Sleek Fat Albinos in Spring
Thu 5 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Nicole Kimberling| Posted by: Gavin
This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s sixth column for LCRW originally published in LCRW 32. Asparagus photo by Dawn Kimberling.
A couple of years ago I happened to be in Europe during the Easter season. Specifically, I was right at the border of Germany and France. There, in field after field lining the autobahn, I saw nothing growing. But my godson, who had just finished a cooking apprenticeship at a hotel in the Black Forest, saw something else.
“Under those rows covered in white plastic—that’s where they grow the spargel—white asparagus. The Germans are crazy for it.”
Is there a vegetable that better typifies spring than asparagus, white or otherwise? The somewhat sleazy little nub nosing its way blindly through the newly unfrozen soil seeking the sun’s warmth to turn from white as a worm to brilliant green.
LCRW 48 is out
Thu 5 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin
LCRW 48 has gone out into the world to subscribers, contributors, reviewers, readers, surprised people, & so on. I’ll put the table of contents below. I am almost sure it is final. Nicole Kimberling’s column is an especially good one and in keeping with my sometime habit I have posted one of of her previous columns — more Southern Hemisphere appropriate at the moment, but with luck spring will come again here, too — Sleek Fat Albinos in Spring, originally published in LCRW 32.
I have most of the next issue but already the usual November publication date is looking a bit iffy. Perhaps it’s time to retreat to the original tagline, An Occasional Outburst. In the meantime, hope you enjoy this latest issue.
Fiction
Lyndsie Manusos, Mnemonic
W. J. Tattersdill, The Skildraffen Stitch
Summer Olsson, Divergence at the Village Thrift
Zebulon House, Pianoskin Boots
Victor Ladis Schultz, Tributary
Bess Lovejoy, Internal Theft
Jennifer Hudak, The Witch Trap
Poetry
Rachel Ayers, The Soldier and Death
Daniel Rabuzzi, Along the River’s Edge
Nonfiction
Gavin J. Grant, Zining
Nicole Kimberling, The Food of Sadness
Dave Myers, Howard Waldrop Fishing: The Oso Letters 1995-2002
About These Authors
Art
Deborah Mills, b&w art
Gessica Maio, cover art: “Castle Panther”
Joan Aiken’s 100th Birthday
Wed 4 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Joan Aiken| Posted by: Gavin
Joan Aiken’s daughter, Lizza, posted on Bluesky that today, September 4th, is Joan Aiken’s Centenary. Lizza keeps her excellent Wonderful World of Joan Aiken site going as well as ensuring new editions of Joan’s work keep coming out. I’m delighted to take any opportunity to celebrate Joan’s work — although I am taking liberties here as we were never on first name terms. I think I only met her once when she was a guest at the IAFA Conference in Florida and it was a treat. She was an absolute fount of good stories from her childhood with her writer parents who split up to bringing up her own kids in a bus to publishing her first book of short stories (All You’ve Ever Wanted) to working at and writing — sometimes under a pseudonym — for Argosy magazine and others.
20+ years ago I interviewed Joan — by mail, I still have the answers somewhere in a file cabinet — for BookSense.com, the early website of the American Booksellers Association and happily for me Strange Horizons agreed to reprint it as part of a Focus Issue in 2001 where you can a story, poems, and reviews by Beth Kelleher and Jed Hartman.
I was looking for that interview and I read part of an interview Kelly did with Strange Horizons in 2005 where she said we were hoping to reprint Joan’s stories in a multi-volume set. We’d just started dipping our toe in the reprint world with Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog and we didn’t have the experience to know how hard it can be to get publicity or to get bookstores to carry reprints. So the multi-volume set idea went out the window and instead between 2008 and 2016 we published three new collections of Joan’s stories.
The first collection we published was The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories and — it still amazes me — we somehow reached Philip Pullman who sent us this:
“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”
But the real reason to mention that book is to mention UK artist Andi Watson who illustrated it and to send you off to celebrate Joan’s books by checking out this page of illustrators who worked on her stories over the years.
Blurred Boundaries Award Winner
Tue 3 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Anya DeNiro, Awards| Posted by: Gavin
Good news for Anya Johanna DeNiro whose short novel OKPsyche has been chosen as the winner of the Blurred Boundaries Award at this year’s Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards. You can read more about the awards here and here are the rest of this year’s winners:
FANTASY
Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi (HarperCollins India)
SCIENCE FICTION
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chaingang All-Stars (Pantheon / Harvill Secker)
NOVELLA
Indra Das, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (Subterranean Press)
SHORT FICTION
Kristina Ten, Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 48
Sun 1 Sep 2024 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Please use this Paypal link to buy this issue — thanks to two readers who emailed to say the regular button is only working sporadically.
———
Aimed for May, published in September 2024. 60 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731227.
L C R W 4 x 1 x 2 x 3 x 2 x 1
or IIL
or more properly XLVIII.
Editing, partially accomplished. Stories: mostly gathered. Design TK. Proofing TK. Printing TK. Ebook TK. Distribution TK. Reading by 10.2 million people TK.
Coming in this leapyear 2024 and containing these parts:
Fiction
Lyndsie Manusos, Mnemonic
W. J. Tattersdill, The Skildraffen Stitch
Summer Olsson, Divergence at the Village Thrift
Zebulon House, Pianoskin Boots
Victor Ladis Schultz, Tributary
Bess Lovejoy, Internal Theft
Jennifer Hudak, The Witch Trap
Poetry
Rachel Ayers, The Soldier and Death
Daniel Rabuzzi, Along the River’s Edge
Nonfiction
Gavin J. Grant, Zining
Nicole Kimberling, The Food of Sadness
Dave Myers, Howard Waldrop Fishing: The Oso Letters 1995-2002
About These Authors
Art
Deborah Mills, b&w art
Gessica Maio, cover art: “Castle Panther”
Celebrating
Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is a finalist in the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards; Sarah Pinsker’s Lost Places (& the press) being Locus Award finalists; and Naomi Mitchison being this year’s Memorial Guest of Honor at Readercon.
Masthead & colophon
Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 48. September 2024. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731227. Text: New Caledonia LT Std. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. Thanks, Valerie. Only surreal ingredients.
LCRW is (usually) published in June & November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 | info@smallbeerpress.com | smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Printed by Paradise Copies.
Subscriptions: $24/4 issues — the chocolate option is very popular while the marmite option is gaining ground. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO. DRM-free ebooks available from the lovely weightlessbooks.com, &c.
Cover illustration “Castle Panther” © 2024 Gessica Maio. All rights reserved.
Contents © 2024 the authors. All rights reserved.
Please send fiction and poetry submissions (especially weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above.
Thanks again, authors, artists, readers.
Dear Subscribers,
please send your old and new mailing addresses to us at info@smallbeerpress.com.
Thank you!
About These Authors
Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes and hosts shows for Sweet Cheeks Cabaret. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science, which comes in handy at odd hours. The DM for her D&D group is constantly exasperated by her need for more research texts to read in her spare time, especially as they are a homebrew group. She dabbles with oil painting, knitting, and making burlesque costumes and pasties. Her fiction appears in Metaphorosis, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Radon Journal, and the anthology Fall into Fantasy; she is a regular contributor at reactor.com. She shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.
Zebulon House is a white settler, born on unceded land of the Pennacook. They are the author of The psychic surgeon assists (Calamari Archive, Ink., 2024), and their work has previously appeared in ergot. and Sleepingfish. They work as a librarian, and play horror sound effects on the radio; you can find them online at zebulon-hourse.xyz.
Jennifer Hudak is a speculative fiction writer fueled mostly by tea. Her work has appeared on both the Locus and the SFWA recommended reading lists, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Boston, she now lives with her family in Upstate New York where she teaches yoga, knits pocket-sized animals, and misses the ocean. Find out more about her at jenniferhudakwrites.com.
Nicole Kimberling has cooked so much food in her lifetime that she’s developed a philosophy around nearly every aspect of it. When she’s not putting hot meals on the table she can be found either running Blind Eye Books or procrastinating until the last possible second to finish her most recent novel. You find her on IG @the_nicole_kimberling
Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. Her fiction has also appeared in The Ghastling, while her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Atlas Obscura, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Public Domain Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.
Gessica Maio is an illustrator. Initially trained in communication design. She works for Hermès, Fulllife, The Good Life, and Marie-Claire Magazine. In 2021, she won the Prix des Agents Associés prize and the Grand Prix Jeunes Talents prize at the Saint-Malo Comics Festival.
Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared in LeVar Burton Reads, The Deadlands, Lightspeed, and other publications. She lives in Indianapolis with her family, works as an indie bookseller, and writes for Book Riot. You can read more of her work at lyndsiemanusos.com.
Deborah A. Mills (she/hers) is a professional woodcarver, who trained in Norway. She has demonstrated & taught classes at the Cloisters/Metropolitan Museum, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum. Her commissioned pieces are in many private collections. Deborah illustrated Daniel Rabuzzi’s two novels. She lives in New York City with Daniel, where they collaborate on various projects.
David E. Myers has published fiction in Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Pulphouse, and articles in the New York Review of Science Fiction and “How-To-Build an Igloo” at Gorp.com. He is a graduate and former administrator of Clarion West, has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and currently resides in Seattle. He fly-fishes when near water.
Summer Olsson is an emerging writer whose stories are threaded with loneliness, ghosts, everyday magic, and female perspectives. Besides being a writer, she works in theater as a physical comedian and puppeteer. She also works in stop motion animation, and was a Second Assistant Director on the film Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. She grew up in New Mexico and lives in Oregon.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he/his) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Asimov’s, Harvard Review, Abyss & Apex, Coffin Bell, Shimmer, Red Ogre Review, Goblin Fruit, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Pushcart Prize nominee. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills.
Victor Ladis Schultz lives near Chicago. His fiction has been in various venues, including McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Chicago Quarterly Review, Barrelhouse, and Chiricú: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. He is also an editor at the Chicago Review of Books.
W. J. Tattersdill writes stories about a fantasy ferry network, others of which have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. With Sarah Crofton, he’s co-author of League of Thieves, a kids’ choose-your-own book published by Usborne. He lives in Scotland with an assortment of strange animals and is also a teacher, critic, and musician. He’s very good at Mario Kart.
Peace in our time.