My first novella, The Joy of Fishes, was published as an e-book by Vagabondage Press in December 2013. In October 2015, it was released in paperback. In July 2024, Vagabondage Press went out of business and the rights reverted to me.
It was lovely to have had a book continuously in print for eleven years, and I thank Vagabondage for their support during that time!
I cannot immediately republish the book under my own press at this time, for the very boring reason that I have a lot of other stuff to take care of. So in the meantime, I have made a pdf of the text available for free here.
If you’d like a postcard with a printing of the cover picture on the front for free, just send me your snail mail address to ehlupton+postcards(AT)gmail(DOT)com. That’s my name (ehlupton) followed by the plus sign and the word “postcards,” then your typical “@gmail.com” business. Easy, right?
Looks like we have time for a few mildly facetious questions and answers! Let’s do it.
Question: What is the book about?
Answer: Love and death, physics, ghosts, Daoism, and head injuries, not really in that order.
Question: Will I like it?
Answer: I hope so. A number of my friends have liked it, and using six degrees of separation, you probably know some of the same people I know, so hopefully you think they have good judgement! Also, some complete strangers have read it and posted positive reviews on places like Goodreads. Anyway, if you don’t like it, at least it’s free?
Question: I really liked it! Now what?
Answer: Consider leaving a review of it on Goodreads, or another site. Tell your friends about the book. Blog about it, if you have a blog. Or just leave a note telling me that you liked it. I spent a lot of time writing it, and it makes me really happy to know that other people have enjoyed reading it.
Question: Anything else to add?
Answer: I’m a little dismayed, looking at the text, to note that I didn’t acknowledge the giant debt the book owes to Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, translated by Victor. H. Mair (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). At the time that I was working on the novella, my Chinese was much better than it is now (i.e., 2024), and I created the translations that are included as part of a discussion for a class on Daoism. I now view that work as having been, at best, intensely guided by Mair’s translations rather than true translations of my own. In the meantime, I have lost most of my facility with written Chinese, so I can’t second-guess the decisions I made and how they align with what Mair had previously created. So I just wanted to acknowledge here the very real intellectual debt I owe to him, and point the few people who come looking in the direction of his work, which is the superior interpretation of these things.