(From back in the day, when Savage had books out from HarperPrism and ROC)

Back in 1992, I was part of a Clarion East class that included Cory Doctorow, Dale Bailey, Nathan Ballingrud, Pam Noles, and a certain great young writer named Felicity Savage. She went on, still a teenager I believe, to get a book deal and have a few novels out…then disappeared. Even wrote about that back in 2006.

Now she’s popped up years later in Tokyo, and she’s got her own blog/website from which she’s selling new fiction in ebook form, under what look like more than one pen name. She was great and had great potential back then, but I can’t wait to see what she’s up to fiction-wise now.

Just a note that Omnivoracious has run two of my recent interviews–one with the wonderful Carrie Vaughn and one with the wonderful Cherie Priest. I think you’ll enjoy both of them.

Thrilled that John Chu, one of our Clarion students in 2010, has a story published by the Boston Review. It’s a favorite of ours–a unique and wonderful and somewhat poignant time travel story. Go read it!

Books have been flowing into the house as usual. Here’s a selection of recent titles that I’ve found particularly interesting…

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The writer of this Atlantic.com article interviewed me about books and soundtracks, since all three of my Ambergris novels come with soundtracks: Robert Devereux’s Fungicide (for City of Saints), The Church’s Shriek: An Afterword, and Murder by Death’s Finch. (I have copies of the MBD soundtrack for sale.)

The reporter couldn’t use everything I gave her, of course, especially as the article is mostly about Booktracks, a company that provides “book scores” for your listening pleasure—something I’m a little dubious about. So I’ve taken my full answers and posted them below.

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Jeremy L.C. Jones has posted a longish profile of World Fantasy Award finalist Nnedi Okorafor on the Shared Worlds teen writing camp site—including some observations about her visit as the Amazon.com visiting writer this year. Go check it out.

In a few days we will announce our full line-up for 2012.

One cool thing about the drive home from DragonCon this past weekend was stopping to visit with a friend of ours who has acquired a used bookstore. As you can see from the photo above that means he has the (to us) amazingly pleasurable job of going through the inventory not already on the shelves. Lucky bastard!

Here are a few of the books we picked up. We’ve been focusing on anthologies and collections to flesh out our selection of short stories. At the moment, I think we have close to 1,500 anthos and story collections in the house.

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Busy prepping for DragonCon, but here’s a breakdown of the magazine and anthology sources for the stories in The Weird, leaving out for now author collections, in case anyone was interested. We’ll post the full publication information for all of the stories closer to the publication date, for those who are curious.

If an anthology, the editor or editors have been listed after the title. For non-UK/US mags, the country of publication has been listed. If more than one story came from a single source, the number of stories is listed in parentheses after the title of the publication. It’s worth noting that Ellen Datlow may be the editor connected to the most number of reprints in the book, given her involvement in OMNI and Event Horizon, as well as the anthology Inferno—although we’d have to research the editors at Weird Tales and Mag of F & SF during the time of publication of those reprints to make sure.

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(rough of the cover; also see Ann’s parallel post on the Weird Tales blog)

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Pub Date: Mid-October; Publisher: Atlantic, Corvus imprint (UK edition)

Foreword: Michael Moorcock
Introduction by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Afterword: China Mieville

Over one hundred years of weird fiction collected in a single volume of 750,000 words. Over 20 nationalities are represented and seven new translations were commissioned for the book, most notably definitive translations of Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” and Michel Bernanos’ short novel “The Other Side of the Mountain” (the first translations of these classics in many decades). Other highlights include the short novels / long novellas “The Beak Doctor” by Eric Basso, “Tainaron” by Leena Krohn, and “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” by Brian Evenson. This is among the largest collections of weird fiction ever housed between the covers of one book.

Strands of The Weird represented include classic and mainstream weird tales, weird SF, weird ritual, international weird, and offshoots of the weird influenced by Surrealism, Symbolism, the Gothic, and the Decadent movement. (A discussion of weird modes of fiction can be found in the introduction.)

A compendium is neither as complete as an encyclopedia nor as baggy as a treasury. Although the backbone of the book reflects the immense influence of both Kafka and Lovecraft, we have ventured out from that basic focus to provide different traditions of weird fiction and outliers that are perhaps open to debate. The anthology is meant to be both an interrogation of weird fiction and a conversation with it. We hope that readers will be delighted by the classics included and by the unexpected discoveries found within its pages.

Also, in support of both the anthology and weird fiction, we will be launching http://www.weirdfictionreview.com in October.

Table of Contents

Story order is chronological except for a couple of exceptions transposed for thematic reasons. Stories translated into English are largely positioned by date of first publication in their original language. Authors are North American or from the United Kingdom unless otherwise indicated.

Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 (translation, Austria)

F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907

Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910

M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911

Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912

Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 (translation, Austria)

Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Germany)

Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 (translation, Germany)

Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 (India)

Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 (new translation by Anna and Brendan Connell, Italy; first-ever translation into English)

A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 (new translation, Japan)

Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 (translation, German/Czech)

Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 (translation, Poland)

H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926

H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929

Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930

Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 (translation, Belgium)

Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 (translation, Belgium)

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933

Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 (translation, Japan)

Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936

Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 (translation, Poland)

Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939

Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941

Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942

Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943

William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 (translation, Argentina)

Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 (Benin)

Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950

Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951

Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951

Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 (new translation by Larry Nolen, Guatemala)

Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 (Nigeria)

Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 1953

Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Argentina)

William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956

Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959

Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963

Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Italy)

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)

Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967 (translation, Catalan)

Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)

Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967

Daphne Du Maurier, “Don’t Look Now,” 1971

Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975

Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976

James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976

Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977

Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 (Antigua and Barbuda/US)

George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979

Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980

Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980

Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980

William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981

M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981

Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982

M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982

Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 (translation, India)

F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984

Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984

Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 (translation, Finland)

Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987

Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987

Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988

Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 (Nigeria)

Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989

Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989

Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990

Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 (translation, Czech)

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991

Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991

Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)

Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992

Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993

Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993

William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994

Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994

Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994

Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994

Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995

Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996

Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997

Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998

Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998

Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000

Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001

China Mieville, “Details,” 2002

Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002

Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002

Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002

Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003

Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003

Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003

Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003

Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004

Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 (Australia)

T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005

Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007

Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007

Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 (Iran)

Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009

Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009

Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009

K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010 (Australia)

Living with the proof pages of our THE WEIRD anthology has been a little like living in close quarters in a cave with a snuffling, rain-soaked, ravenous bear that at times is all-too-real and at times is a ghost or a hallucination. You get claustrophobic, paranoid, jumpy, itchy, smelly, hunched over, flinchy, and irritable. You’re drinking too much coffee, poring over too many pages, eyeballs imprinted with the flash-imprinted image of story notes and page breaks and title treatments. The days merge together because you’re doing nothing other than checking things from the time you get up in the morning until when you go to bed at night. The stacks of print-outs rise. You start talking to yourself, and you start talking to the bear. You begin to wonder what readers are going to think, and every time you see the words “The Beak Doctor” you start cackling. When you come across a short novel embedded in the antho, you do a little jig. You become a sloth—just two huge eyes staring at things from matted fur—and then you realize you’ve become a sloth, but it’s too late…you’re a sloth. You’re a sloth talking to a ghost bear in a cave in the middle of the night, and you realize vaguely, with a kind of distant interest, that it’ll end soon, but you’re not sure when…so you better be on good terms with the bear.