BOOK DEAL: Two Books from Eugen Bacon

Raw Dog Screaming Press and Anti-Oedipus to publish Eugen Bacon

We are excited to announce that RDSP and its imprint Anti-Oedipus Press have each signed a book from Eugen Bacon to be released in 2022. Chasing Whispers is a stunning and unique collection of short stories to be published by Raw Dog Screaming Press. “In Chasing Whispers, I sought to write a collection of mostly original stories, transformative black speculative fiction of culture, diversity, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds and mythology,” says Bacon. It’s a boundary stretching collection that doesn’t just describe the disjointed modern experience of minorities but makes you feel it.

RDSP Managing Editor Jennifer Barnes says, “I was just so impressed with these stories. They are not quite like anything I’ve read before, at turns poetic and pragmatic. They’re refreshing and unsettling, heartfelt and mixed up in an undeniably real way.” The miscellany—with its assemblage of literary strange tales—casts a gaze at mostly women and children haunted by patriarchy, in stories packed with affection, dread, anguish and hope. Explaining further Bacon says, “The connecting theme is a black protagonist with a deep longing for someone, someplace, something… and a recurring phrase in each story: ‘a deep and terrible sadness.’ But the collection is not fully sombre—there are bouncy pieces that I hope will remind the reader of their funny bone.”

Anti-Oedipus to Publish An Earnest Blackness

Alongside RDSP’s release of Chasing Whispers Anti-Oedipus will also be releasing Bacon’s collection of essays on Afrofuturism and black writing titled An Earnest Blackness. Bacon says it contains, “Themes on writing the ‘other,’ betwixt, hauntings, colonization and unlimited futures.” Essays in this book explore inhabitation—the self and “other,” black speculative fiction, including the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nisi Shawl, Sheree Renée Thomas.

About the deal Bacon says, “As I researched potential publishers, I saw Guattari and Deleuze, logic and illogic somewhere in the about section of AOP, free-spirited madness, and felt this clawing longing that this was the publisher I was looking for.”

Jennifer Barnes says, “Anti-Oedipus’ editor D. Harlan Wilson and I are extremely pleased to have Bacon onboard. She’s thinking creatively and critically about black writing and the “other” in a way that’s really need right now so we’re excited to bring her works to a new audience.”

About the Author

Eugen M. Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Foreword Book of the Year Awards, Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans. Her novella Ivory’s Story was shortlisted in the 2020 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards. Upcoming: Danged Black Thing, a short story collection by Transit Lounge Publishing, Saving Shadows, an illustrated microfiction collection by NewCon Press, and Mage of Fools, an Afrofuturistic dystopian novel by Meerkat Press.

Website: eugenbacon.com Twitter: @EugenBacon