Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Leave Luck to Heaven, Call for Submissions, Silly Video

FirstLeave Luck to Heaven has arrived. Preorders have been shipped to preorderers, so now every order is an equally exciting normal, standard order. Check out our newly redesigned press page to buy your copy via paypal. It's just $12 with free shipping. Also, look out: an ebook is coming soon. If you'd like to review the book, or interview our handsome author Brian Oliu, drop us a line. Here, in case you forgot how lovely it is, is our cover, drawn by Mr. David Wells:


Secondly, we are now officially open to submissions for both our next full-length book and additional weirdo web content. What are we looking for? We like to keep that somewhat vague; we want to be surprised. That being said, it should be a beautiful experience for readers first and foremost. We love formal invention, pretty prose, and blended genres (in every sense), but we love structure and narrative even more. When it comes to the weirdo web stuff, we are interested in a very broad variety of experiences, so long as they are interesting and enjoyable online. Anyway, please do submit.

Lastly, we made an excellent video to celebrate the arrival and shipment of Leave Luck to Heaven to our readers. Be careful, watching it will make you want the book even more, and also, you might fall in love.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Leave Luck to Heaven, by Brian Oliu

Tracy and I have been reading pieces of Brian Oliu's Leave Luck to Heaven, a heart-wrenching collection of Nintendo-themed lyric essays, for something like five years now. If you're the kind of person who knows about Uncanny Valley, there's a solid chance that you have too. These things have been published pretty much everywhere, and, in our experience, just about everybody loves them immediately -- not only people who grew up glued to an NES, but anyone who appreciates a haunted, beautifully written personal reflection.

When we decided to focus on publishing books, Brian was the first person we wrote. We were amazed the book was still available. And we were glad that we would be the ones to bring it to you. Here is its cover:


We're thrilled to announce that Leave Luck to Heaven is now available for preorder. (You may have to refresh this page to see the Paypal button; I'm not sure why.) The book will cost you $12 with free shipping. It will arrive by early summer of this year. And it will be beautiful. Its gorgeous pixel-packed cover was drawn by our friend David Wells, whom you may remember as the artist who drew our first magazine's cover.

You can read a little more about it here. You can watch a video that Brian made for his Maniac Mansion piece on Vimeo here.

But the key thing to take away from this post is that Leave Luck to Heaven is coming and you're going to want to order it as soon as you can.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Goodbye magazine, hello press

So we owe you an update.

When we started Uncanny Valley, we were two grad students with time to juggle the demands of building, managing, and promoting a blog, magazine, and press. We worried at the time that we were spreading
ourselves too thin and that we needed to narrow our scope, but it was very appealing to imagine ourselves as a vast publishing empire.

As my work has become more demanding and Mike's writing career has taken off in different directions, finding and curating a magazine's worth of material has become too much for us to manage. We still want to publish and promote the best, most fun, most consuming, most ambitious writing out there, but to do so, we need to narrow our scope.

It is with regret, but anticipation, that we announce Uncanny Valley Magazine will no longer be published. Uncanny Valley Press will continue to operate as a publisher of book-length manuscripts, with the first book coming out this year. We have always loved long-form work, and we welcome the opportunity to focus our efforts on one project and to be great editors, designers, and promoters for it.

Submissions will be closed to new material as we prepare the book for publication, but you can follow our Twitter feed (@uncannyvalleymg) to find out when we are looking for new material. And stay tuned for the announcement of our first full-length title later this week.

We want to thank everyone for all the enthusiasm and support we've received for the magazine. We've met many amazing authors, and we hope you'll continue to support them, as well as other outlets for new, weird, fun, imaginative writing.

Thank you again, and stay tuned.

Tracy + Mike