Ron Tanner is an award-winning writer, teacher, and historic preservationist. He lives on an antique farm in Maryland, where he directs an educational nonprofit that promotes creative writing. More about Ron here.
Ron blogs about Everything: the writing scene, pop culture, city life, farm life, and more.
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Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology
In a time defined by uncertainty, change and inequality, speculative fiction is fast-becoming the genre of the 21st century. Straddling genres such as fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, alternative history and horror, this book is a comprehensive introduction to the art of writing in this imaginative, fluid and inclusive mode. An all-in-one textbook combining a craft guide with an extensive, diverse anthology, it explores the multiplicity of influences that speculative fiction has consumed and incorporated, digs into the techniques specific to speculative writing and gives writers exercises and prompts to begin their own works.
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>>>> Watch the way-cool trailer here!
Far West: award-winning stories
Winner of the Elixir Press Book Prize, stories in Far West are sh*t-kicking, go-for-broke tales that take you to as far west as anyone could go. “Tanner’s voice never fails, always spot on, with a sure sense of his material. Far West is in turns hilarious and sad, but always unforgettable!”
Missile Paradise: a novel
Named a Notable Novel of 2017 by the American Library Association, Missile Paradise takes place in the Marshall Islands, an island-nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that was once a testing ground for nuclear bombs, American engineers and programmers are making and testing missiles while their “hosts,” the indigenous Marshallese, sweep their streets and clean their houses. It’s 2004, the Iraq war is heating up, and 9/11 is fresh in everyone’s minds. Following four interconnected story lines, the novel is epic, heartbreaking, and satirical–about the clash of cultures between the Americans trying to realize their American Dream in this seeming paradise, and the Marshallese who are both angered and bedazzled by that dream.
From Animal House to Our House: a Love Story
Shortly after they met and fell in love, Ron and his girlfriend, Jill, did the impossible. They bought condemned property — a big Baltimore Victorian brownstone — and vowed to bring it back to its original glory. The house had been home to Baltimore’s most notorious fraternity for a decade and now, wrecked and abandoned, it was filled with garbage. As if that weren’t daunting enough: Ron and Jill had been dating for only six months and they knew nothing about fixing up old houses. Friends, family, and concerned onlookers told them not to do it : they would surely lose their shirts and their love in the bargain. But Jill wanted the house and Ron wanted Jill. So Ron bought the house.
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>>>> Watch the way-cool trailer here! <<<<
Kiss Me, Stranger: An Illustrated Novel
Set in an unnamed country built on landfill — situated sometime in the past, present, or future — Kiss Me, Stranger is the story of one woman’s attempts to keep her family together while a civil war rages around her. Featuring illustrations by the author, Kiss Me, Stranger is a comical and tragic commentary on war, violence, and consumerism
.Buy the book here!
>>>> Watch the way-cool trailer here! <<<<
A Bed of Nails: award-winning stories
Chosen by Janet Burroway for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Award for:Fiction, A Bed of Nails “is fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breathtaking…both male and female voices are handled beautifully, although the prose is what we’ve come to call ‘muscular.’ At first I felt that this was actually two collections, one concerned with life as we know it and one as we fear it will be–but came to believe that the worlds are perfectly married through their askew inventiveness and their witty contemporary language. It’s very assured and audacious work”
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