Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  Best known for her “Company” series of time travel science fiction, Kage Baker’s (1952-2010) debut novel, In the Garden of Iden, was published in 1997. Other notable works include Mendoza in Hollywood (2000) and “The Empress of Mars,” a 2003 novella that won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award. Her short story “Caverns of Mystery” and her novel House of the Stag (2009) were both nominated for World Fantasy Awards. In 2010, her novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s was nominated for both a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award, and won the Nebula Award. Her sister, Kathleen Bartholomew completed Baker’s unfinished novel, Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea. It was published in 2012.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-seven novels (The most recent is Karen Memory, a Weird West adventure from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, writer Scott Lynch.

  Gregory Benford is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, winner of the Lord Prize in science, and the UN Medal in Literature. His fiction and nonfiction has won many awards; he has published thirty-two novels, over two hundred short stories and several hundred scientific papers in several fields.

  Holly Black was a library school drop out. Now she’s the author of bestselling dark fantasy for kids and teens. She lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret door that hides a room filled with books.

  Richard Bowes has published six novels including Minions of the Moon and Dust Devil On A Quiet Street, four short story collections and eighty stories and has won World Fantasy, Lambda, IHG, and Million Writer Awards. Many of his stories are personal/semi-autobiographical. He worked for thirty-five years at New York University’s Bobst Library and was present at the 2003 student suicides and their aftermath.

  Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. In recognition of his stature in and impact on the world of literature, Bradbury was awarded the National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Medal of Arts in 2004, and, in 2007, a Pulitzer Prize special citation. A great lover and supporter of libraries and said, “I didn’t go to college, but when I graduated from high school I went down to the local library and I spent ten years there, two or three days a week, and I got a better education than most people get from universities. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight years old.”

  Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of prose, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium. Anthology appearances include The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. Her collection, The Honey Month, was published in 2011. El-Mohtar’s articles and reviews have appeared in the LA Times, NPR Books, and on Tor.com.

  Ruthanna Emrys lives in a mysterious manor house in the outskirts of Washington DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, occasionally attempts to save the world, and blogs sporadically at ashnistrike.livejournal.com and on Twitter as @r_emrys. Her stories have appeared in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Analog. Her first novel, Winter Tide, is available from MacMillan’s Tor.com imprint.

  Nebula Award winner Esther Friesner is the author of more than thirty novels and over one hundred fifty short stories, including the story “Thunderbolt” in Random House’s Young Warriors anthology, which lead to the creation of Nobody’s Princess and Nobody’s Prize. She is also the editor of seven popular anthologies. Her works have been published around the world. Educated at Vassar College and Yale University, where she taught for a number of years, Friesner is also a poet, a playwright, and once wrote an advice column, “Ask Auntie Esther.” She is married, is the mother of two, harbors cats, and lives in Connecticut. You can visit Esther at princessesofmyth.com.

  As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She received a Master’s from the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, and a PhD in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University. She is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Several of her short stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld and Upgraded. Her first story written in English, “Let’s Have a Talk,” was published in Nature in 2015.

  The library has always been Ellen Klages’ favorite refuge, and there have been many significant librarians in her life. She is the author of two award-winning YA historical novels: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula Award in 2005. In 2014, “Wakulla Springs,” co-authored with Andy Duncan, was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. Tor.com published her novella Passing Strange in January 2017. Klages lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of books and other strange and wondrous things.

  Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, his debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. The second book in the series, The Wall of Storms and a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories were published in 2016. He also edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016). He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Prior to becoming a published fantasy author, New York Times, USA Today, and Times of London bestselling author Scott Lynch had a variety of jobs including dishwasher, busboy, waiter, web designer, office manager, prep cook, and freelance writer. He is also a volunteer firefighter. Novel The Thorn of Emberlain will soon follow The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves in his seven-volume Gentleman Bastard series. Lynch lives in Massachusetts with his partner, writer Elizabeth Bear.

  Jack McDevitt is a former English teacher, naval officer, Philadelphia taxi driver, customs officer, and motivational trainer. His work has been on the final ballot for the Nebula Awards for twelve of the past thirteen years. His first novel, The Hercules Text, won the Philip K. Dick Special Award. In 1991, McDevitt won the first $10,000 UPC International Prize for his novella, “Ships in the Night.” The Engines of God was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and his novella, “Time Travelers Never Die,” was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. McDevitt lives in Georgia with his wife, Maureen, where he plays chess, reads mysteries, and eats lunch regularly with his cronies.

  Sarah Monette studied English and Classics in college, and receive an MA and Ph.D. in English Literature. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books, and she has written two collaborations with Elizabeth Bear for Tor: A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men. Short stories have appeared in a variety of venues. Monette has published two collections of short stories, Som
ewhere Beneath Those Waves and The Bone Key. Monette’s latest novel—The Goblin Emperor, written under open pseudonym Katherine Addison—was winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel and a finalist for Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards.

  Publishers Weekly called Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest “contemporary American writing at its finest” and chose the novel as one of the One Hundred Best Books of 2006. His fiction includes horror, suspense, crime, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” according to writer Joe R. Lansdale. Author of five short story collections, Partridge’s novels include the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. Partridge’s compact, thrill-a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Canadian writer Tia V. Travis, and daughter. Partridge works in a university library.

  Robert Reed has been nominated for the Hugo Award twice for novellas, and was the first Grand Prize Winner of the Writers of the Future. The author of scores of short stories published in major SF magazines, Reed has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “year’s best” anthologies in every year since 1992. He has published eleven novels, the most recent of which is The Memory of Sky. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife, Leslie, and daughter, Jessie. An ardent long-distance runner, he can frequently be seen jogging through the parks and hiking trails of Lincoln, and has taken part in many of the area’s races.

  Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of Musketeer Space, the Creature Court trilogy, and Love & Romanpunk. The first book she remembers checking out from a library is Edward Eager’s Seven Day Magic, in which five children check out an book from the library which has collected all the magic “dripped onto it” from the fairy tale collections shelved above it, and thus leads them on magical adventures while narrating what happens to them. This . . . possibly . . . raised Tansy’s expectations rather high about what libraries could achieve. Still, she has never been disappointed by them.

  USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre under her own name and several pseudonyms. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen “year’s best” anthologies. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo and Le Prix Imaginales. Rusch also edits. She began with the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse—for which she won a World Fantasy Award—followed by her Hugo-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She now acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, of original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. Rusch lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

  E. Saxey has had fiction published in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and The Future Fire, and in anthologies including Tales from the Vatican Vaults and The Lowest Heaven. They have worked in academic libraries for happy interludes, and now volunteer at their local library to stave off the effects of public service budget cuts. On Twitter as @esaxey.

  A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, and Tor.com. Her collections The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, are both published by Lethe Press. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly review column, Words for Thought, to Apex Magazine. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

  About the Editor

  Paula Guran is senior editor for Prime Books. This is her forty-second anthology. She owes a great deal to libraries and librarians. Without the Belle Isle and Bethany branch libraries of the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library system, she would never have made it through childhood. Without the Akron-Summit Public Library system, she would not have survived raising four children. (Those children’s grandmother is, by the way, a retired librarian.) She looks forward to someday taking her (so far) three grandchildren to libraries.