We’ve got it! Our first review of Ex Marginalia is from Locus Magazine. And it’s a good one! Eugen M. Bacon calls it “a critically rewarding, introspective selection of essays that will conflict, startle, and reassure you.”
You can read the review in its entirety on the Locus website.
If you’d like a copy, you can get one at most online retailers.
At last! Hydra House Books is proud to release the finalized table of contents for Ex Marginalia, and we couldn’t be happier that all of these authors contributed their personal experiences of writing from the margins of speculative fiction to this work.
The authors and titles are:
Pre-orders are now being taken through Hydra House Books, and Ex Marginalia will soon be available through most online retailers. (And some brick-and-mortar bookstores!)
Publication date is February 21.
Thank you to all the authors who made this possible, and a big special thank you to the editor, Chinelo Onwualu, for all she’s done to make this anthology a reality!
We haven’t said much about Ex Marginalia because we’ve been heads down in getting it ready. But the big bit of news is that we’ve decided to release it on February 21, 2023, during Black History Month. We feel this is an important time (and an important month) to release this important work.
We’ve also finalized the table of contents, which we’ll post in a few days.
Preorders are now being taken!
Hydra House Books is proud to reveal the cover art for our next release: Ex Marginalia!
This beautiful cover was created by award winning author and illustrator Ashe Samuels.
Edited by Chinelo Onwualu, Hydra House Books introduces Ex Marginalia, a collection of essays by writers from identities routinely excluded or ignored by the speculative fiction community. These voices are vital to the present and the future of the genre. And they cannotâwill notâremain any longer in the margins.
Ex Marginalia will be published in Fall 2022 through all major book outlets.
Preorder a copy now, and we’ll send it to you when it’s published.
Or you can help support this project with a tax-deductible donation via the Carl Brandon Society.
Proceeds from the sale of Ex Marginalia will benefit the Carl Brandon Society.
Hydra House Books is proud to announce the upcoming release of Ex Marginalia, a new collection of personal essays by writers of marginalized backgrounds and identities about the art, craft, and lived experiences of writing speculative fiction, co-sponsored by the Carl Brandon Society and edited by award-nominated author and editor Chinelo Onwualu.
In 2021, Hydra House Books released Pocket Workshop: Essays on living as a writer just as many in the United States were gaining a renewed interest in issues of racism, anti-Black violence, and the systemic oppression of marginalized communities. While Pocket Workshop drew its authors from a diverse pool of professional writers, it didnât push the boundaries or open new ground for justice and equality in publishing.
Ex Marginalia aims to be an active and deliberate space for the writers who are most often excluded and ignoredâauthors who cannot and shall not remain in the margins, whose voices are vital to the present and future of speculative fiction.
Planned contributors include:
Nisi Shawl
P. Djèlà Clark
Julia Rios
Millie Ho
Chikodili Emelumadu
Suyi Davis Okungbowa
Hannah Onoguwe
Malka Older
Ibtisam Azem
Carlos Hernandez
L.D. Lewis
Shawn Frazier
S.B. Divya
and others.
Cover design by Ashe Samuels.
To support this project, tax-deductible donations can be given via the Carl Brandon Societyâs Ex Marginalia page. Donors may opt to receive complementary copies of Ex Marginalia as follows:
Donations will be used to offset publication costs and ensure that contracted authors from BIPOC, AAPI, LGBTQIA, disabled, and other marginalized communities will be paid professional rates.
The Carl Brandon Society will receive proceeds from sales of the book to support their mission of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction.
Ex Marginalia will be released in the Fall of 2022, in trade paperback and ebook through most major online book retailers, and in a limited hardcover edition exclusively through the Hydra House Books website.
Hey there! FiyahCon is one of the best new conventions to come along in many years, and Hydra House Books is proud to be a part of it.
Through the end of September, Hydra House is offering a 20% discount on all book purchases (not just Pocket Workshop!) to FiyahCon members.
PLEASE NOTE: To get the 20% discount, you’ll have to go through our WooCommerce website! To get there, select this link:
Hydra House Books WooCommerce Store
Enter the code FIYAHCON21 to get the discount.
Proceeds from the sale of Pocket Workshop will go to the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Huzzah! Thanks for attending FiyahCon! And thanks for supporting Clarion West!
Hydra House Books is happy to announce the release of the Pocket Workshop, a collection of twenty-eight essays by instructors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, the six-week in-residence science fiction, fantasy, and horror workshop in Seattle, Washington.
Edited by Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, this is not a “how to” book of writing speculative fiction. Rather, this collection is intended to expand your knowledge of writing from the perspective of professional writers.
Essays range from scene setting, exposition, writing while blocked, feeding your creative engine, your approach a writing career, finding your process, thickening the plot, and using voice, among many others.
Through Monday, November 30, order a copy through Hydra House Books at a discounted price.
A fundraiser for Clarion West, the Pocket Workshop will be published on February 9, 2021.
May 30, 2019
Hydra House Books has book news!!!
We are delighted to announce the acquisition of a collection of short speculative fiction by Lauren Dixon titled Welcome to the Bitch Bubble!
The collection will be comprised of stories both published and unpublished, including “Double Dutch,” “Floating Feathers, Red Wings and Wild,” “Sheela of the Good Shepherd,” âIf You Canât Take the Heat, Donât Hire a Yeti,â and many others. Her fiction walks the line between the strange, the weird, and the humorous, often in unsettling ways.
Launch date is slated for early April 2020 through all major online retailers, and will be available in trade paperback, ebook, and limited edition hardcover formats.
Lauren Dixon knows how to shoot a rifle. She’s written lingerie catalogs for the Army, talks a lot about vaginas, and doesnât eat animals unless they ask her to first. Sheâs worked as a gutter poet record store clerk, movie studio intern, pizza slinger, disaffected video store clerk, word nerd professor and counselor, gopher-extraordinaire for the Austin Film Society, and for Bill Hicksâ best friend. Sheâs also, basically, your garden variety cat whisperer.
Sheâs tried not to break into abandoned, derelict buildings and ruins since the age of seven, but canât seem to help herself. Coincidentally, thatâs when she started writing. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge, DIAGRAM, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, BookLifeNow, Scape, Extract(s), Oracle, Sojourn, INTER, Kadar Koli, and (R)evolve (Naropa). A Clarion West 2010 graduate, Dixon also edited the absurdist literary âzine Superficial Flesh. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Texas State University in San Marcos and a PhD in Humanities-Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas. She lives in complete and total sin with the writer Dallas Taylor in Seattle, Washington.
With the greatest pleasure, we present the newly updated Hydra House Books website. Redesigned from the ground up by Clockpunk Studios (thank you, Jeremy Tolbert and Jenn Reese!), it has a lot of fancy new functionality and, most importantly, a brilliant new design.
It’s got some fancy new things, like a calendar of events. And easy peasy ways for us to enter new books. And all kinds of crazy gizmos behind the scenes that we’ll probably never use. It’s also got this cool graphic at the top of the screen where the two Hs in Hydra House come smoothly together. You’ll have to go back to the home page to see it. Go on, do it. Oooooohh. Pretty snazzy, huh?
HHB has been pretty quiet the past few months, but we’re regrouping and planning to do more publishing in the coming year. Like Book 6, the sixth and final installment, in Danika Dinsmore’s middle-grade series Faerie Tales from the White Forest. Stop back from time to time to see what’s new. Or sign up for the newsletter and we’ll keep in touch with you.
As a gift to y’all, we are presenting a short story by Sandra M. Odell, “The Home for Broken,” from her 2018 collection Godfall and Other Stories, available here through Hydra House Books. Original to the collection, it’s an amazing and moving story about a wind-up child that must be … well, you’ll just have to read it.
Thanks for dropping by!
Tod McCoy
Hydra House Books Overlord
Oh, so many things in the works! Watch for a complete web redesign in the next few months. And more books in the works! Also, a slight name change — up until now it’s just been “Hydra House” (much like “Random House”), but we think that’s not very specific, especially for someone who isn’t familiar with the company. So “Hydra House Books” it is! (I mean, the URL already says that.)
If you’ve sent a manuscript someone in the last year, we just discovered that the JotForm wasn’t working right and we probably didn’t get the manuscript. (Really sorry about that.) We have no idea how long it’s been going on, so if you sent something, either send an email to tod@hydrahousebooks.com or resubmit the manuscript using the newly fixed form. (“Submissions” in the menu.)