Congratulations

to writer and anthologist Lynne Jamneck, who says, "Eight stories from Dreams From the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror received honorable mentions by Ellen Datlow for "The Best Horror of the Year 8." 

Sonya Taaffe - “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts”
Molly Tanzer - “But Only Because I Love You”
Marly Youmans - “The Child and the Night Gaunts”
Karen Heuler - “All Gods Great and Small”
R.A. Kaelin - “Mnemeros”
Storm Constantine - “From the Cold Dark Sea”
Amanda Downum - “Spore”
Gemma Files - “Every Hole in the Earth We Will Claim as Our Own”

(And thanks to Lynne Jamneck for the request.)

4th publication of "An Incident at Agate Beach"

"Ocean Sky" by Nathan Allworth.
On the Oregon coast. Courtesy
of the photographer and www.sxc.hu.

“An Incident at Agate Beach” is online! The story originally appeared in James Artimus Owen's handsome Argosy Quarterly 3 (2005) and has proved popular. It was reprinted in the anthology Northwest Passage: A Cascadian Odyssey (Windstorm, 2005) and in The Year’s Best in Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006.)

Today the tale is published for the fourth time at weirdfictionreview.com, a site (what an attractive home page!) dreamed up by the well-known-for-weird team of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer and managed by also weirdoholic Adam Mills. It is, indeed, a strange, fantastic thing, and I hope will find many new readers.

The day I visited Agate Beach in Oregon, I knew that I would write a story about the place. But this is not the one I expected. If you have comments, there's a spot to leave them at the close of the story. Enjoy!

Oh, and thanks to Rebecca Beatrice Miller for that leading-with-the-chin, uncanny eyebrow portrait...

"The Beastly Bride" NYC Reading

Reading from "The Beastly Bride," an anthology from the mythic fiction series edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

June 7 Monday
7-8 p.m.

McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince St.
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012

Readers: Jeffrey Ford, Carol Emshwiller, Rick Bowes, Nan Fry, Gregory Frost, Steve Berman, Rick Bowes, and me

Host: editor Ellen Datlow.
She edited SCIFICTION and Omni and has won a raft of awards.

The Beastly Bride approaches!

It's almost time for The Beastly Bride--and definitely time for a pre-order. Kirkus has given the book its blessing, saying that it "fits" the familiar, much-desired pattern of a Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow anthology with its Charles Vess illustrations, notes, biographies, bibliography, and solid introduction.

Here's what the reviewer notes about the contents: "The 22 writers include Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner , Midori Snyder , Tanith Lee and Peter S. Beagle, among others. Delia Sherman ’s 'The Selkie Speaks' allows a seal maiden to tell her own tale; Terra L. Gearhart-Serna brings a trickster’s sly voice and a little Spanish into her first published writing, 'Coyote and Valarosa.' Marly Youmans turns to glassmaking and the Blue Ridge Mountains for the intensely romantic 'The Salamander Fire.' The three interwoven motifs of these tales, inspired by many cultures, are beings who shape-shift between animal and human of their own will, who are transformed as a curse or enchantment and who are both human and animal yet wholly neither. Rich reading that meets the editors’ high standards." Catch that? "Intensely romantic." That's with either a small "r" or a large "R."

So if you're somewhere between about 12 and about 112, you might just like it! Available for pre-order now and with a pub date of March 1.

The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People

Preface by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Introduction by Terri Windling

Island Lake by E. Catherine Tobler

The Puma’s Daughter by Tanith Lee

Map of Seventeen by Christopher Barzak

The Selkie Speaks by Delia Sherman

Bear’s Bride by Johanna Sinisalo

The Abominable Child’s Tale by Carol Emshwiller

The Hikikomori by Hiromi Goto

The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin by Gregory Frost

Ganesha by Jeffrey Ford

The Elephant’s Bride by Jane Yolen

The Children of Cadmus by Ellen Kushner

The White Doe Mourns Her Childhood by Jeanine Hall Gailey

The White Doe’s Love Song by Jeanine Hall Gailey

The White Doe Decides by Jeanine Hall Gailey

Coyote and Valorosa by Terra L. Gearheart

One Thin Dime by Stewart Moore

The Monkey Bride by Midori Snyder

Pishaach by Shweta Narayan

The Salamander Fire by Marly Youmans

The Margay’s Children by Richard Bowes

Thumbleriggery and Fledglings by Steve Berman

The Flock by Lucius Shepard

The Children of the Shark God by Peter Beagle

Rosina by Nan Fry

And see just below for some of the online things I've found interesting lately... I'll be back to talking about friends with new books just as soon as I wallow through the taxes-and-documents slough.

New anthologies & Val/Orson special

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Postscripts 19: The PS Quarterly Anthology (P. S. Publishing) contains my story, "The Red King's Sleep." The publisher says that "this Postscripts anthology is probably the best yet, containing gripping, stylish stories by some of the finest genre writers around . . . Marly Youmans enters the world of Through the Looking Glass from a terrifying angle."

Editorial - Nick Gevers
Daniel Abraham - 'Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance'
Andrew Hook - 'Bigger Than The Beetles'
David T. Wilbanks - 'The Cacto Skeleton'
Matthew Hughes - 'Enemy of the Good'
David N. Drake - 'A Life Cliched'
Marly Youmans - 'The Red King's Sleep'
Tim Lees - 'Meeting Mr. Tony'
Scott Edelman - 'The World Breaks'
Justin Cartaginese - 'The Portrayed Man'
Chrs Beckett - 'The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolis 9'
Ron Savage - 'Famous People'
M.K. Hobson - 'The Warlock and the Man of the Word'

http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/acatalog/Postscripts_19_ltd.html

In addition, P. S. Publishing is running a special on the four P. S. books reviewed recently in "Black Static," including Val/Orson. You may find that offer at the P. S. website: http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2009/08/24/special-offer-the-black-static-foursome-for-just-45/. If you want to see a clip from my "Black Static" review, sail to http://www.marlyyoumans.com/ and check out the Val/Orson page.





















Available for pre-orders at your friendly neighborhood bookstore or elsewhere: The Beastly Bride (Viking), another marvelous anthology from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

My story is "The Salamander Fire," in which you may find a young glassblower, a lawyer who is busy turning into a demon, fire bathers in an underworld, a salamander, and much more. I like the anthologies in this series and am pleased to be in this one.

Author list: Christopher Barzak, Peter Beagle, Steve Berman, Richard Bowes, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Gregory Frost, Nan Fry, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Terra Gearheart, Hiromi Goto, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Steward Moore, Shweta Narayan, Johanna Sinisalo, Lucius Shepard, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, E. Catherine Tobler, Jane Yolen, and Marly Youmans.


Upcoming is Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's anthology, Last Drink Bird Head: Flash Fiction for Charity (Ministry of Whimsy). The author list is nigh-infinite: here. The tale (and the picture) behind this curious anthology can be found at

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/10/last-drink-bird-head-an-october-surprise/.

Marly, the dervish of NYC

Photography credit: by Ellen Datlow, editor extraordinaire. As I have always been a great maker of weird faces (and even somehow managed to be in a picture at KGB where I appear to have a bust of double-dirigible proportions--how?--bizarre posture? is that my next insult to photographers?), I present a nigh-insuperable challenge to the candid photographer, and I congratulate Ellen for catching me without one of my especially peculiar faces now and then. Most people can't manage it! She has many more on her site, but here are a couple of me (one with Paul Guran of Prime Books) and one of Dan Braum, my co-reader, and his fellow Clarion South grad, Ben Francisco.

My mighty whirl through New York is finished. I took the 8:30 puddle-hopper bus to the city, immediately fell into an on-going interview with Jim Freund of "Hour of the Wolf" at WBAI and John Klima (editor of the anthology Logorrhea and zine Electric Velocipede, recorded "The Girl in the Fabrilon" with Jim, did an interview with Jim, taped a few poems for other shows, did a reading of "Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" at KGB Bar (hosted by Gavin Grant and Ellen Datlow and also captured by Jim, though I felt that my reading was a bit ragged-and-rugged by then), went to dinner at a Chinese place with part of the KGB mob, ran around with Dan and Ben, slept for a few hours at the blessedly quiet HoJo Express on East Houston, went to breakfast with writer Maggie Paley at the Noho Star (we met at Yaddo last year--she's the author of Bad Manners and, yes, The Book of the Penis), met up with my friends Jack and Anne for a Turkish elevensies (like hobbits, I was doing an extra meal), bought presents at Pearl River, caught the subway to the Port Authority, hopped on a bus, got delayed by an unfortunate tractor-trailer accident, and finally arrived back in the peaceful little village of Cooperstown (where it is always snowing and so was) around midnight.

Did that sentence seem rushed? Now you know what my trip was like.

But I think it was fruitful; the prose and interviews will be on three shows, and the poems will be tossed in elsewhere on other shows. The next step is that Jim Freund will call and wake me up at 3:00 a.m. when he runs a story so that I can answer questions. I think this will be comical because I am not at my best at 3:00 a.m. We all know that 2:00 a.m. is my proper hour...