighborhood on Monday. May you have a spooky and fun weekend! Stay safe out there, space pirates, and if you end up with any mini snickers you don’t want, I will definitely take them.
Let’s make the world a better place, together. Here’s somewhere to start: NDN Collective and Jane’s Due Process.
Bookish Goods
Vintage Book Ghosts by Createdwithrepurpose
Since it’s almost Halloween, I had to get these guys in — little 3D ghosts made from recycled/repurposed old books. And as you might see in the picture, they do cool looking pumpkins as well. $57
New Releases
Launch Something! by Bae Myung-Hoon translated by Stella Kim
A second “sun” has appeared in Earth’s sky — “sun” being a loose term here, since it looks more like Pac-Man in shape — and it’s causing a massive heatwave. As the mysterious “sun” approaches and the heat cranks up, the Korean government decides to help by aiding the U.S.-led Allied Space Force, creating its own Korean Space Force.
Sign Here by Claudia Lux
Peyote Trip is a regular guy in the deals department…on the fifth floor of Hell. It’s not a bad job (though the coffee maker has been broken for centuries), but he’s gunning for a promotion — and he’ll have it if he just gets one more member of the Harrison family to sign their soul over. When the Harrisons go on vacation to the family lake house, he jumps into action with his coworker Calamity…but things are not as they seem, and a sure deal…isn’t.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
I want to get in one more round of indie/small press books to check out, since it’s been a good couple months for those releases.
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
An oral history of a future (reminiscent in some ways of KSR’s The Ministry for the Future), this imagines a mid-21st century world where the world’s governments have collapsed under the weight of war and climate catastrophe. The heart of a new way, this is the oral history of the “insurrectionists” who created the New York Commune in the wake of capitalist armageddon.
Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman
In a Philadelphia beleaguered by climate change and economic collapse, the Saturnalia carnival is a winter respite, a holiday wholeheartedly adopted into American life despite its pagan roots. This Saturnalia will be the third anniversary of Nina walking away from the elite Saturn Club. Since then, she’s made a thin living with her Saturn Club tarot deck. But her remaining friend from the club pulls her back in this year for the celebration, and she finds herself once more in the midst of this occult secret society, where she must confront her past if she is to save her own — and the city’s — future.
See you, space pirates. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.