“When it comes to the Romania writers the one name that impressed me lately and that comes immediately into my mind because of this fact is Marian Coman.” (The Dark Wolf Fantasy Review)

As exemplified by World Fantasy Award winner Zoran Zivkovic and other writers, one way to a larger audience is by finding a way to self-publish your work in English and use that beachhead as a way to get more attention, find an English-language publisher, and then dive back into non-English publication when editors at Spanish, Italian, and other publishing houses read your work in English.

Now the talented Romanian writer Marian Coman has taken the bull by the horns, found a translator, and published a short e-book collection via Kindle: Fingers and other fantastic stories.

It has a great cover, and it’s inexpensive. Go forth and buy.

Also, Coman is looking for signal boost for his book. You can contact Coman via facebook or via his email: marian.coman @ obiectivbr.ro if you’re interested in interviewing him or doing a review or mention and need more information.

Coman is a noted Romanian novelist and journalist. He is the editor of the daily lens – Voice Braila. He has two critically acclaimed collections of stories published in Romania, and he won a prize from the European SF Society. Work has also appeared in several publications, including the 2007 Millenium Est anthology edited by Horia Ursu and myself, which presented Romanian writers in French translation at the Utopiales convention.

We were lucky enough to meet Marian in Bucharest a few years back—very interesting guy with good taste in fiction.

(Please feel free to link to this post, or even just re-use the info however you like on your own blog.)

UPDATE: Some have asked if I still have copies of THE TROIKA to sell in the original edition. Yes, I do, most all of them from the second printing. Please email me at vanderworld@hotmail.com for more details if you’re interested.

Way back in the 1990s, my Ministry of Whimsy press published a novel called The Troika by Stepan Chapman that had been rejected by 120 publishers and which the author had tried to salvage by sending out chapters as stand-alone stories. One of them came to Leviathan 1, an anthology I was editing in the early 1990s. It made no sense to me out of context, but I still loved it. I felt like I was looking at a puzzle piece of something larger, and so I asked Stepan if it was part of a novel, and if so if he could send more of it. He sent another piece as a submission, and this one was self-contained and we published it in Leviathan 1: “The Chosen Donor”.

Then he sent the full novel…and as I read it and the back of my skull began to explode and my brain to melt from the audacious brilliance of it…I realized we had to publish it.

We did, and not only did it win the PKD Award and also garner over 120 reviews world-wide, Stepan, in one of those ironies too delicious to seem real, sat at a table during the PKD Award ceremony with some of the most prominent editors who had rejected his manuscript—all of whom probably had perfectly valid reasons for rejection, in that it’s not a novel that fits smoothly into any particular marketing category.

What’s it about?

Under the glare of three suns, three beings travel across an endless desert. They argue, whine, wheedle and needle each other. Sometimes they switch identities when the sandstorms roar in. As The Troika rolls on, we learn more about Alex, who started out as a man, then became cyborg, then jeep. About Naomi, a veteran soldier who woke up from her cryogenic storage tank to a new life, now a dinosaur. About Eva, who fled her native land to escape her fate as an organ-donor for the emperor.

The novel reconstructs their shattered lives through amazing tour-de-force flashbacks while driving closer to the central mystery of why they are trudging across an endless desert. It’s a truly stunning book in so many ways I don’t really know how to begin. What I do know is that without reading The Troika I could not have finished my novel Veniss Underground, and without the lessons learned from The Troika I could not have taken any number of leaps of faith in my fiction. Nor could I have jumped into my current serial The Journals of Doctor Mormeck without the influence of The Troika—several techniques I’m using were first perfected by Stepan in his novel.

So, as we prep the e-book, I’m wondering if any of you remember reading The Troika and liking it this much as well, and if you’re writer, how did the book influence you, if it did? We’ll probably publish a selection of responses in the back of the e-book as a bonus for readers, along with some other cool stuff.

And, here’s an excerpt from the novel—one of the flashbacks involving the character who keeps morphing into mechanical avatars.

(more…)

In honor of the Tallahassee Lambshead Cabinet Extravaganza occurring this Sunday at Ray’s Steel City Saloon (info here), I’ll be posting some special new material connected to the anthology (order it here!).

Today, we have a special treat: an expanded version of one of the best micro-submissions to the anthology and an important part of Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet: Graham Lowther’s Ear-Eye…

(more…)

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

Through all of my surveillance across worlds, through the stamen-delicate antennae of the luna moths, questions vibrate. A child asking his mother at bedtime “What is an angel? Do they really live in Heaven?” Are angels real? Do they watch over us? What is a fallen angel? Priests and scientists and believer and non-believers alike. Trillions of replications and icons, the alt-Earths awash in them. Numb, dumb marble statuary devoted to angels. Millions of books. Mutterings and prayers and interrogations and conversations. “What is an angel?” If I could answer any of them, I would say: “An angel is something so alien from yourselves that ‘purpose” becomes a meaningless word.”

But what did I really know? I knew what Gabriel told me, and sometimes a few words with one of the nameless others who I knew only by their faces as they glided effortless and ghost-like through the laboratory on some esoteric secret mission. I knew only that sometimes they carried objects with them on their way from one part of the laboratory to the other. An aquarium full mice and spiders. Three candelabras with old lavender wax runneling down their oxidated curves. Ancient, pitted swords that looked like they had come from some Bronze Age. Four angels once carried effortless the oddly balanced weight of a huge figurehead from the prow of a great ship of war, the glazed gold eyes of the woman mused for the sailors’ superstitions staring fixedly ahead as if their every effort were meaningless and unimportant to her.

I knew from the discoveries in the winter city that one way kill an angel was cremation. It was reversible, but it keep them silent and on a shelf for awhile, waiting for their release…and even that did not guarantee a sane or permanent return. Dust to dust and back from dust for awhile. The essential essence of an angel would show itself over time, a cannister turning turquoise or some other shade. No one knew what the colors meant, although one scientist named Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, who lived in India on an alt-Earth, acquired several and did research. Satyamurthy went mad from whatever he discovered but still managed to self-publish the results in a slim monograph entitled The Significance of Angel Ashes: The Contamination and Reconciliation of the Swedenborg Hypothesis. I found a copy on one of the slide in the angels’ library, and this quote was liquid in my mind when Gabriel joined me there: “Angelcide it seemed was a means of penetration. a sort of litmus test exposing the molecular nature of this immediate realty, the cellular weight of this momentary spot of cohesion in the flux of space and time.”

(more…)

Big Questions by Anders Nilsenand I have had only a passing acquaintance until now…when the awesome Drawn & Quarterly Press decided to drop a metric ton on me in the form of a huge hardcover book that has been lovingly and exquisitely designed. Wow wow wow—absolutely beautiful in all possible ways.

Huh? Wha? Why? Who? say those amongst you who care not for the tactile creativity that is a well-designed book printed on a real honest-to-god offset press as opposed to in html e-purgatory.

Let me then take you through a little guided tour of how the pleasure centers of the book lover’s brain light up when encountering this kind of artifact, especially so unexpectedly…

(more…)

In honor of the Tallahassee Lambshead Cabinet Extravaganza occurring this Sunday at Ray’s Steel City Saloon (info here), I’ll be posting some special new material connected to the anthology (order it here!).

First up is contributor S.J. Chambers’ rumination on Poe-pathy, associated to some degree with her contribution to the Cabinet antho, Dr. Lambshead’s Dark Room. The account of meeting Dr. Lambshead concerns hypnotic techniques, including the Valdemar Method, which enabled the doctor “to extract from even the most cavernous subconscious those diseases that afflicted the soul, as demonstrated in the mesmeric stories of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Tomorrow: An expanded treatise on the famed “Ear-Eye”!

THE POE BUG
S.J. Chambers

Have you experienced these following symptoms: soaring soul, existential exigency, speaking in cryptically symbolic metaphor, vertigo caused by sublimity, vision heightened by chiaroscuro, dead-dwelling or head-swelling? Do you suffer from daydreaming reflex with reveries that include blackbirds, scents of an unseen censor or aberrant alliterative applications? If you have answered yes to more than one of these, you may be suffering from Poepathy. A terrible disease of the soul, characterized by the affectation of the imagination and its degenerate interaction with the secular world, Poepathy is derived from continual contact of the reader’s imagination with that of 19th- century American author, Edgar Allan Poe, and the dependency upon Poe’s work for constant creative stimuli.

(more…)

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

There was a ringing in my ears for a long time after the explosion. I mean, in my earholes. Except. I didn’t have earholes anymore, so where could the ringing be coming from?

I didn’t have a tail.

I didn’t have feet.

I didn’t have legs.

I didn’t have a torso.

I didn’t have any internal organs.

I didn’t have any veins.

I didn’t have any arteries.

I didn’t have fatty tissue.

I didn’t have muscle.

I didn’t have tendons.

I didn’t have sinews.

I didn’t have bones.

I didn’t have eyes.

I didn’t have a snout.

I didn’t have a mouth.

I didn’t have a head.

I didn’t have a skull.

I didn’t have a brain.

I would have felt the loss of each intensely if I wasn’t too busy surviving. I was just a scrap of flesh about one centimeter long, a bit of skin and flesh from approximately five centimeters southwest of my left foreleg, having detached from my lower neck from the pressure and shot out, accompanied by its brethren, the shrapnel of a scale model of Stalingrad, rocks, dirt, and a few hundred confused and splattering earthworms and ground-burrowing creatures rapidly losing their bodily integrity.

This was possibly the best decision Scrap-me had ever made, to join the general exodus, for said neck buckled and jellied with the heat and then spray-evaporated beyond saving, along with the rest of me.

(more…)

Here’s the official announcement for our party, open to the public, this weekend…It should be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there! JeffV

Announcing:

A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES EXTRAVAGANZA RIGHT HERE IN TALLAHASSEE!

A book launch party for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, an LA Times Summer Reading Selection, and The Steampunk Bible, recently featured in the NYT and Wall Street Journal.

Ray’s Steel City Saloon (lower level), Sunday August 21, 4pm to 7pm (or later)

Official program starting at 5:30pm:
—Scandelous anecdotes about the books
—The stories behind the stories
—Short readings
—Giveaways (of previous Weird Tales issues, Bull Spec magazine, Jeff’s novels, a copy of 1001 Steampunk Creations, and much more)

Free appetizers and cake!

(Full bar and Ray’s menu are available)

Featuring Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer and the unveiling two items from the Lambshead Cabinet:

—The Steampunk Workshop’s Bassington & Smith Positronic Brain, built by Jake von Slatt

—Famous Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s cryptozoological art

With Special Guests:
—S.J. Chambers (Lambshead contributor and Steampunk Bible coauthor with Jeff VanderMeer)
—Florida State University Professor and artist Carrie Ann Baade (art available)

Fun for the whole family, with rumors of a face painter also in attendance…

Lambshead Cabinet anthology and The Steampunk Bible both available for sale and signing as well as the latest issue of Weird Tales (edited by Ann VanderMeer, art by Baade) and humor book The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (written by Ann & Jeff).

More on the Books…

(more…)

We’re not quite ready to reveal the full table of contents for THE WEIRD: A COMPENDIUM OF STRANGE AND DARK STORIES (Atlantic/Corvus), but we have finished the proofing process and provided the publisher with story notes, the extended copyright page, and the introduction.

In the interim before the reveal, I decided to go back and take a look at some of the best-of anthologies from the past couple of years and compare our table of contents to theirs. Below I’ve posted kind of a tease with regard to our book, revealing the number of stories overlapping ours, as well as the list of common writers. For the first two, I’ve put a line of ****** to indicate the year/story from which the antho correspond with our own list.

These other anthologies have a different but at times overlapping mission statement from THE WEIRD, which clocks in at 750,000 words. Our mission statement was to chart the best examples of weird tales/weird fiction over the past one hundred years. We took that brief to mean exploration of several different threads: the traditional weird tale, weird ritual, some weird SF, etc. We also took the opportunity to include weird fiction from beyond the U.S. and U.K., with 17 nationalities represented among the 116 stories . We saw Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft as representing two main strands of weird fiction, etc., and also traced other sources of influence. We also used the opportunity to commission new, definitive translations of several stories and included novellas and short novels.Non-supernatural horror without an element of strange ritual, Gothic fiction, and traditional ghost stories did not fit our brief to select “weird fiction”. We also looked carefully at all public domain material, trying to be definitive but also not rely too heavily on it for the time period of roughly 1908 to 1922. Part of this process included re-evaluating the strength of certain authors and certain classic works.

The four books below have their own constraints and obsessions. The Century’s Best Horror Fiction chooses one story per year as the best from that year. It also contains only four stories not from Anglo sources, and ignores Kafka entirely, probably defining him as not really horror–it is largely concerned with comprehensively chronicling the horror impulse in the UK and US. The anthology also includes more naturalistic horror, selecting some fine authors that simply didn’t fit into THE WEIRD.

The Peter Straub American Fantastical Tales from Library of America has, of course, the constraint of including only stories by U.S. writers, going all the way back to Poe. However, Straub had the freedom to pick any kind of dark fantasy—weird, horror, etc.—meaning that traditional ghost stories are well-represented in his anthology, and correspondingly he has more women writers from the period of 1910 to 1950. He has also selected many stories from “literary” authors, which creates a nice mix of writers who might not always appear in the same volume.

The other two anthologies, The Very Best of Best New Horror edited by Stephen Jones and Darkness edited by Ellen Datlow, both cover roughly the last 20 years of horror fiction, and intersect with The Weird during that period only partially. Neither anthology looks at fiction from outside of the US/UK/Australia.

…THE WEIRD will be out in October and we will post the full table of contents prior to publication. In the meantime, with these story lists as a partial guide, do you have your own favorite weird tale?

(more…)

The whole 63-minute Halo motion comic flick based on the novella by me and Tessa Kum from Halo: Evolutions. Every gross, bloody, suspenseful, disgusting, fungal, roiling, boil-ridden, scary, violent, scarring, tough-person-dialogue-ridden, crazy-ass Terrorific Scooby-Doo frame of it. With “shore leave” substituted for our “ice cream” and a beat missing from the end…