“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.)

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?

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(Jeremy Zerfoss designed the poster)

In response to (p)Rick Perry entering the Presidential race, Mord, star of my stories “The Third Bear” and “The Situation” (as well as my forthcoming novel Borne, with cameos in The Journals of Doctor Mormeck) has announced his own candidacy—based on the truth…omnivores have run this country into the ground. Here’s his platform as passed on to me.

—MORD BALANCE BUDGET BY EATING NO MORE PEOPLE THAN CAN EXCRETE

—MORD CALL FOR PALAVER WITH TEA PARTY…HEADS ON SPIKES REQUIRED, TEA OPTIONAL

—MORD TAKE ALL MONEY FROM RICH, GIVE IT TO POOR. MORD TAKE ALL MONEY FROM POOR NOW RICH, GIVE TO NEW POOR. REPEAT.

—MORD MAKE MICHELLE BACHMANN ENTER THERAPY

—MORD DESTROY BRIDGES TO ENSURE INFRASTRUCTURE EXPENDITURES

—MORD SHOVE HIGH-SPEED RAIL DOWN RICK SCOTT’S THROAT…LITERALLY

—MORD CAUSE HAVOC AND TERROR IN CONGRESS BECAUSE THEY DESERVE IT

—MORD STOMP HARRY REID’S ORCHARDS SO HE TOP WHINGING ABOUT NOT SEEING THEM ON FLOOR OF CONGRESS

—MORD MEAT WITH ALL HERBIVORES TO PREY WITH THEM ON COMMON TISSUES

—MORD GIVE NEWT GINGRICH ONE PAPERCUT FOR EACH FAKE TWITTER FOLLOWER

—MORD IMPOSE TERM LIMITS BY DEVOURING ANYONE IN CONGRESS LONGER THAN 20 YEARS EVEN IF STRINGY OR BRAIN-MEATS FLABBY

—MORD DO WHATEVER HE WANT WHENEVER HE WANT AND STOMP WHATEVER HE WANT. THE END.

I’m going to selfishly say what I want to discover is more strangeness in fiction, and by more strangeness I mean the rise of a new surrealism that looks at science fiction and fantasy both askance and and with affection, but is less concerned with building causality and logic and more concerned with restoring a “sense of wonder” without the baggage of the golden age of SF. A sense of wonder that’s both ironic and cynical at times and that relies upon huge imaginations blasting out of the traps of “how would that happen” and “I have to figure out how that would work” and letting the dream-logic of charged images and amazing concepts flow. Anchored by compelling characters and stories that wormhole within each other and bestriding the landscape with confidence. We see some of this already in the most mind-bending of manga and anime, and in other manifestations of the imagination that understand there’s always a backstory that will work because we live in a multiverse. There’s always a reason, an explanation, for anything. On some level, in these post-post times explanations are less useful to us than journeys that expand consciousness, get at psychological truths, and convert the dross of the everyday into something amazing.

(Short DIY vid shot by guest writer Ekaterina Sedia)

I’ll have much more info and news from this year’s SW teen writing camp, including the reveal of next year’s guest writers, but for now here’s a short informal video shot by guest writer Ekaterina Sedia of some of the students from Shared Worlds browsing for their free books.

Shared Worlds is located at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Publishers who sent free books this year included HarperVoyager, Tor, Pyr, Tachyon, White Wolf, Penguin (Firebird), Weird Tales, Angry Robot, Small Beer, Del Rey, Bull Spec, and Orbit.

SW is partially sponsored by a grant from Amazon.com. The camp was founded by Jeremy LC Jones and I serve as assistant director. The full writer/editor staff for 2011 included me, Ann VanderMeer, Nnedi Okorafor, Ekaterina Sedia, Will Hindmarch, Rob Rhodes, Jeremy Jones, and Minister Faust.

(No Jake von Slatt artifact was harmed during the events described in this blog post.)

Ever since Ann and I returned from the Carolinas with Jake von Slatt’s Bassington & Smith Brain, featured in the The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities it’s been nothing but trouble. Our cats will have nothing to do with it. It emits strange sounds and odors in the middle of the night. Flashes of electricity have appeared under the bell jar, appearing to reveal rips in the very fabric of space and time.

Even worse, the ongoing conflict between Moomins and Totoros previously detailed in this post has been brought into the house because of the presence of the Bassington & Smith Brain. It has quickly become the flashpoint for an ongoing, smoldering battle…as this series of still photographs demonstrates…

The Moomins and what temporary allies they could find within the house chose the high ground within the psychotronic field of the Jake von Slatt Bassington & Smith Brain, the emanations temporarily hiding their presence from the adorable enemy.

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(Ann bought me the sea slime book as a b-day present…)

During two readings at the Hub City Bookstore in Spartanburg, the Shared Worlds teen writing camp students bought a ton of books—just like last year, when Hub had only been open a few weeks. It’s just an amazingly good bookstore, mostly because the staff does such a great job of selecting the right books. When I walk in there it’s almost as if they’ve been reading my mind.

And now comes the news via Publishers Weekly that they’ve outstripped projected first-year sales by quite a sum. Nice job. Such a great place for a reading, too, and such a great resource for the students.

So the students weren’t the only ones to come away with a book haul. Here’s what I bought, with a few books thrown in that came from the Blue Bicycle in Charleston.

Which ones should I read first? Which have you read and recommend?

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Many at the Shared Worlds teen SF/F writing camp here at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, know about Totoro but not as many know about the Moomins. So I have created this handy and totally arbitrary guide that compares and contrasts them. – JV

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Totoro is a giant creature featured in the movie My Neighbor Totoro. It can fly but sometimes likes to just stand by a bus stop so it can use unusual forms of public transit.

…or sometimes it just is a person in a sweaty mascot outfit waiting for a real bus.

THIS…is wrong. Very wrong.

Meanwhile, the Moomins are a family of large hippo-like trolls created by author Tove Jansson and written about in comics and books.

People in Moomin costumes aren’t often seen waiting at bus stops.

Totoro seems to be happy enough to be around people, but that stare indicates Totoro would also be fine without them. Totoro seems to have friends, but not a whole lot of them.

Moomins have their family and friends and a lot of other people and animals that interact with them. If you sat down with a Moomin you might get a slice of berry pie. If you sat down with Totoro, he might give you a scary but exciting ride through the night sky….but you wouldn’t get any pie, just some stray acorns from between his toes. Totoro doesn’t appear to know how to cook…or care at all about cooking.

Moomin are deceptively cute…which means they tend to be very wise and if you are hoodwinked by their cute factor you might miss the wisdom. (Well, okay, sometimes Moominpappa isn’t so wise.) Honestly, I wouldn’t play cards with Moominmamma, either.

Sometimes, you get the sense that Totoro might be hiding a little bit of a temper…

Angry Moomins are rare, but because of that fact angering a Moomin doesn’t seem like a good idea. If you anger a Moomin, you would probably get punished within the confines of the law, and have a fair trial, because that’s what the Moomins would approve of. But that Moomin would make darn sure he or she had an iron-bound case against you and your ass would be in jail for a long time for whatever offense you had committed.

Many have wondered what would happen if Totoro and Moomins came into conflict. (Well, okay, just me.) These fingers found randomly on the internet indicate Moomins might at first be outnumbered.

This photo indicates that Totoro might spawn dozens of tasty Cupcake Totoros to infiltrate Moomin territory…

This might lead the Moomins, especially given Totoro’s superiority in the air, to temporarily retreat via boat to a remote island with a lighthouse.

But this photo reveals that the Moomins eventually would counter with an army of cardboard robots built out of hundreds of discarded whisky boxes.

The Moomins would also find a way to unleash their reluctant secret weapon The Groke…

…before inviting Totoro over for tea so that the Moomins could talk some sense into Totoro.

…or attempt to cook him (in a respectful way)….

…which would only infuriate Totoro and his allies and lead to more bad blood.

…like this propaganda film created by Totoro wishing ill-will toward Moomins, deliberately spelling their name wrong, too.

Regardless of how this conflict made up in my head turns out, one thing is for sure: they both look good on a t-shirt!

Ann and I have (rather quietly) put together a unique new project over the past few month: a Bestiary with the imaginative working title of…Bestiary. In an A-Z format, with a couple extras, the anthology will contain all original fiction. Think of it as a cryptozoological text for the twenty-first century, although some entries go far back into history. (Ivica Stevanovic is on board as an artist.)

For this project we wanted to assemble the writers ahead of time and then sell the anthology, so a huge thank you to our contributors for being willing to send us material on such a speculative basis. The antho will make the rounds to editors in August.

Although we’re still in the editing phase, we do now have our final line-up, revealed here in its entirety for the first time. We think it’s a stellar group of writers. Certainly what we consider a kind of dream team, and in several cases our first opportunity to work with favorite writers who we hadn’t yet had a chance to publish. It’s a little overwhelming to think we have an original Michal Ajvaz—terrifically funny and pointed—and an original Vandana Singh and an original Karen Lord and Cat Valente and…well, if we keep going we’ll wind up listing everyone!

A: “The Auricle” by Gio Clairval
B: “Bartleby’s Typewriter” by Corey Redekop
C: “The Counsellor Crow” by Karen Lord
D: “Daydreamer by Proxy” by Dexter Palmer
E: “Enkantong-bato” by Dean Francis Alfar
F: “The Figmon” by Michael Cisco
G: “The Guest” by Brian Conn
H: “Hadrian’s Sparrikan” by Stephen Graham Jones
I: “Ible” by Brian Evenson
J: “Jason Bug” by Joseph Nigg
K: “The Karmantid” by Karen Heuler
L: “The Liwat’ang Yawa and the Litok-litok” by Rochita Loenin-Ruiz
M: “Mosquito Boy” by Felix Gilman
N: “N—– (Bolus Barathruma)” by Reza Negarestani
O: “Orsinus Liborum” by Catherynne M. Valente
P: “Pyret” by Karin Tidbeck
Q: “Quintus” by Michal Ajvaz
R: “Rapacis X. Loco Signa” by L.L. Hannett
S: “Snafu” by Micaela Morrissette
T: “Tongues of Moon Toad” by Cat Rambo
U: “The Ugly-Nest Rat” by Eric Schaller
V: “The Vanga” by Rikki Ducornet
W: “Weialalaleia” by Amal El-Mohtar
X: “The Xaratan” by Rhys Hughes
Y: “Yakshantariksh” by Vandana Singh
Z: “Zee” by Richard Howard
&: “Ampersand” by Karin Lowachee

(Not shown: a creature whose name begins with invisible letter, written by an anonymous writer who is not one of the editors…)

The latest Cheeky Frawg e-book, my Secret Lives, is now available on Amazon for Kindle and Barnes & Noble for Nook. it debuted with Weightless Books a couple of weeks ago. This is the mightily affordable version of the collection you could only buy as a $35 limited edition before.

“A collection of unique short fictions by World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer which have previously available been only in a signed, limited, numbered edition. These stories, praised by K.J. Bishop and Liz Williams, take the facts of real life fantasy readers and uses them as the starting point for startling, funny, and rapturous secret lives. Discover a man obsessed with a mechanical duck, a strange mascot, a person who is a portal, a priest battling a shark, and much more.The secret lives of librarians, doctors, lawyers, university students, bank tellers, sex shop clerks and dozens of others are revealed for the first time. A luminous little book meant for dipping into one secret life at a time.”