Elizabeth Hand, the talented sf writer (I loved her feminist apocalyptic novel Winterlong), has posted a killer reading from her new book, Generation Loss, in honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Hand's reading is totally kick-ass, the kind of thing I'd expect to hear commissioned by the BBC. The story is gritty, noir, dirty, and utterly engrossing.
Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.
