Today is the official release of Alcestis in paperback!
In the year since the hardback release, I’ve:
- had a book launch party (photos here)
- read at a college
- read in Ashland, Oregon, met with a book club there, and filmed an interview/reading with a local book TV program
- read at Wiscon
- read at ArmadilloCon in Austin
- met a huge number of amazing writers on Twitter
- taught an intensive summer fiction workshop at the University of Texas
- spoke to a UT honors class after they read the book
- learned that the book will be available in a Turkish edition and in audiobook form from Iambik
- led a discussion about the book in the Blanton Museum, for their book club
- written a bunch of blog posts for other sites, including the always fabulous Hipster Book Club and Small Beer’s Not a Journal (see the Alcestis page for more guest blog posts, interview, and reviews from sites like Open Letters Monthly and Lambda Literary)
- written more blog posts here than I ever expected to!
I continue to be amazed that people want to read my book. I mean, obviously that’s what I hoped for when I wrote it, though I also wrote it because I wanted to read it. But the fact of the book being in the world, of going into a room for a book club meeting and seeing fifteen people who have all spent at least a few hours of their lives reading something I wrote and are now eager to talk about it — there’s nothing quite like it. Thanks to my time as an English grad student, I’m well aware of just how far back the English-language literary tradition stretches, and how very many books have been produced since print became widespread. I like knowing that Alcestis is among them, and that it’s reached some readers who have really enjoyed it. I hope the paperback edition will allow it to reach even more.
The book is available in paperback via IndieBound, Amazon, B&N, Chapters/Indigo, Powell’s, Borders.com — and of course it’s still available in hardback and ebook form on those sites, too. If you buy and read the book, please do take the time to leave a review on the site where you bought it and/or at Goodreads, if you can. It means a lot to me and will especially mean a lot to other potential readers who want to know what you thought of the book.
Congratulations! Any book birthday is a good day. 😉
Thanks, Nephele!
Kate, you also made progress on your dissertation. (I was wondering if the stuff you mentioned was supposed to be related to Alcestis, but some of them overlapped with other stuff, so maybe that could be added).