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Celebrating
Forthcoming
Karen Lord’s debut novel Redemption in Indigo is now out in the UK from Jo Fletcher/Quercus. More good news to follow!
Joan Aiken’s story “Hair” (F&SF / The Monkey’s Wedding) will be reprinted in Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
A Stranger in Olondria
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Sofia Samatar Jevick’s life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria’s Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
Trafalgar
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Angélica Gorodischer 9781618730329 · trade paper · $16 · 256pp 9781618730336 · ebook · $9.95 When you run into Trafalgar Medrano at the Burgundy or the Jockey Club and he tells you about his latest intergalactic sales trip, don’t try to rush him. He likes to stretch things out over half a dozen coffees. No one knows [...]
Errantry: Strange Stories
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Elizabeth Hand trade paper · 9781618730305 / ebook · No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand’s new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken [...]
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We occasionally post pieces from LCRW and other places up here on the web.
Would you like to read some? Decide: All the Free Stuff | Short Stories | Novel Excerpts | Reviews | Etc.
Mom’s Little Friends
by Ray Vukcevich
1 CommentBecause he wouldn’t understand, we left Mom’s German shepherd Toby leashed to the big black roll bar in the back of Ada’s pickup truck, and because Mom’s hands were tied behind her back and because her ankles were lashed together, we had some trouble wrestling her out of the cab and onto the bridge.
My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.
No Comet
by Ray Vukcevich
Leave a CommentConvinced that my slant on Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was our last hope, I bullied Jane, who didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and Sacha into cooperating with a final desperate attempt to save the world.
“This is stupid, Tim,” Jane said, her voice softened a little by the brown paper bag over her head.
“La la, la la, la la,” Sacha sang. She banged the heels of her shoes against the legs of her chair in time to her tune. Wearing a bag over her head was still fun, I thought, but our daughter was seven and had fidgeting down to a fine art. How long would she stick with me?
What’s the Story: Reading Anna Kavan’s Ice
by L. Timmel Duchamp
Leave a CommentLCRW 14 Online Extra
Anna Kavan’s Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s. The novel’s surrealist form demands a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven by narrative causality, but the text’s obsessive insistence on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist literary experiment.
Prison Is a Place on Earth
Leave a CommentHouse prices far out of reach?
Can’t afford an apartment?
Come to Prison!
“It’s just like my old man told me,” says Prisoner X, male, 37, married with two children. “Three squares a day, a job and a place to sleep. I’m doing better here than I ever did outside!”
Tired of the noise, the rat-race, the pressure of urban life? Many prisons are in rural and suburban areas. Enjoy the peace, the fresh air of a new prison. Laugh at people hurrying along from one city to another as you take a relaxed walk beside the highway (Keeping America Beautiful as you go).
Worried by overcrowding? It’s not a feature of all our prisons. Besides, there’s always solitary confinement which Charles Dickens enthusiastically described as a “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.” (American Notes for General Circulation, London: Chapman & Hall, 1842)
Perpetual Motion
by Dora Knez
Leave a Commentfrom the chapbook Five Forbidden Things
Malfi arrived in the middle toilet stall of the men’s room. The Saurians had chosen it as the best way of concealing him initially, though it was not ideal. But he was lucky: the only other man there was locked into a cubicle of his own. Malfi had plenty of time to check his appearance in the mirror and make sure he had the beeper and the ticket mock-up before entering the airport proper.
Other Agents
by Richard Butner
Leave a Comment
“1985 sure is dark,” Nick said, and another 100 watt bulb popped gently in his hands. “It’s a good thing we have these protective gauntlets.” Nick waggled his hands and scattered shards of glass on the bedspread.
“These aren’t protective gauntlets,” the Assassin replied, “they’re rubber gloves we stole from the bathroom at the Burger King.” Except for the brownish-blue gloves, the Assassin was dressed in black from head to foot.
“I like to think that they were left there for us. We are on a mission, after all.”
The motel room was strung with cheap extension cords that fed a dozen utility lamps clamped to any available surface. The dingy bedspread, scattered with supplies, glowed in the center of the ring of lights. Between the two of them they’d already smashed five bulbs.
The Assassin carefully peeled off his gloves, pushed up his mirrored sunglasses, and rubbed his eyes. His hands shook. Nick started doing one-handed pushups on the carpet.
“I’m feeling much better now that we’ve got these lights up,” Nick said, gasping. “But I’m thirsty. Let’s get some beers. What’s the best beer in 1985?”
Male Blonding
Leave a CommentExcerpts from an upcoming textbook to be published by the Northern Massachusetts University School of Industrial History.
From the Introductory Section:
Male Blonding is a modern movement that, however, has its basis in ancient times. Early Male blonds include Jesus of Nazereth who stood out very effectively from the generally dark Israeli crowds. Blonding was very popular in the highlands of Ethiopia where legends of an Aryan tribe grew up around a city where almost everyone blonded their hair. Leonardo da Vinci rediscovered Male Blonding in the Renaissance. It was a huge breakthrough when he announced that lemon juice was as effective if not more so than pigs urine. (He also drew a plan for the first machine to extract juice from lemons but was unable to construct a working model).
The Death Penalty
by Gavin J. Grant
Leave a CommentThe death penalty is alive and well as Western calendars and Bill Gates’ computers nervously approach the year 2000. In the US alone at least 490 people have been executed since 1976. But, no matter how much the practice of state mandated killing is debated, we need to abolish it now.
Fact Checking Department, Library of Alexandria, Egypt
Leave a CommentFROM: Dept. Head
TO: Editor
SUBJECT: Submissions for volume 2, number 1
DATE: September 25, 1998
Enclosed is a brief summation of major points on the latest batch of submissions to the magazine. The summation here is brief as you should have the completed report by this time (Editor’s Note: the report itself, while I don’t doubt it’s existence, has yet to make an appearance). As this is being sent telegramatically I shall keep it short.