The Sky-Riders

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Dellinger, Paul

Allen, MIke

Science Fiction

Mythic Delirium Books

“The poems in Mike Allen’s latest book, Hungry Constellations, make a rowdy, red-tinged tapestry, representing twenty years of work from one of the major creative forces in this genre. These poems are physical, expansive, and revolutionary. They are grand and dystopic. They seethe with the conflict of opposites. Allen likes the destructive side of creation as much as the emergent side ... He writes about stars and legends and human beings contending with the monster-filled and glorious cosmos. He does it all with a relentless, energetic style, full of thought and invention.” —Star*Line 
The mutants of Wonderland threaten to smash through the looking glass as the river of Time overflows its banks. The King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves dance a duet across eons, alternately foes and lovers. Monstrous constellations come to life in the sky, hungry for people-filled worlds. 
Hungry Constellations, the newest poetry collection from Nebula Award finalist and three-time Rhysling Award winner Mike Allen, surveys two decades of mind-bending verse. Editor Dominik Parisien starts with poems drawn from Allen’s previous book-length collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006) and The Journey to Kailash (2008), then concludes the triptych with a selection of new and previously uncollected pieces, which author, poet and editor Amal El-Mohtar calls Allen’s most ambitious work to date in her introduction. Cover artist Paula Arwen Friedlander (arwendesigns.net) adroitly illustrates the collection’s Rhysling Award-nominated title poem. 
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Hungry Constellations is Allen’s first poetry collection available in digital format. 
From the introduction by Amal El-Mohtar: 
“Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you … Subterranean in conception and galactic in execution, this is a book of monsters.” 
Praise for Mike Allen's poetry: 
“Allen’s is poetry for goths of all ages … There is a long tradition of poetry dealing with the uncanny—think Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ or Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—and it’s nice to see someone putting it to such use again. Allen’s poems … do a fine job of making the human scary and the scary human.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer 
“Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.” —Fred Chappell 
“Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.” —Catherynne M. Valente 
“In the great tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does—rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights.” —R.H.W. Dillard

Hungry Constellations

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Winner of the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection Contains "The Bone Swans of Amandale," 2015 Nebula Award finalist for Best Novella 2015 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Collection and Best Novella
"C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket." —Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of the Fairyland novels
"These stories are a pure joy. C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language—O! her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable." —Delia Sherman, author of Young Woman in a Garden: Stories
"Bone Swans is a joy of feathery bones &amp; ghoulish clowns. I adored every word. Like an eyas cries for meat, I cry for more. C.S.E. Cooney's a major talent and these are major talent stories. Who can resist hero rats, pouting swans, feral children, flying carpets and the Flabberghast? So tongue-tied am I with delight I fall back on the usual cliches: gripping, delightful, insightful, rollicking &amp; lyrical—and yet not one cliche is to be found in Bone Swans, only stories of surpassing delicacy and wit, told by a lady of rare talent. Please, ma'am, might I have some more?" —Ysabeau S. Wilce, Andre Norton Award wining author of Flora's Dare
A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.
World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney's writing "stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible." Bone Swans, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are "bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time." Cooney's mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as "pure Cooney," and he offers readers a challenge: "Try to define that when you've finished the stories in this book."
“These stories are rich original fantasy with a sharp edge, peopled by vivid engaging characters inhabiting fantastic worlds. This is a brilliant and thoroughly enjoyable collection.” —Martha Wells, author of The Books of the Raksura series

Bone Swans: Stories

Cooney, C.S.E.

Short Stories & Anthologies

“Rich word choices and settings that blend speculative concepts with quotidian reality highlight this stellar anthology of prose and poetry.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “One of those rare long-term survivors of the small-press landscape. . . contributes mightily to the health of our genre.” —LOCUS ONLINE Assembled from the second year of the digital journal MYTHIC DELIRIUM and recast in an artfully arranged anthology, this latest offering from editors Mike and Anita Allen will introduce you to harrowing deserts and vengeful waters, to quantum mythology and edible religion, to slipstream explorations of love and identity. Publisher and editor Mike Allen writers in his introduction, “If you’re on a quest for the weird, lowercase, here is a book where you can find it. And likely The Weird as well.” This international anthology of beautiful prose and strange verse features Saira Ali, Michele Bannister, Alicia Cole, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Gwynne Garfinkle, Brady Golden, Adam Howe, John Philip Johnson, Jamie Killen, Swapna Kishore, Margo Lanagan, Geoffrey A. Landis, Nathaniel Lee, Rose Lemberg, Livia Llewellyn, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, C.S. MacCath, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Lynette Mejía, Virginia M. Mohlere, Sunny Moraine, Kristine Ong Muslim, Dominik Parisien, Jessy Randall, Wendy Rathbone, Sonya Taaffe, Shveta Thakrar, Natalia Theodoridou, Sheree Renée Thomas and Jane Yolen. Cover art by Hugo Award winner Galen Dara.

Mythic Delirium: Volume Two: an international anthology of prose and verse

Lanagan, Margo

Llewellyn, Livia

MacFarlane, Alex Dally

Thomas, Sheree Renée

Gailey, Jeannine Hall

Thakrar, Shveta

Lupescu, Valya Dudycz

Taaffe, Sonya

Howe, Adam

Muslim, Kristine Ong

Rathbone, Wendy

Moraine, Sunny

Landis, Geoffrey A.

YOLEN, JANE

MacCath, C.S.

Kishore, Swapna

Mohlere, Virginia M.

Parisien, Dominik

Johnson, John Philip

Lynette Mejia

United States

“Mike Allen will infect your subconscious with hallucinatory and alarming delight. This book is a must-read for fans of weird fiction and dark fantasy.” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One who Comes After “Surrender yourself to The Spider Tapestries and let these tales rewire your mind.” —Scott Nicolay, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Do You Like to Look at Monsters? “Elegant language and surrealistic themes defy genre and moral expectations in the weird and transgressive stories found in this collection . . . Allen’s pairing of individualistic suffering and cosmic hugeness evokes a lyrical friction between dread and wonder.” —Publishers Weekly The Spider Tapestries, Mike Allen’s sophomore short story collection, takes a wrecking ball to genre boundaries, showcasing seven stories that mix transhuman noir, Lovecraftian horror, and surrealistic sorcery in an exploration of the further reaches of the Weird. Readers who savored the disorienting strangeness in Allen’s debut collection Unseaming, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and Amazon.com horror fiction bestseller, will find The Spider Tapestries begins where Unseaming left off. As Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, explains in her introduction, “Allen outdoes himself even further, borrowing and synthesizing across genres with gleeful abandon. . . . This results in stories like ‘Twa Sisters,’ with an atmosphere and setting as if Heironymous Bosch had been brought in as a consultant on Blade Runner. Or ‘Sleepless, Burning Life,’ which, with simultaneous nods to steampunk and metaphysics, explores and upends the familiar trope of Mortal Chosen by the Gods.” “The Spider Tapestries is kaleidoscopically, gloriously imaginative.” —Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown “The seven stories in this slim collection range from dark fantasy to sf to horror—sometimes all within one tale . . . Allen weaves intriguing connections among his tales, applying dizzying, sensual images.” —Library Journal

The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories

Genre Fiction

• 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Anthology • Contains "The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me" by Rachael K. Jones, 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Short Fiction • Contains "Sabbath Wine" by Barbara Krasnoff, 2016 Nebula Award finalist for Best Short Story • 2016 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Anthology “Allen’s strange and lovely fifth genre-melding fantasy anthology selects 20 new short stories of unusual variety, texture, compassion, and perception . . . All the stories afford thought-provoking glimpses into alternative realities that linger, sparking unconventional thoughts, long after they are first encountered.” —Publisher Weekly, starred review 
“The arrangement is superb. This anthology of 20 stories can resemble a symphony of themes and variations in a wide range of keys, or a tapestry whose elements form patterns of imagery and meaning that shift and offer new insights throughout the book.” —Locus 
The Clockwork Phoenix anthologies offer homes to “well-written stories occupying multiple subgenres, usually in the same story, often ambiguously,” as Locus Magazine once put it. 
The ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, award-nominated series of fantasy anthologies returns for a fifth incarnation, triumphantly risen from the ashes after another successful Kickstarter campaign. This is the largest installment yet, holding twenty new tales of beauty and strangeness. Each story leads you into unmapped territory, there to find shock and delight. 
With fiction from Jason Kimble, Rachael K. Jones, Patricia Russo, Marie Brennan, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Rob Cameron, A. C. Wise, Gray Rinehart, Sam Fleming, Sunil Patel, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, Holly Heisey, Barbara Krasnoff, Sonya Taaffe, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Shveta Thakrar, Cassandra Khaw, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Rich Larson, and Beth Cato. 
Table of Contents 
<li> “The Wind at His Back” by Jason Kimble </li>
<li> “The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me” by Rachael K. Jones </li>
<li> “The Perfect Happy Family” by Patricia Russo </li>
<li> “The Mirror-City” by Marie Brennan </li>
<li> “The Finch’s Wedding and the Hive That Sings” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew </li>
<li> “Squeeze” by Rob Cameron </li>
<li> “A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)” by A.C. Wise </li>
<li> “The Sorcerer of Etah” by Gray Rinehart </li>
<li> “The Prime Importance of a Happy Number” by Sam Fleming </li>
<li> “Social Visiting” by Sunil Patel </li>
<li> “The Book of May” by C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez </li>
<li> “The Tiger’s Silent Roar” by Holly Heisey </li>
<li> “Sabbath Wine” by Barbara Krasnoff </li>
<li> “The Trinitite Golem” by Sonya Taaffe </li>
<li> “Two Bright Venuses” by Alex Dally MacFarlane </li>
<li> “By Thread of Night and Starlight Needle” by Shveta Thakrar </li>
<li> “The Games We Play” by Cassandra Khaw </li>
<li> “The Road, and the Valley, and the Beasts” by Keffy R.M. Kehrli </li>
<li> “Innumerable Glimmering Lights” by Rich Larson </li>
<li> “The Souls of Horses” by Beth Cato</li>

Clockwork Phoenix 5

Brennan, Marie

Sriduangkaew, Benjanun

Cato, Beth

Krasnoff, Barbara

Hernández, Carlos

Wise, A.C.

Kimble, Jason

Kirkus Best YA Science Fiction of 2018 Tor.com Best Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2018 Den of Geek Best Fiction Books of 2018 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Fantasy Novel
“Near-future science-fiction crimes bleed into dystopian horror centuries later in a wildly imaginative genre-hybrid sequel to Archivist Wasp…Excruciating, cathartic, and triumphant.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Archivist Wasp fans, prepare to be delighted…Teens who enjoy reading extended fight scenes and want immersion in an extraordinary world will enjoy Kornher-Stace’s second act.” —School Library Journal, starred review
“Latchkey is a masterful example of sustained tension.” —Den of Geek
“I loved Archivist Wasp, and Latchkey surpasses it in every way.” — Amal El-Mohtar, Hugo-award-winning author and critic
Isabel, once known as Wasp, has become leader of the fearsome upstarts, the teen girl acolytes who are adjusting to a new way of life after the overthrow of the sadistic Catchkeep-priest. They live in an uneasy alliance with the town of Sweetwater—an alliance that will be tested to its limits by the dual threats of ruthless raiders from the Waste and a deadly force from the Before-time that awaits in long-hidden tunnels.
Years ago Isabel befriended a nameless ghost, a supersoldier from the Before-time with incredible powers even after death, and their adventure together in the underworld gave her the strength and knowledge to change the brutal existence of the Catchkeep acolytes for the better. To save Sweetwater, Isabel will have to unlock the secrets of the twisted experimental program from centuries gone by that created the supersoldier and killed his friends: the Latchkey Project.
Latchkey continues the story begun in Kornher-Stace’s widely acclaimed Archivist Wasp, an Andre Norton Award finalist that was selected by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Teen Books of 2015.
More Praise for Latchkey
“Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Latchkey is a little like retracing a war veteran’s scars with a scalpel and asking, ‘So. Does this hurt more than the original?’ It does, of course. Hurts good, hurts deep, this almost-familiar world that bleeds right into ours, where the only thing fiercer than ferocity is tenderness—though both talk equally as tough…Has there ever been such longing, fueled by such darkness and adrenaline? Has there ever been such satisfaction, and at such a cost?” —C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans
“Latchkey shows us the power of community and the worth, greater than diamonds, of courage. Cathartic, feminist, explosively imaginative and masterfully told, Kornher-Stace gives us a second-world fantasy that transports our minds while, time and again, it emotionally arrives.” —Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal and Gabi Break the Universe
“Fierce, blazing, brilliant. The mythic and brutal world of Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Latchkey is so richly realized, you don’t step into it, you fall.” —Jacqueline West, New York Times–bestselling author of The Books of Elsewhere
Cover art by Jacquelin de Leon, jacquelindeleon.com

Latchkey: Book Two of the Archivist Wasp Saga

Kornher-Stace, Nicole

Now updated with an additional poem!
"I was expecting this to be good, but it's wonderful. Seeing these pieces together makes me realize what a vivid, authentic and important voice Goss is. These are real fairytales, magical, unsettling, touching, and brilliant. I loved every word." —Jo Walton, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo award-winning author of Among Others
“Fairy tales are clothing, and to retell them is fashion. The fashion of these particular stories and poems is an abundance of lace, roses and porcelain contrasting with fur, snow and blood.” —Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times
"As a Hungarian-American raised on Hans Christen Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Goss takes obvious delight in reweaving classic European folk tales to reveal new, often deeply feminist, perspectives . . . This toothsome collection is best read in one go." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
A young woman hunts for her wayward shadow at the school where she first learned magic--while another faces a test she never studied for as ice envelopes the world. The tasks assigned a bookish boy lead him to fateful encounters with lizards, owls, trolls and a feisty, sarcastic cat. A bear wedding is cause for celebration, the spinning wheel and the tower in the briar hedge get to tell their own stories, and a kitchenmaid finds out that a lost princess is more than she seems. The sea witch reveals what she hoped to gain when she took the mermaid's voice. A wiser Snow White sets out to craft herself a new tale.
In these eight stories and twenty-three poems, World Fantasy Award winner Theodora Goss retells and recasts fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, always lyrical, the works gathered in Snow White Learns Witchcraft re-center and empower the women at the heart of these timeless narratives.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Jane Yolen, in her introduction, proclaims that Goss "transposes, transforms, and transcends times, eras, and old tales with ease. But also there is a core of tough magic that runs through all her pieces like a river through Faerie . . . I am ready to reread some of my new favorites."
More praise for Snow White Learns Witchcraft
"Theodora Goss re-fleshes and re-clothes old tales in multifarious ways. Sometimes the stories' new garments are classic and mythic, sometimes they're up-to-the-minute, twenty-first-century creations, fresh cuts and colors that bring new truths from the underlying structures. Through prose and poetry, Goss shines her unique light into the fairytale forest—and many bright eyes gleam back." —Margo Lanagan, New York Times-bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author of Tender Morsel
"Theodora Goss's Snow White Learns Witchcraft is a gorgeous, lyric collection of fairy tale retellings. Goss has the ability—the witchcraft—to be able to see the heart of the tale, and show it, polished and reflected and new, to the reader. I loved these stories and poems, their wildness, their beauty, their truth." —Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
"With each story, Theodora Goss weaves new myths from the threads of childhood and legend. This collection does what the best songs and poems and spells do: slips gently into your consciousness, then slowly changes the way you see the world. A wonderful addition to Goss's works." —Fran Wilde, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo finalist and author of the award-winning Bone Universe trilogy
Cover art by Ruth Sanderson

Snow White Learns Witchcraft: Stories and Poems

Goss, Theodora

“This is storytelling at the top of the heap.” —Jane Yolen, winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement
“Powerful and dreamlike, this intergenerational meditation on family, mortality, and hope is far more than the sum of its parts.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Achingly familiar and wonderfully strange.” —Samuel R. Delany, Hugo and Nebula Award winner
“Plunge into The History of Soul 2065, there’s nothing like it.” —Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy Award winner
Months before World War I breaks out, two young Jewish girls just on the edge of adolescence—one from a bustling Russian city, the other from a German estate—meet in an eerie, magical forest glade. They are immediately drawn to one another and swear an oath to meet again. Though war and an ocean will separate the two for the rest of their lives, the promise that they made to each other continues through the intertwined lives of their descendants. This epic tale of the supernatural follows their families from the turn of the 20th Century through the terrors of the Holocaust and ultimately to the wonders of a future they never could have imagined. The History of Soul 2065 encompasses accounts of sorcery, ghosts, time travel, virtual reality, alien contact, and elemental confrontations between good and evil. Understated and epic, cathartic and bittersweet, the twenty connected stories in Nebula Award finalist Barbara Krasnoff’s debut form a mosaic narrative even greater than its finely crafted parts. Jane Yolen, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master, says in her introduction: “If you, like me, love quirky and original fantasy stories, I advise you to dive right in. If you, like me, admire tough writing that’s not afraid of the grit, dive right in. If you, like me, want to hang out a while with characters rich in their own traditions, dive right in. This is storytelling at the top of the heap.” 
“Krasnoff’s multigenerational, phantasmagoric saga kept me turning the pages at a rapid pace.” —James Morrow, World Fantasy Award winner
Cover art by Paula Arwen Owen, https://arwen.myportfolio.com/

The History of Soul 2065

New horror tales from the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of UNSEAMING.

Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories (Unseaming)

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