More "10 books that haunt me"

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995
paperback, Bard, 1996
Editions from Literary Guild, Claasen Verlag,
Editions Anne Carriere, Ediciones B. Also in braille.

Catherwood

Thanks to director/producer Stacy Title for including me on her "10 books that haunt me" list--I'm glad to be popping up in such places, and it's interesting to see preferences. (See Midori Snyder's list here, with a different book of mine. Midori writes fantasy and mythic fiction, as well as essays on folklore and myth.)

A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
The Wasp Factory, Ian Banks
Paris Trout, Pete Dexter
The Child in Time, Ian McEwan
Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore
Catherwood, Marly Youmans
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
Roman Fever, Edith Wharton.

"one of the glories of American fiction from the last 50 years" 

John Wilson, editor Books and Culture, June 11, 2014

• FORTHCOMING in a new edition. The Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover, the large print hardcover, and the Bard Imprint (William Morrow) paperback are all out of print.
• Book Club rights:  A Literary Guild Alternate Selection
• Best Ten Books of 1996, The Spectator (Raleigh)
• Best Books of 1996, The Anniston Star
• Best Five Books of 1996, The Rocky Mountain News
• Nominated for The National Book Award by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

More here.

Quote best befitting this frog-eating day:

If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning.
And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.
        --Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens

Thaliad goes to South Africa

     This is modern day epic poetry about the destruction of our 21st century world and the seven children who escape topping mountains and the great inferno.
     One hundred pages of mesmerizing iambic pentameter surge and swell, plunge and soar the journeying through the children's grief and rotting remains of what was our civilisation, until few of the seven triumph over danger and evil and grow into adulthood to parent a new post-apocalyptic future for mankind.
     Blank verse on grand scale, heroic imagery, narrated by the latter day Bard of the Clave tasked with preserving the best of old world literature and recording the new.
     Wise beyond her years but, so endearingly, as susceptible as any 19-year-old to charm spun by a stranger with eyes "green as Glimmerglass in a storm."
          --Moira Richards, Cape Times, South Africa, 22 August 2014

"The Comb" at Far Fetched Fables

Fantasy Magazine, no. 7 (2007) Editor Sean Wallace.
Reprint in Fantasy: The Best of the Year, edited by Rich Horton (Prime Books, 2008)
Podcast at Far Fetched Fables No. 20 Bill Congreve and Marly Youmans

"The Comb" is the most drastically pruned of any short story that I have written--it is a third or perhaps a fourth of what was originally written. At the time when I was revising, I remember fearing to weaken the main character by not revealing the rest of her story. While I always feel that what is cut from a story remains as a kind of shadow to the work, extending outward by little, broken tendrils of shade, that was a lot to cut and so meant a very large shadow. I've been curious about whether any of that shadow is visible to readers, though it's hard thing to know.

Eventually stories and poems are finished with the writer and her worries. They wander away to find a place in the world or else to get lost and then go unread. "The Comb" has been published, anthologized, and now is read as a podcast by actress and writer Nicola Seaton-Clark. So the story keeps moving along in the wilderness of the world, finding a home.

Thank you to Nicola Seaton-Clark for reading and liking and now recording the tale! And thanks to Gary Dowell and the rest of the Far Fetched staff.

Nicola Seaton-Clark lives in the wilds of (almost) Eastern Europe with her long-suffering husband, phenomenal children and a grumpy cat. Trained as an actress and singer, she has worked in entertainment for over 20 years and currently splits her time between writing speculative fiction, helping her husband run their voice-over company, Offstimme, and voicing everything from commercials and documentaries to public transport announcements.  She also hosts this podcast…..

Publication day for Glimmerglass!

Comments and images

Full front quote:
I cannot recommend an author more 
than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose 
is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.
--Sébastien Doubinsky

Glimmerglass (Mercer, 9/2014),

Links: indies (search), online venues, and Mercer.

SIN: 0881464910 ISBN-13: 978-0881464917

Interior/exterior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

a novelist

Glimmerglass is a series of mirrors and panes that splinter and soften to let you fall deeper into the heart of myth and artistic desire. A resonant, beautiful exploration of fragile hopes and the courage that comes from resisting their trampling by others.   

        --Margo Lanagan, author of Sea Hearts, Black Juice, and others; winner of World Fantasy and Printz awards

an editor

You might not even know what you are seeking, but once inside the pages of Glimmerglass, you’ll find exactly what you need: “a cup of music, a hill of sea.” In the Republic of Letters, Marly Youmans is our Magician in Chief.   

       --John Wilson, Editor, Books and Culture

Clive Hicks-Jenkins sketch for Glimmerglass

a poet

I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who has the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Glimmerglass does more than shimmer and grip; it entertains and hypnotizes. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty. Whether she’s writing historical fiction or fantasy, her characters leave one breathless. Her ability to describe a person, a place, or the psychological underpinnings of a plot or individual, ranks with the great novelists, the highest literature. A tale of love and intrigue, mystery and pathology, Glimmerglass’ appeal is the warmth and charge of a tale told round a fire fused by Hitchcockian anxiety, empathy, and relief. Nature, architecture, dread, thrill, sexual dilemma, and murder echo against Youmans’ gorgeous prose and terrifying romance, which glides like a serpent―without a single extraneous or boring word. Youmans is my favorite storyteller. I come back to her as if to a holy well.

       --Jeffery Beam, award-winning poet

         of The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, and many more books

Marly YoumansGLIMMERGLASSSee On

pre-pub review

 This stylish contemporary variation on the Bluebeard legend from Youmans (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage) serves up an appealing blend of myth, mystery, and magic... 

       --Publishers Weekly July 2014

JACKET COPY 

Perhaps it was a sense of estrangement from the everyday that drew Cynthia Sorrel to the village of Cooper Patent. The failed painter was lured by the gate house with its seven doors, the lake with its tower, and the magical air of a place that couldn’t quite decide whether it was fictional, mythic, or real. The gate house should have been a first clue that she was on a journey, and soon she begins to glimpse and then to pursue a figure in the woods near her house, convinced she has seen the Muse.  

As she reclaims her calling as a painter and moves deeper into the uncanny world of Cooper Patent, Cynthia is finds herself at the heart of a labyrinth of mystery. She will have to navigate its dream depths and secrets, brilliant or dark, locked behind a door that opens into the earth.  

Sébastien Doubinsky writes, “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” Now this “best-kept secret among contemporary American writers” (Books and Culture) has scaled the tree of books and plucked twigs of gothic romance, ghost tale, medieval dream vision, and belated coming-of-age story, with a leaf or two from the novel of manners and fantasy. The transformed result,Glimmerglass, is a gift to literature like no other.

A step on the way...
On August 13th, the book arrived at the warehouse.
Prefer buying direct from the publisher?
"Call us and place an order, or order online 
(20% off discount code: Facebook). 
Toll free 1-866-895-1472 or locally 478-301-2880."

from "Letter from the Editor," 

Books and Culture Magazine, August 27, 2014

Speaking of superb novels, let me recommend two others that will be appearing not too long after you receive this issue. In September, Knopf will publish Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which imagines the aftermath of a global pandemic of unprecedented ferocity. We follow a wandering troupe as they make their circuit in the upper Midwest, stopping at tiny settlements to perform Shakespeare and play music. In the same month, Mercer University Press will publish Marly Youmans' Glimmerglass, set in Cooper country in New York State, a book in which the fantastic and the quotidian are cunningly interlaced. These two novels have very little in common except for the quality of their imagination—but that is more than enough to make them kin.

A sample of the profuse interior decoration 
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

A Clive-sketch for Glimmerglass!

A step on the way to the final jacket--soon the spine lettering 
would shrink a little, and other minor tinkering would happen.

And a larger version here.

detail of the jacket by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
book design by Burt and Burt
Mercer University Press, September 2014

A detail from the cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Mercer makes a postcard...

Lady Word of Mouth 

thanks you for noting the book's 

first day in the world.

Antique printer's flower
with harp to sing and wings to soar...

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