Writers of MeFi Represent! October 22, 2020 11:29 PM   Subscribe

I often see AskMeFi requests for book recommendations, especially now that so many people are in Lockdown. I'm often in a bind because I think my own books would be a good fit, but it seems spammy to recommend them :) How about we create a thread here where the writers of MetaFilter can showcase our books?

Mention what kind of books we write, and put a few links in to where they can be bought or downloaded. Sound like a plan?
posted by Zumbador to MetaFilter-Related at 11:29 PM (34 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite

Nice idea! Maybe there could also be an authors section in the Mefi Mall?
posted by Klipspringer at 1:38 AM on October 23, 2020 [7 favorites]


OK I'll go first.
I'm a South African writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy. My books are set in alternate world South Africa. Two of my books have been shortlisted for the Nommo Award for best speculative fiction novel by an African writer. I tend towards "hope-punk" for want of a better term, (and the dogs don't die).

My Science Fiction Linked World series features a 40-something woman and her cybernetically enhanced dog Meisje. The first book in that series is The Babylon Eye
A cyber-dog, lost in the void between worlds. The woman who must find the dog to win back her freedom. A spy's betrayal that could kill them both.
Meisje is no ordinary dog. She's a gardag, a cybernetically enhanced living weapon. She's also lost, hungry, and lonely. Elke Veraart is on Meisje's trail. If she can find the dog she'll win back her own freedom. If she fails she'll be sent back to prison. s she closes in on the gardag, Elke finds her admiration for Meisje growing. And Meisje, weak with hunger, begins to wonder if she could trust the woman who is hunting her. Then Elke discovers that there are other hunters searching for the gardag and that her orders have changed. She no longer has to find Meisje. She has to kill her.


My contemporary fantasy Crooked World series was inspired by this question: What would South Africa be like if magic was real and magical creatures lived among us? How would apartheid have worked? What about xenophobia?
The first book in that series is Crooks & Straights
Gia's brother Nico is different from other boys. And being different can be dangerous in Gia's world.
Cape Town is no longer the haven for magical refugees that it once was. The Purists want to get rid of all magic and the newspapers are full of dreadful stories about the Belle Gente, the magical terrorists.
None of this concerns Gia, until the Special Branch— police who investigate the illegal use of magic— come knocking at her door, looking for Nico. When Gia turns to her parents for help, she finds only more secrets. Then she realises that she was the one who put her brother in danger.


The Story Trap is the first book in the Sisters series:
One girl’s death might save the ocean. But can her sisters let her die? Rebecca never expected to meet a witch, least of all in a second-hand bookshop in Mowbray.

You can see a complete list of all my books on my website.
posted by Zumbador at 5:26 AM on October 23, 2020 [13 favorites]


Fine with the thread but just to say I think it’s OK to mention your own stuff in AskMe if it fits the question. Mods correct me if required?
posted by Phanx at 6:46 AM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


Totally fine to link your own solutions to a Ask.
posted by Mitheral at 7:20 AM on October 23, 2020


I'll play!

I write a lot of different things.

My book That's So Funny is nonfiction but...shall we say darkly humorous about living with my narcissistic mom. I mean the centerpiece of the story is a neighborhood-level CIA-style plot to kidnap and/or assassinate her dog because she can't admit she keeps leaving the gate open and letting him out. You can buy print or the paperback. To entice you further, there are pictures of my cats!

For the RPG crowd, I have made Gobbos: A Roleplaying Game for Silly Goblins that's intended to be a light diversion where you are a group of ridiculous goblins trying to go on an adventure, but frequently getting distracted.

You can check out some of my smaller games and my larger writing portfolio here.

On behalf of all of us, I'll say if you get something and like it, I beg you to leave a review. It helps a lot on Amazon and helps everywhere else as well.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:24 AM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


I'm not an author, but yesterday I was the happy recipient of gusandrews's Keep Calm and Log On. (A departing colleague bought it for me, awww. (Amazon) She had no idea about the MeFi's Own connection, but it really pleased me!)
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:46 AM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Hmm, since you ask: I've written a book on performance practices in Beethoven's piano works. Amazon. Goodreads.
posted by Namlit at 7:50 AM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


To confirm, it's a-okay to link your own stuff in AskMe answers if:
- it's a relevant answer to the question
- you're disclosing that it's your own stuff
- you don't otherwise seem like a spam account
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2020 [5 favorites]


(And while I'm here, hooray for Mefi authors! It's fun to see everyone's links, thank you for sharing.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:34 AM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


All right, what the hell.

I'm a film historian, and have written two books in that field. My first is an analysis of the film This Is Spinal Tap.

My second book, derived from my dissertation, is called Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin.

I've written a bunch of scholarly articles, as well, but won't link to those. I'd be happy to send you copies, though, if you're interested in any of them.

In my other life, I was (am?) a journalist, and wrote a ton of articles for Seven Days, Vermont's finest newspaper.
posted by Dr. Wu at 9:44 AM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


My first book is a road-trippy investigation into a curious photograph taken in 1850s by one of the first photographers to visit Newfoundland, Paul-Émile Miot. The book is called Album Rock, and is available through Boulder Books. It's a very visual book, containing historical photos and watercolours along with my own photography, and tells a story through creative nonfiction punctuated by four poems. I wrote a bit about making the book.
posted by oulipian at 10:06 AM on October 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


Is it okay to recommend a MeFite-written book here, in case the author doesn't see this thread?

MeFite thesmallmachine won the 2019 LGBTQ SF/F/Horror Lambda Literary Award for the excellent The Breath of the Sun, which I personally thoroughly enjoyed. I recommend it.

This is a great idea, Zumbador - thanks for starting this thread!
posted by kristi at 10:33 AM on October 23, 2020 [6 favorites]


Yes anyone who has a book for sale please put it into the MeFi Mall.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 12:39 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yes, please add to the Mall. There's also an author list at the MetaFilter Wiki, and a page for the Mefite Library ("A place to collect links to books written, edited, or otherwise created by mefites").
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:32 PM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


My husband does have a MetaFilter account but isn’t here very much, so I’ll go ahead and link his stuff: he wrote a book called called “The Stewardess is Flying the Plane!” about 70s movies (sadly, out of print at the moment), and another called “Getting Right with the Tao: A Contemporary Spin on the Tao Te Ching.”
posted by holborne at 2:05 PM on October 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


This thread is a great idea and I already see several books I hadn't heard of but now am looking forward to reading!
posted by mark k at 2:34 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Wow, I hadn't updated the wiki in years... added six books. The easiest way to find mine, with descriptions, is on my website. They're mostly language and linguistics, but there are also books on India and China, and two novels.
posted by zompist at 12:51 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


I have been putting off posting, hoping some other mefite is a self-pubbed romance author brave enough to go first, but nooo! Anyway, this is me, writing about boys who fall in love and kiss and stuff.
posted by mittens at 5:59 AM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


Zumbador: "I'm a South African writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy. My books are set in alternate world South Africa. Two of my books have been shortlisted for the Nommo Award for best speculative fiction novel by an African writer. I tend towards "hope-punk" for want of a better term, (and the dogs don't die)."

Sounds great, I'm getting started on your books.
posted by signal at 8:30 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


What a nice idea for a post! I write literary short stories. My first collection came out earlier this year (bad timing, that). It's called Pallbearing, and was put out here in Canada by House of Anansi. It got some nice reviews, here's one.

You can pick it up or order at any bookstore in Canada, but it's probably not stocked anywhere outside of Canada, so you'll have to order it, if you're interested.

And here's a link to one of the stories in the collection.
posted by melgy at 1:31 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


It's great to see what other folks have published.

My latest book is Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. This looks at the next generation of colleges and universities.

Before that, I did a second edition of my first book, The New Digital Storytelling. It's about, well, digital storytelling.
posted by doctornemo at 3:26 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Thanks for plugging my book, Kristi, and I’m so glad you enjoyed it! After an interruption for divorce and grad school, I’ve got a new manuscript and a new agent now, so here’s hoping folks hear from me again soon.
posted by thesmallmachine at 6:15 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm a novelist - The Psychology of Time Travel and The Thief on the Winged Horse. More info about me available at my website.
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 3:17 AM on October 25, 2020 [8 favorites]


I read and really enjoyed The Psychology of Time Travel without knowing you were a mefite!
posted by something something at 6:11 AM on October 25, 2020 [5 favorites]


I read and really enjoyed The Psychology of Time Travel without knowing you were a mefite!

That's good to hear - thanks!
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 8:04 AM on October 25, 2020


I wrote a totally shitty textbook about a piece of software that no longer exists. It went out of print about 15 years ago. The five copies the publisher sent me went into the recycling a few weeks ago, because nobody buys that crap at the charity shop.
posted by pipeski at 2:35 PM on October 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


Long story short, I learned Portuguese some years back to do research for yet another failed novel and ended up translating random books, mostly related to Goa, from Portuguese. It's been a weird, but pretty cool, turn of events.

In late 2016 I translated Orlando da Costa's novel O Signo da Ira as The Sign of Wrath. (Fun fact: Orlando da Costa is the father of Portugal's current prime minister!) Around the same time I collected and translated the Portuguese-language poetry of Goan freedom fighter and Marathi short story writer Laxmanrao Sardessai. Then came a translation of Leonor Figueiredo's biography of Angolan communist Sita Valles. This year, Routledge put out a wildly overpriced translation/study of an 18th-century letter written by a nun in Portuguese India entitled To Serve God in Holy Freedom: The Brief Rebellion of the Nuns of the Royal Convent of Santa Mónica, Goa, India, 1731–1734 that I helped out on.

All the links save the Routledge one go to Indian sources, since that's where my publisher and most of my (small) audience is. If you want to get a copy of anything other than To Serve God in Holy Freedom and you're not in India, memail me- I should have a few of each available. The Routledge book's South Asia edition comes out soon, and a cheaper US/European paperback should be released next year.
posted by heteronym at 6:39 PM on October 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


Oh man I feel so much better plugging my books when someone asks first. :)

I'm a mostly-indie writer in the Seattle area, writing sci-fi and fantasy. Currently all my stuff is exclusive to Amazon.

Poor Man's Fight is a military and after-the-military sci-fi series driven by student debt, unchecked corporate greed, and space pirates. It's fun, it's face-punchy, it leans hard to the left, and the hero really does just want to survive his enlistment and go to college.

Good Intentions is a polyamorous urban fantasy comedy-adventure series with a whole lot of romance and sexytimes. Please heed the warnings after the descriptions. They'll either turn you away or sell you on the series.

Wandering Monsters takes on sword and sorcery adventure from the POV of the dungeon monsters. If you ever thought those poor orcs aren't paid enough to throw their lives away against shiny heroes, this is a series that fully agrees.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 10:32 PM on October 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


Late to the party! (Actually pretty on-brand for me.) You can find my speculative fiction work with R.A. MacAvoy from Wordfire Press and assorted online retailers. (Such an honor to work with Bertie! She has some great stories. And I just realized her picture’s not there...she was the lead author, so if anyone should have a photo skipped it should be me. I’ll see if I can get that fixed.) My published short stories are all out of print but may some day come back to haunt me. I self-published an indignant and attitude-laden coloring book, The Naughty Fairies’ Adult Coloring Book of Bad Words and Worse Influences, with a “cleaned up for company” version of the same book also from Amazon. I’ve put one of the images up for free on my website as being politically relevant. It’s toward the bottom of the page. Feel free to print and distribute as many copies of that as you wish. Resistance takes many forms.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 2:49 PM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Oh, just noticed this!

My debut novel, Love Bites, was published earlier this year! It's a girl-meets-girl urban fantasy romance.

It was published in the UK, so while Amazon UK (and I believe other European sites) have it in both print and e-book forms, U.S. and other worldwide readers can get the print version, but not necessarily the e-book, through sites such as Amazon.com, Book Depository (which may have cheaper shipping), etc.

A sequel, Bleeding Hearts, will be coming out next year, as will a German language edition of the first book, which is tremendously exciting to me. (I'm also very amused by the fact that while the English language title is "Love Bites", the German language title is "Die Unmöglichkeit, bei Tag die Liebe zu finden" -- The Impossibility of Finding Love During the Day).
posted by kyrademon at 1:21 PM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


While I'm here, I'll add my voice to those above praising both thesmallmachine's The Breath of the Sun and Ballad of Peckham Rye's The Psychology of Time Travel; both are amazing!

And to that list I'll add:

Jeanne's excellent A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, and

PhoBWanKenobi's superb Starglass.
posted by kyrademon at 1:40 PM on October 29, 2020 [4 favorites]


Poor Man's Fight is a military and after-the-military sci-fi series driven by student debt, unchecked corporate greed, and space pirates. It's fun, it's face-punchy, it leans hard to the left, and the hero really does just want to survive his enlistment and go to college.

I'm going to endorse this series! I stumbled on the third one in some 2:1 giveaway, thought "maybe this would have been better if I'd read the first two," and then like a year later proved myself correct by reading all three in the correct order. I say all three but I now realize there are more. Cool.

Had no idea you were on MeFi.
posted by mark k at 10:21 PM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm really late to the party, but I suspect I'm the second-most prominent SF writer on MeFi, after scalzi: here are my books, and here's the wikipedia page. Latest novel, Dead Lies Dreaming, came out last week!
posted by cstross at 9:32 AM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]


I'm hella late, but I'm an author of young adult and middle grade novels, middle grade non-fiction, and I edit young adult anthologies.

My latest series of YA anthologies are the OUT series, featuring queer YA authors writing about queer protagonists. ALL OUT and OUT NOW.

My most recent novel, ALL THE THINGS WE DO IN THE DARK, was a Lambda Finalist, and won the Indiana Authors Award in 2020.

And if that's too heavy, I wrote an alternate POV for the Broadway show THE PROM, about a queer girl in Indiana who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom, and the Broadway stars who decide to help her, whether she wants their help or not. The show will be a Netflix movie this December starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington, Keegan-Michael Key, James Corden, Andrew Rannells, and Ariana DeBose. (The movie is mostly an adaptation of the show, but will feature some new material I wrote for the novel.)

My latest novel for middle grade is co-authored by Josh Berk, CAMP MURDERFACE. What happens when two unlikely allies come together to face a primordial evil at summer camp? Life and death shenanigans at Camp Sweetwater!

Anyway, I'm up to 18 and counting if you're interested in young adult, middle grade anything.
posted by headspace at 7:17 AM on November 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


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