I am delighted that my story The Telling, which won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, will appear in a Mandarin Chinese translation in the June issue of Science Fiction World. This is, as far as I know, the first translation of any of my work in Chinese.
My story The Hearts of All is out Black Static #73 from TTA Press, along with stories from Keith Rosson, Maria Haskins, and Jack Westlake. The issue is, as always, beautifully illustrated and filled with great non-fiction as well.
Here’s a sample of The Hearts of All:
It was only after the horse had turned that they saw that it was still on fire. A rim of thin blue flame outlined the patch where the skin had burned away, from flank to jaw. A tendon in its neck quivered like a plucked string, shockingly white against the blackened flesh.
Fallow clenched his fingers in his beard, and tried not to think of the candle’s flame gone that same blue against the spoon.
The horse’s head trembled, every muscle in its jaw ridged as if carved by a dull tool, but its eye was steady on them.
The Realtor raised her phone again, as if it were a gun, as if a report could evict the horse from this misery.
Fallow said, “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”
My story Dear Boy is out now in Weird Fiction Review #10 edited by John Pelan and published by Centipede Press. It’s an absolutely beautiful volume, 392 pages, filled with color illustrations, with fiction by D. P. Watt, Anna Tambour, Richard Gavin, Marc Laidlaw, Gemma Files and others, and a slew of non-fiction articles including a history of Mexican horror comics by Silva Moreno-Garcia. On sale now for a great price.
Here’s a sample from Dear Boy:
Ernst Vul struggled to explain how he could be so haunted by a story that he barely remembered. He could not even recall when he had read it; decades ago at the very least. Had he been in school? Would the school library have carried a work so unsettling, one set so deeply in the grotesque?
It might have been a comic, one of those rare prizes plucked from an old sibling and passed from seat to seat while the teacher’s back was turned, or read by flickering light under bedcovers. The images in Ernst’s head, as torn and faded as they were, were certainly vivid enough: a cast of intricately depicted deformities; perspectives of unsettling angles, as if the viewer had suffered some dreadful dislocation; the colors, the lurid, unnatural colors, nothing like the bright primary colors of the art class, as if refracted from some other light, distilled from pigments of some obscure and esoteric source.
May 102019
I am delighted to announce that my story The Empyrean Light, originally published in Conjunctions #71, will be included in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror from Prime Books, alongside works from some of my favorite authors.
Announcing The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison, edited by Preston Grassmann with illustrations by Yoshika Nagata, coming out this August from PS Publishing. I am delighted that my story With Frank and Lucinda Brewer at the East Pole is part of this anthology.
It’s available for preorder now, in both hardcover and a signed limited-edition slipcased version. And the release party will be at WorldCon in Dublin—look for me there!
Here’s a peek at the backstory behind the anthology, and at some of the included artwork and stories.
And here are details on the limited edition.
May 182017
Teodor Reljić interviews me in the latest issue the Antae Journal on the topic of Utopias, available online now, prompted in part by the recent new edition of More’s Utopia from Verso Books, featuring fantastic essays from China Miéville and Ursula K. Le Guin.
We talk about utopias as process vs. plan, the American tradition of the shiny “world of tomorrow”, the problem of inclusion in Utopia, and whether Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X is a new sort of Utopian vision.
Oct 212015
I’ve sold my story Between Dry Ribs to The Dark magazine for their February 2016 issue. The story travels from St. Martin to Finland, in search of the healthy benefits of a good sauna. Here’s a taste:
In the mirror, the parents are studying the menu in a sort of baffled dread. ‘What are we doing here,’ those looks said, so far from the pastel-painted markets by the cruise ship landing, manned by Dutch students on their year-off adventure, alway within safe range of a McDonalds or PizzaHut or Starbucks. Their confusion, the way their eyes twitch as the bartender hacks at the ice with a pick, the way their sweat-slick shoulders hunch forward. All that, too, is reassurance.
The boy has twisted in his chair, has pinned a gecko’s tail to the wall with one finger; as I watch in the mirror the tail pulls free and the gecko drops to safety. The girl has set her phone down. Her reflection gives me a look too dry and flat, and a fresh layer of sweat breaks out across my scalp, under my bra. I smell my own fear. The girl is rolling her can of Coke across her forehead, and her reflection is too distorted, the mirror too dank and corroded for me to tell if the glints are sweat or just the can’s condensation.
The humidity, which finds everything, can make my lighter unreliable. I fight the urge to try it, imagine the lure of the flame. Instead I pull out my little pocketknife, open it so the blade faces upward, rest the last joint of my forefinger upon it.
I am delighted and honored to discover that my story “Bloom”, which was published in the December 2013 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year.
The always-excellent SF Signal podcast recommends my story “The Telling” for a Hugo Award.
I’ve sold my yeastpunk insurrection romance story “Lost Wax” to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It should be appearing sometime in early 2013. More details soon.