The Mumpsimus

I was honored to be the nonfiction editor for a special issue of Fantasy magazine, part of the ever-growing Destroy series from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy — this time, QUEERS DESTROY FANTASY! The editor-in-fabulousness/fiction editor was Christopher Barzak, the reprints editor was Liz Gorinsky, and the art editor was Henry Lien. Throughout this month, some pieces will be put online. So far, Austin Bunn's magnificent story "Ledge" is now available, as are our various editorial statements . More will be released later, but most of the pieces I commissioned are only available by purchasing the ebook [also available via Weightless ] or paperback . There are magnificent pieces by Mary Anne Mohanraj, merritt kopas, Keguro Macharia, Ekaterina Sedia, and Ellen Kushner, and only merritt's "Sleepover Manifesto" will be online. I owe huge thanks to all the contributors I worked with, to the other editors, to managing editor Wendy Wagner who did lo...

A friend sent me the above photo this morning. "You probably know more about Sci Fi and Fantasy publications than anyone I know," he wrote, "so can you possibly identify the book that Jerry Garcia is reading in the attached photo. It would mean a lot to thousands of Deadheads." I like a challenge. The picture is of such low resolution I almost couldn't make out anything helpful about the book, but I was determined. The title seemed long and the more I stared at it, the more it looked like some sort of anthology title ... The Best something? ... maybe a best of the year collection? ... no, best of fantasy and science -- The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction , I bet. I've got a few copies of that longrunning series of stories from the venerable magazine , but all mine are old hardcovers picked up at library sales. I'm not sure I've ever even seen one of the paperbacks, or knew that there were  paperbacks of the series. But God invented ISFDB ...

Eric Schaller and I have been working on creating an online version of a magazine some of our ancestors  were involved with in 1876, and after a long period of work, with the brilliant and invaluable help of Luís Rodrigues, THE REVELATOR can now be revealed. In it you will find two new short stories, "Gaslight" by Jeffrey Ford and "Nick Kaufmann, Last of the Red-Hot Superwhores" by Nick Mamatas; an essay about the relationship between Salem, Massachusetts and witches by Robin DeRosa, poetry by Lillian Aujo and Beverly Nambozo, an interview with and comix by Edward Bolman, an account of The Spleen Brothers by Brian Francis Slattery, paintings by Michaela D'Angelo, and an eyewitness account of the James/Younger gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota -- an account unlike any others, and till now lost in the archives of The Revelator ! A theme of twins, doubles, and doppelgangers runs lightly through this issue of the magazine. It's presen...

You might have heard that Ann VanderMeer was promoted from fiction editor of (the Hugo Award-winning )  Weird Tales to editor-in-chief. Ann is smart, brilliantly discriminating, down-to-earth, and practical*, so I've been very curious to see what she would do as editor-in-chief. Well, now we know. Weird Tales has a revamped website , for one thing. (Writers should note that with that comes a new submission portal -- be sure to read the guidelines before submitting. Payment for fiction has also been raised to 5 cents/word.) And the staff is composed of some great folks in addition to Ann -- the great and glorious Paula Guran is nonfiction editor, the glorious and great Mary Robinette Kowal is art director. Aiding and abetting them are Tessa Kum, Dominik Parisien, and Alan Swirsky as editorial assistants. I'm tremendously proud to have had a story in Weird Tales , a magazine I've been reading since childhood (astute collectors will find a rather embarrassing let...

Paolo Bacigalupi, who used to work for High Country News , takes some lessons learned from his previous employment and speculates about the ways science fiction and fantasy magazines could save themselves from their ever-declining circulations. Paolo's thoughts appear in three blog posts: Part 1 (overview), Part 2 ("Marketing in Meatspace"), and Part 3 ("Online Marketing"). I don't have any great knowledge of marketing, so I will defer to Paolo and others on that, but I do hope the magazines are able to survive, partly because I respect the history they represent and partly because I like the idea of monthly magazines full of fiction being able to survive in our world. But honestly, I only pay money to subscribe to one of them. I receive subscriptions to some others because once upon a time I reviewed them more frequently than I do now (I certainly still read them for Best American Fantasy ), but for the others, when it comes time to make selections for...

My favorite benefit so far of being series editor for the upcoming Best American Fantasy is getting to read things I wouldn't otherwise know about or have ready access to, including a wide variety of magazines generally considered part of the literary mainstream. Inspired by these two posts from other bloggers, I thought I'd highlight a few that I have been looking through recently -- not an exhaustive list by any means, but rather a little sampling. Agni is a magazine I used to subscribe to, but because I try to scatter my subscriptions, I let it go, and now I regret it. I haven't read a recent issue, but I have enjoyed some of the web-only content they've posted, and I expect the journal itself is as varied and high-quality as I always found it to be. I know I'll spend a day at the library catching up with this year's batch of fiction, in case there's something appropriate for BAF , and I look forward to it. Gargoyle is a genuine find, a journal I ...