Jedediah Berry
The Naming Song
“A brilliant, thrilling adventure.”
—Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestseller
"A parade of delights and nightmares, written with the kind of incantatory precision that the truest spells are made of."
—Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get In Trouble
“A haunting, glorious train ride of a novel that feels both new and old at the same time, a creature of post-apocalyptic myth.”
—Erin Morgenstern, #1 national bestselling author of The Starless Sea
“A vast and sweeping wonder of a novel.”
―J. M. Miro, bestselling author of Ordinary Monsters
“Jedediah Berry has delivered a true epic, thrumming with life.”
―GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and The Lumberjack's Dove
“A mysterious, poetic, and invigorating post-apocalyptic adventure saga.”
―Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
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Upcoming Appearances
Jedediah Berry is the author of The Naming Song, available now from Tor Books. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4.His story in cards, The Family Arcana, was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. His Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers, was cowritten with Andrew McAlpine and published by Phantom Mill Games. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.For rights inquiries, please contact Esmond Harmsworth at Aevitas Creative.
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Photo by Tristan Morgan Chambers
The Naming Song
Tor Books | Sept 24, 2024 | ISBN: 9781250907981
A gorgeously imaginative fantasy in the spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro.
“The Naming Song understands the fundamental magic of language, and breathes that magic onto every page.”
—Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestseller
When the words went away, the world changed.All meaning was lost, and every border fell. Monsters slipped from dreams to haunt the waking while ghosts wandered the land in futile reveries. Only with the rise of the committees of the named—Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names—could the people stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. They built borders around their world and within their minds, shackled ghosts and hunted monsters, and went to war against the unknown.For one unnamed courier of the Names Committee, the task of delivering new words preserves her place in a world that fears her. But after a series of monstrous attacks on the named, she is forced to flee her committee and seek her long-lost sister. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the shadows, her search for the truth of her past opens the door to a revolutionary future—for the words she carries will reshape the world.
Praise for The Naming Song
“The Naming Song is a genre-bending picaresque ode to the power of words and imagination. A breathlessly enjoyable tale.”
―Cassandra Clare, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sword Catcher
"Jedediah Berry makes strange and wonderful magic out of the absence of words. A parade of delights and nightmares, written with the kind of incantatory precision that the truest spells are made of."
—Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get In Trouble
“A haunting, glorious train ride of a novel that feels both new and old at the same time, a creature of post-apocalyptic myth.”
—Erin Morgenstern, #1 national bestselling author of The Starless Sea
“Deeply immersive, magnificently imagined, Jedediah Berry's The Naming Song is an epic tale of the fantastic, where language - quite literally - has the power to remake the world. This is a vast and sweeping wonder of a novel.”
―J. M. Miro, bestselling author of Ordinary Monsters
“With The Naming Song, Jedediah Berry offers a Genesis wrapped up in a Revelation―a mysterious, poetic, and invigorating post-apocalyptic adventure saga about how things can be reborn, and in some cases remade, after they have been undone. It's rare that a novel this substantial is also this strange and this fun.”
―Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
“Fans of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or Marie Brennan’s Driftwood will be in awe of Berry’s wonderfully odd ode to language, story, and family.”
―Library Journal, starred review
“Fantasy readers looking for a fresh and exciting new world to explore will be thrilled.”
―Publishers Weekly
“Berry creates both a familiar and unfamiliar landscape in a sweeping epic about the language and love between us, the humanity of the living and the dead, and the raw power of creation.”
―J. R. Dawson, author of The First Bright Thing
"In Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song I perceive the simplicity and complexity of Richard Brautigan’s Watermelon Sugar, a structure that could have been borrowed from Berry’s own card game, The Family Arcana, and a nod to The Romance of the Rose. Still, it’s wholly its own engaging creature that engenders wonder and suggests a new kind of fiction."
―Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy Award-winning author
“An anti-totalitarian, post-apocalyptic fable featuring mystical theater trains, impossible monsters, and the awesome power of story? Sign me the heck up. If we can rise against injustice even half as boldly as 'the courier' and her friends, there might just be hope for humanity yet. Jedediah Berry has delivered a true epic, thrumming with life.”
―GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and The Lumberjack's Dove
“Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song brings the reader as close to magic as they are likely to ever get. Berry, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain M. Banks, or John Crowley picks up words at a different angle . . . and brings a whole new world to light. Every page is play.”
―Gavin Grant, Book Moon Books
“The Naming Song is not just one of the best told fantasy novels of the last twenty-five years, it is a masterpiece of storytelling destined to be extolled as a classic.”
―Howard Andrew Jones, author of Lord of a Shattered Land
The Valley of Flowers
Phantom Mill Games | 2023 | ISBN: 9780996422031
A mythic setting for tabletop adventure games by Jedediah Berry and Andrew McAlpine.
Winner of an ENNIE Award
Inspired by Arthurian literature and weird fiction, this setting book for old-school tabletop RPGs features 144 full-color pages of locations, encounters, characters, rumors, adventure sites, and more.
"Perhaps the best OSR module I've ever read.... I think it's a masterpiece."
—Yochai Gal, Between Two Cairns
"An idiosyncratic vibe with a MONSTROUS number of things going on, and a tone that is magnificent."
—Ten Foot Pole
Psychographia
Phantom Mill Games | 2022
A play-by-mail game of psychic deduction for two test subjects players.
As psychics in desperate trouble, you must reach out to each other with messages encoded in the pages of old books, magazines, and other literary flotsam. The goal? To help your partner guess your dire secrets. Your chances? Not good.You are not entirely powerless, however. By using your psychic abilities you can manipulate your pages in creative and dramatic ways:
Fold, tear, and crush your text with psychokinesis
Materialize new words from the bones of the old
Negate words on a page, erasing them from existence
Burn the page with your psychic rage(DO NOT DO THIS)And more!
To play, you’ll each need a text you feel comfortable destroying, as well as stamps and envelopes.
A game by Jedediah Berry and Andrew McAlpine
Illustrated by Andrew Cothren
The Family Arcana
Ninepin Press | 2015 | ISBN: 9780996422000
A gothic story in cards: shuffle, cut, play, read.
A World Fantasy Award Finalist
The tale of a sprawling family bound to their decaying farmhouse by a web of passions and strange obsessions. Each shuffle of the deck reveals a new pattern of secrets, confessions, troubles, indictments, and dreams. The family grows, shrinks, and changes, trapped forever in its haunted house of cards.
"Haunting and lovely."
—Strange Horizons
“Recommended, especially for people who like Berry’s other writing; people who enjoyed Little, Big; people who collect unusual card and tarot decks; people interested in the way symbols can flex and bend and point towards different meanings.”
—Emily Short
The Manual of Detection
The Penguin Press | Feb 24, 2009 | ISBN: 9781594202117
Raymond Chandler meets Kafka in this inventive reimagining of the classic detective novel.
Winner of the Crawford Award · Winner of the Hammett Prize · Locus Award Finalist · NYPL Young Lions Award Finalist
In an unnamed city always slick with rain, Charles Unwin is a humble file clerk working for a huge and imperious detective agency, and all he knows about solving mysteries comes from filing reports for the illustrious investigator Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing, and his supervisor turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective, a rank for which he lacks both the skills and the stomach. His only guidance comes from his new assistant, who would be perfect if she weren't so sleepy, and from the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection.
"This debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka."
—The New Yorker
“Jedediah Berry has an ear well-tuned to the styles of the detective story from Holmes to Spade and can reproduce atmosphere with loving skill.”
—Michael Moorcock, The Guardian
“A mind-blowing novel that’s both fun and thought provoking.”
—Nancy Pearl, NPR