Oh, we're bound for Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea

Good morning! It is now what selkie has informed me I am legally obliged to term the "book birthday."

Forget the Sleepless Shores is now live in the wild. You can buy it from the publisher's website. You can buy it from Amazon. You can buy it from Barnes & Noble. You can buy it in person from the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council or Pandemonium Books & Games and I will sign it for you. You can buy it from your local independent bookstore and I will approve of keeping small businesses alive. It makes excellent beach reading and an elegant gift. It is my first fiction collection since 2005 and I am very proud of it.



Not every story in this book is a sea-story, but the sea moves underneath so many of them that I consider it an especially appropriate release for this season that I used to spend as much in the Atlantic as humanly possible. I learned to swim in the July-cold water off Cape Elizabeth, open-eyed to the salt. Even now, I don't feel I've had a summer unless I've been to the sea. Thank you to Steve Berman of Lethe Press for publishing this collection and to every editor who first gave its stories a home. Now you can drown in them, too.

Hanging below the sea, I'm telling you, look at me

In ongoing book birthday news, Bogi Takács has wonderful things to say about Forget the Sleepless Shores at Bogi Reads the World:

There is a gentle and careful attention to detail in every story. Like Milkweed is a bit more science fictional than the rest, with the monarch butterfly migration somehow becoming a migration of strange alien creatures – but here you can tell that Sonya Taaffe not only knows about weird Jewish demonology and New England landscapes, but also about monarch butterflies and I imagine basically everything she chooses to write about. (Let me tie this back to The Trinitite Golem, where the same detail is spent on the history of the atomic bomb.)

Plus handful_ofdust tagged me some delightful fanart for Newt Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb, which is book-unrelated but makes me happy.

It is murderously hot outside, but I feel very sea-supported.