Boom. Pow. It’s out!
Seven gayly subverted stories from around the world in one neon pink-slashed collection.
Get into your comfies, set your cell on vibrate, and curl up with it on the surface of your choice. My preference is our living room sofa next to the radiator. Our cat Chloë likes that too.
Here’s what you can expect.
What really happened when Theseus met the Minotaur? How did demon-slaying Momotarō come to be raised by two daddies? Will Scheherazade’s hapless Ma’aruf ever find love and prosperity after his freeloading boyfriend kicks him out on the street? Classic lore gets a bold remodeling with stories from light-hearted and absurd, earnestly romantic, daring and adventurous, to darkly surreal.
The collection includes: Theseus and the Minotaur, Károly, Who Kept a Secret, The Peach Boy, The Vain Prince, The Jaguar of the Backward Glance, Ma’aruf the Street Vendor, and A Rabbit Grows in Brooklyn.
Award-winning fantasy author Andrew J. Peters (The City of Seven Gods) takes on classical mythology, Hungarian folklore, Japanese legend, The Arabian Nights, and more, in a collection of gayly subverted stories from around the world.
Sound all right? Pick up a copy for yourself at the NineStar webstore or Amazon or BN.com or iTunes, etc.
I’ll be sharing some behind the scenes scoop all this month, and for today, I thought I’d talk about a song that inspired the mood of the last story in the collection: “A Rabbit Grows in Brooklyn.”
It’s about a Puerto Rican guy in his late twenties who leaves his Pennsylvania hometown to move to New York City for a job as an assistant professor at a community college. He’s also dipping his toes into living his life as an openly gay man.
Then an encounter with a strange vagrant in the neighborhood leads to a series of mystifying and surreal events.
One of the story elements is that vagrant character Rabbit plays a haunting song on his beat up guitar that becomes a darkly romantic backdrop. I found it searching for Brazilian folk songs and fell in love with it. “Nesta Rua,” sometimes called “Se Esta Rua Fosse Minha” (“On This Street” or “If This Street Were Mine”) has been re-arranged and performed widely, but the original song writer is unknown. It’s a traditional Children’s rhyme or folk song. Anyway, give it a listen. What better version to share than openly gay songwriter and actor Jay Brannan playing it in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
