The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (26 page)

About the Author

Best known for
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase,
Joan Aiken (1924-2004) wrote over a hundred books, including
The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
and
The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories
and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband’s death, she supported her family by copyediting at
Argosy
magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for
Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women’s Own,
and many others. Visit her online at: www.joanaiken.com.

Read More Joan Aiken collections from Small Beer Press: The Serial Garden

A Junior Library Guild Selection.

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”—Philip Pullman

The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories
is the first complete collection of Joan Aiken’s beloved Armitage stories — and it includes four new, unpublished stories.

After Mrs. Armitage makes a wish, the Armitage family has interesting and unusual experiences every Monday (and the occasional Tuesday). The Board of Incantation tries to take over their house to use as a school for young wizards; the Furies come to stay; and a cutout from a cereal box leads into a beautiful and tragic palace garden. Charming and magical, the uncommon lives of the Armitage family will thrill and delight readers young and old.

The Serial Garden
includes Joan Aiken’s Prelude to the series from
Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home,
as well as introductions from Joan Aiken’s daughter, Lizza Aiken, and best-selling author Garth Nix, and is gloriously illustrated throughout by Andi Watson.

paper · $16 · 9781931520829 | ebook · 9781931520980

Read More Joan Aiken collections from Small Beer Press: The Monkey’s Wedding

“Hair” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and reprinted in
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.

“It’s always the children’s book writers that you have to watch out for.”

—Jessa Crispin,
Kirkus Reviews

“Part of a storytelling tradition that predates MFA programs and quiet epiphanies, and she concerned herself with a snappier brand of narrative entertainment.”—
Review of Contemporary Fiction

Joan Aiken’s stories captivated readers for fifty years. They’re funny, smart, gentle, and occasionally very, very scary. The stories in
The Monkey’s Wedding
are collected here for the very first time and include seven never before published, as well as two published under the pseudonym Nicholas Dee. Here you’ll find the story of a village for sale . . . or is the village itself the story? There’s an English vicar who declares on his deathbed that he might have lived an entirely different life. After his death, a large, black, argumentative cat makes an appearance. . . .

  This hugely imaginative collection of incongruous, light, and unexpected stories features Shelley Jackson’s spooky and eyecatching cover painting inspired by the story “A Mermaid Too Many” and includes introductions by Joan Aiken as well by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.

trade cloth · $24 · 9781931520744 | ebook · 9781618730268

Small Beer Press

Our ebooks are available at all ebookstores as well as DRM-free in multiple formats at our indie ebooksite
weightlessbooks.com
.

Read excerpts, interviews, see what we’ve done, what we’re going to do at
www.smallbeerpress.com.