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Today is the last day of Small Beer Press's October Celebration Sale. Buy their books at 25%-60% off!

I already have a bunch of their books, so the most exciting thing on that page for me is the ability to order a new Joan Aiken book: The Serial Garden, collecting all of the Armitage family stories (including four never before published!) in one volume. If you order it today, it'll cost you only $16 (tomorrow the price goes up to $20). I'm getting at least two copies.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see my SH review from 2001 of a couple of Aiken collections. In the table of stories that accompanied the review, you can see that the previously published Armitage stories were spread out among at least three different books, two of which are long out of print and almost impossible to acquire.

And the fact that there are previously unpublished stories in the new volume is an unexpected gift, especially in these dark times since Ms. Aiken's death a few years back. I'll take this opportunity to quote, one more time, my favorite line from the Postscript to her collection A Small Pinch of Weather:

Favourite stories, like unexpected presents, are things that you can keep and cherish all your life, carry with you, in memory, in your mind's ear, and bring out, at any time, when you are feeling lonely, or need cheering up, or, like friends, just because you are fond of them.

So what are you waiting for? Go order some books!