It is traditional in the world of zines to apologize for the lateness of the latest issue to appear. This goes back to Bob, the first caveman to leave a couple of carved stone tablets with his musings on the politics of fire distribution and some great undiscovered band he saw in a cave a few hills over. His next carvings, were, of course, a bit delayed. You know how it is. A hunt goes long. The crop gets rain-delayed and the delay just rolls over everything else. Other projects—carving wheels, painting the walls—get in the way. Eventually Bob gets through the to-do list and starts getting a new issue of his zine out. Eventually we did, too.

Besides, we’re introducing a new columnist, Nicole Kimberling, who will write about food. This time, she starts us off with that most delightful of foods: brownies.

Reviews

“Unusual and imaginative, with a distinct literary tone and a lot of characters on the far edge of sanity, if not beyond.”
—Lois Tilton, Locus Online

“This small black and white irregularly-published journal is much bigger inside than it is outside.”
—Terry Weyna, Fantasy Literature

SF Revu

Fiction

A. D. Jameson, The Wolves of St. Etienne
Jessy Randall, The Hedon-Ex Anomaly
K. M. Ferebee, Thou Earth, Thou
Karen Heuler, Elvis in Bloom
M. K. Hobson, A Sackful of Ramps
Carol Emshwiller, The Mismeasure of Me
David Rowinski, Music Box
Joan Aiken, The Sale of Midsummer
Sarah Harris Wallman, The Malanesian

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Sending All Your Love
Gwenda Bond, Dear Aunt Gwenda
About these Authors

Poetry

Sarah Heller, Four Poems
Sarah Heller, Garden
David Blair, Five Poems

Cover

Kathleen Jennings

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.27, August 2011. ISSN 1544-7782. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 17 of the paper edition or here). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets.

LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, Weightless Books, and Fictionwise, and occasionally as a trade paperback and ebook from lulu.com/sbp.

Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

As always, thanks for reading.

We wish Michael J. DeLuca were not leaving Small Beer East for Detroit but we wish him and Erin well and we’re very grateful for his time, his bread, beer, and good cheer. He’s provided more help than we could list in 60 pages, never mind in this note. Thanks, Michael.

Joan Aiken (1924–2004) was born in Rye, England. After her first husband’s death, she sup- ported her family by copyediting at Argosy and worked at an advertising agency before turning full time to writing fiction. She wrote for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, and Women’s Own, and over a hundred books—perhaps the best known of which are the dozen novels in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She received the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction, and was awarded an MBE. “The Sale of Midsummer” was first published in Ghostly Grim and Gruesome (Helen Hoke, ed., 1976) and was recently collected in The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories.

David Blair’s first book, Ascension Days, was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize. He teaches at the New England Institute of Art.

Gwenda Bond lives in Lexington, KY, with her husband, the writer Christopher Rowe, and a number of pets, chilled bottles of champagne, books, and just the right number of screwball comedies.

Carol Emshwiller’s most recent books include The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, a novel, The Secret City, and a collection, I Live with You. She lives in New York City.

K. M. Ferebee was bred, born, and raised in Texas. Currently she lives, more or less, in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer and The Brooklyn Rail. She has a strange obsession with the geography of London, and no great gift for gardening.

Sarah Heller received her BA from Bard College and her MFA in poetry from NYU. She teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and was the Executive Director of the Authors League Fund from 2000–2010, where she now serves as Executive Advisor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in RealPoetik, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, NextBook, The Temple/El Templo, Thin Air, The Apocalypse Anthology, The Literary Companion to Shabbat, and Hayloft. She has received fellowships or awards from the Drisha Institute, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Council for the Creative Arts, Centre D’Art I Natura (Spain), Vermont Studio Center, and Soul Mountain Retreat. She is on the Board of Directors of Nightboat Books and Triskelion Arts.

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in anthologies and in dozens of literary and speculative publications from Alaska Quarterly Review and Arts & Letters to Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Weird Tales. She has published two novels and a short story collection, and has won an O. Henry award. She lives in New York City with her dog, Booker Prize, and cat, Pulitzer.

M. K. Hobson’s short fiction has recently appeared in the Haunted Legends anthology, as well as in Realms of Fantasy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Postscripts. She is the author of two novels, The Native Star and The Hidden Goddess. She lives in Oregon.

A. D. Jameson is the author of the novel Giant Slugs and the prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy. He contributes regularly to the group literary blog Big Other.

Nicole Kimberling resides in Bellingham, Washington with her epically long-time partner, Dawn Kimberling, two bad cats and a rotating assortment of houseguests. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Though currently the editor of Blind Eye Books, she has mostly made her money working as a professional cook.

Jessy Randall’s stories, poems, and other things have appeared in Asimov’s, Flurb, and McSweeney’s. Her young adult novel The Wandora Unit is about love and friendship in the high school literary crowd.

David Rowinski splits his time between Amherst with his sons and East Africa where his wife, Sali Oyugi, runs their bar and inn. He has taught English in Cairo, worked in a youth hostel in Athens, been a PCA in Zurich, a security guard in Boston, and is currently painting houses to pay the bills. Last year he found out he was adopted and is tracking down his half sister via the internet. All of this will find its way into the stories he has yet to write.

After stints in Arkansas, Nashville, Charlottesville, England, New York, and Pittsburgh, Sarah Harris Wallman settled in New Haven CT, where she teaches English and creative writing at Albertus Magnus College. She has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Her fiction and plays have previously appeared in Brooklyn’s L Magazine, readshortfiction. com, and once in a swimming pool atop a midtown Marriott.

Electronic subscriptions to LCRW are now available.

After issue no. 25, NewPages said, “More, more, more please.” SF Revu suggested, “If you want to support some very wonderful fiction, than subscribe to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.” Esubs will be available very soon. And Mr. John Klima declared on Tor.com “The issue is filled with a bunch of names I don’t know, but that’s always been true. And while I like reading work from my favorite writers, I like uncovering new (either brand-new or new-to-me) writers, too.” Which made us very happy as while we also very much enjoy our favorite writers we also love reading new (or new-to-us) writers.

This zine was almost published in October. And so nearly published in November. And here it is coming up to December and (insert chorus singing something striking but not at all holiday-like) and Lo! here it is. Eight stories: dread pirate ships, dread submersibles, dread sheds! Alice, Three-Hat Juan, and welders in love. Ted Chiang on folk biology. And a cover that should be reproduced on the side of a skyscraper. Yep, we liked it—hope you do, too.

All of this copiously illustrated with letters throughout. Sometimes as many as 2000 per page. Most arranged in forms known colloquially as “English.”

No part of this zine was produced on a Freyfarm.

We have advertisers and will sell you space if you like. We take dollars, pounds, euros, or chocolate bars. Hello and thank yous to Bull Spec, Icarus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Publications, Electric Velocipede, &c!

* Also known as “text.”

Reviews: SF Revu · Rise Reviews · “Some of the oddest fiction that you could hope to find.” — Fantasy Literature · “Strange, original fiction that bulges well out of the corset of genre.” — SFF Portal

And now, the actual and real Table of Contents:

Fiction
Harvey Welles and Philip Raines, The Cruel Ship’s Captain
Patty Houston, Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever
Carlea Holl-Jensen, Sleep
Rahul Kanakia, The Other Realms Were Built With Trash
Veronica Schanoes, Alice: a Fantasia
Sean Melican, Absence of Water
Jenny Terpsichore Abeles, Three Hats
J. M. McDermott, Death’s Shed

Nonfiction
Ted Chiang, Reasoning about the Body
Gwenda Bond, Dear Aunt Gwenda
The Patient Writers

Poetry
Lindsay Vella, Thirst; The Way to the Sea; Spit Out the Seeds; The Seamstress; Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying
Darrell Schweitzer, Dueling Trilogies

Cover
Sarah Goldstein, Broken Stick; Year: 2004; Size: 11” x 10. ”Materials: acrylic medium, gouache on paper.

About These Authors

Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is an amateur cosmologist, ragpicker, fabulist, and wandering scholar. She lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts (she thinks) and is writing a novel about Renaissance feminism and werewolves. “Three Hats” is her first non-self published story and LCRW is her favorite literary magazine, so she’s having an unusually splendid day.

Gwenda Bond has just finished a novel.

Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and holds a degree in computer science from Brown University. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. His fiction has won three Hugos, four Nebulas, three Locus awards, and a Sturgeon award. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

Sarah Goldstein was born in Toronto and lives in western Massachusetts. Her artwork has been exhibited in the US and Canada, and her first book, Fables, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press next spring.

Carlea Holl-Jensen was born on a Wednesday. Since then, her short fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz and Call & Response, and she once received a prize. She is confident that you will enjoy reading her blog at hourofgold.wordpress.com.

Patty Houston lives in Cincinnati with her husband and daughters. She teaches English at the University of Cincinnati and is also at work on a short story collection.

Rahul Kanakia is an international development consultant based in Washington, D.C.

J. M. McDermott’s favorite color is dark blue. With five novels forthcoming, he has not been able to keep up with all the activity of his favorite television programs. Forthcoming books include a reprint of his critically-acclaimed Last Dragon, with his new novel Maze from Apex Books, and a fantasy trilogy beginning with Never Knew Another from Nightshade.

Sean Melican would like you to know that true love exists. Oh, and that Popeye’s is da shizz.

Philip Raines lives in Linlithgow in Scotland. Harvey Welles lives in the Milwaukee of his mind.

Veronica Schanoes’s work has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Sybil’s Garage. She lives in New York City where she is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College—CUNY. She does not like cats.

Darrell Schweitzer has also rewritten a good deal of the works of H.P. Lovecraft into limerick form. Among his longer works, he has published about 300 stories and three novels. His PS Publications novella Living with the Dead was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He used to edit Weird Tales and now edits anthologies, the most recent of which are Cthulhu’s Reign and Full Moon City (with Martin Greenberg).

Lindsay Vella has been assigned a flammability rating of 3 (severe fire hazard). Fires involving Lindsay Vella should be fought upwind and from the maximum distance possible. Keep unnecessary people away; isolate hazard and deny entry. Her poems have appeared in Spork, and she lives in Detroit.

Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.
Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques.
Extra thanks: Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.26, December 2010. ISSN 1544-7782. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 17 of the paper edition or here—and, whoop de doo, are there some choices). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets.

LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, Weightless Books, and Fictionwise, and occasionally as a trade paperback and ebook from lulu.com/sbp. Electronic subscriptions coming next week!

Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply.  Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

These days we’re always behind in our reading, sorry. Thanks to the writers for their patience—especially Darrell, whose misplaced poems took five years to reach print(!), Sean, and Phil & Harvey (whose stories took two or three years). On the right side of the first page are covers of a few books we’re working on for 2011. Not all of those covers are final. There are a few books missing and then there is a chapbook—the last, we expect, for a while—by Hal Duncan, An A-Z of the Fantastic City, which we will publish in some lovely ways in spring. As always, thanks for reading.

We’re very happy to release a new issue of LCRW into the world. Away, zine, away! And now with more translation! Edward Gauvin provides a taster of his upcoming collection of French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s lovely, weird stories in “A City of Museums” and Chinese author Haihong Zhao translated her own award winning story, “Exuviation.”

Apart from that, this issue contains no BHCPs, LLCs (we’ll get there one day!), manganates, managements, or manatees. Maybe next time.

Reviews: SF Revu · Tor.com · NewPages

Fiction
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, “A City of Museums”
(translated by Edward Gauvin)
Jennifer Linnaea, “Fire-Marrow”
Ben Francisco, “This is Not Concrete”
Sean Adams, “The Famous Detective and His Telepathy Goggles”
Richard Gess, “Circumnavigation, With Dogs ”
Eilis O’Neal, “The Sleeper”
Richard Parks, “The Queen’s Reason”
Daniel Braum, “Music of the Spheres”
Sarah Tourjee, “The Problem With Strudel”
Thomas Israel Hopkins, “Elephants of the Platte”
Haihong Zhao, “Exuviation”

Nonfiction
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
The Patient Writers

Poetry
Susannah Mandel, “Box.”
Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Three Poems”
Christa Bergerson, “Heliotrope Hedgerow”

Comic
Abby Denson, “Tales from Dolltopia: The Candies”

Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Michael J. DeLuca.
Readers: Diana Coa, Kristen Evans, Su-Yee Lin, Nicholas Miriello, and Abram Thau.

Ursula update: Ursula Annabel Link Grant was discharged from (the truly fantastic) Franciscan Hospital for Children in early April. Gavin & Kelly won’t be taking her into crowds for a while (say 2011) as her premature arrival left her with compromised lungs. But she is growing, is very much enjoying life & bringing joy up to the maximum. Thank you for your patience & for all help received in the last year or so.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.25, May 2010. ISSN 1544-7782. Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow.
Since 1996, LCRW has usually appeared in June and November from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see here for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, WeightlessBooks.com, Fictionwise.com, and lulu.com, and sometimes as a trade paperback from lulu.com/sbp. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Thanks for reading.

Sean Adams is a graduate of Bennington College. His writing has appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He also writes a humor blog as a character named Landrew Kentmore which can be found at landrewstake.com. Right now, he might be in his hometown Pine Plains, NY. He might also be in Iowa. You can never be too sure.

Christa A. Bergerson’s poem appeared with a line out of place in LCRW 23. She is a guardian of Nature and all of her wondrous inhabitants, even those who writhe betwixt the veil. Her poetry has appeared in Quantum Pulp, The Candor, Open Ways, and Faerie Nation Magazine. She was a finalist in The Mattia Family 11th International Poetry Competition. Her poem “Sekhmet Upon the Horizon” garnered third place in the 2008 B.S.F.S. Poetry Contest.

Gwenda Bond is an international woman of mystery who recently received the Veritas Media Award.

Daniel Braum likes bats, rose water lassis, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and the old rail cars on the Long Island Rail Road as opposed to the new ones. His fiction often resides in the fuzzy areas between genres and has appeared in publications ranging from Electric Velocipede and Full Unit Hook Up to Midnight Echo and Cemetery Dance.

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is the author of nine novels and over one hundred short stories. He is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. This spring Small Beer Press is publishing A Life on Paper, his first collection of stories to be translated into English.

Ben Francisco’s short stories have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Realms of Fantasy, Dreaming Again, Shimmer, and PodCastle. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner. His day jobs have included receptionist for a church rectory, volunteer coordinator for an LGBT community center, and program director for a foundation.

Edward Gauvin has published George-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s work in AGNI Online, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Words Without Borders, The Café Irreal, and The Brooklyn Rail. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he is the recipient of a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and translates graphic novels for Tokyopop, First Second Books, and Archaia Studios Press.

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily and were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry and a Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Mythic Delirium, and Ninth Letter, and have been nominated for the Rhysling Award. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University.

Richard Gess is a writer, musician, and photographer from Decatur, Georgia. He’s currently working on a novel, making pictures with a vintage Diana camera and a customized Brownie Hawkeye, and drumming for the nascent Atlanta bands My Lost Heart and The Last Lilies. He has an MFA in writing from UNC-Greensboro, and a dayjob at Emory University, cataloging rare twentieth-century poetry ’zines from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

Zhao Haihong, a science fiction writer and translator, gained an M.A. in English literature from Zhejiang University in 2002 and has been teaching English literature in Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China. She started writing science fiction in 1996, and has received the Galaxy Award from Science Fiction World Magazine, the Soong Ching Ling Children’s Literature Award, and the sixth National Writers Association Award for outstanding children’s literature in China. Her first story collection, Eyes of the Birches, was published in 1999. “Exuviation” (the Chinese version), first published in 2000 in Science Fiction World Magazine, was honored with the Galaxy Award.

Thomas Israel Hopkins owes a debt of gratitude to chapter three of Merrill J. Mattes’s history The Great Platte River Road; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essay “The Canal-Boat,” published anonymously in the New-England Magazine in 1835; and modern dentistry. He dreams of a future in which his blog, tomhop.com, is wind-powered; as of this writing, it still appears to be running on energy generated by squirrels, magnets, and inertia.

Jennifer Linnaea is or has been a research scientist, bicycle superhero, personal growth workshop assistant, and landlord, not necessarily in that order. She lives in Oregon and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Flashquake, and other magazines.

Susannah Mandel’s poetry and fictions has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, Peter Parasol, The Lamplighter Review, Shimmer, and Escape Clause. Her flash fiction appears regularly at DailyCabal.com, and she writes a column for Strange Horizons on the fantastic in pre-modern literature. Susannah has lived in California, Boston, Philadelphia, and northern France, and is delighted to be paying her first visit to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Eilis O’Neal lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is Managing Editor of Nimrod International Journal. Her YA fantasy novel, The False Princess (Egmont) will be published this summer. Her short stories have or will appear in Fantasy, Interfictions II Online, ASIM, Zahir, Leading Edge, and others.

Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. He collects Japanese woodblock prints but otherwise has no hobbies since they all require time. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, LCRW, Fantasy, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His collection, The Ogre’s Wife, was a World Fantasy Award finalist. His novel, The Long Look, was on the Locus Recommended Reading list.

Sarah Tourjee lives and works 9–5 in Boston, MA. Her short fiction has appeared in the Sonora Review.

This zine was made in the spring and summer of 2009 by Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Michael J. DeLuca, Sara Majka, Paul Bozzo, Kristen Evans, and Faune Albert, and put back from June to July by the best reason Gavin & Kelly have ever had: Ursula Annabel Link Grant, born February 23rd, 2009. Our deepest thanks go to everyone at Baystate Medical Center and the Ronald McDonald House in Springfield, Mass.

Fiction
Alexander Lamb, “Eleven Orchid Street”
Liz Williams, “Dusking”
Jasmine Hammer, “Tornado Juice”
J. W. M. Morgan, “Superfather”
Dicky Murphy, “The Magician’s Umbrella”
Alissa Nutting, “Leave the Dead to the Living”
Eve Tushnet, “A Story Like Mine”
Dennis Danvers, “The Broken Dream Factory”
Anya Groner, “The Magician’s Keeper”

Nonfiction
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”

Poetry
Neile Graham, “Machrie Moore”
Marina Rubin, “Bordeaux, And Other Mysteries”

Comics
Abby Denson, “Heady’s Crush”

Cover

Matthew Kirby

Reviews: SF Revu. Ray Garraty/Endless Falls Up (from Russia).

Subscriptions: $5 per single issue or $20/4. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library and institutional subscriptions available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as an ebook through Fictionwise.com, smallbeerpress.com, and lulu.com, and (maybe some day) as a trade paperback from lulu.com/sbp.

Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Thanks for reading.

Made by Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Kendell Diane Richmond, Michael J. DeLuca, Sara Majka, Danielle Baldassini, and Anna Brenner.

Fiction

Nick Wolven, “The LoveSling”
Kat Meads, “The Emily(s) Debate the Impact of Reclusive on Life, Art, Family, Community and Pets”
Susan Wardle, “The Chance”
Alex Wilson, “A Wizard of MapQuest”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “In the Name of the Mother”
Daniel Lanza, “Holden Caulfield Doesn’t Love Me”
Kirstin Allio, “Marie and Roland”
William Alexander, “Ana’s Tag”
Mark Rich, “The Leap”
Angela Slatter, “The Girl With No Hands”

Nonfiction
Ted Chiang, “The Problem of the Traveling Salesman”

Poetry
Kim Parko, “Sailor,” “Shiny Hair,” “Schoolgirl”
Christa Bergerson, “Heliotrope Hedgerow”

Comics
Abby Denson, “Jingle Love”

Cover

Kevin Huizenga

Reviews

“Carruthers, put that bloody thing down. I think I heard a …”

Kirstin Allio‘s novel Garner (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She was selected one of “5 Under 35″ writers to watch (and hopefully read) by the National Book Foundation. She lives in Seattle, WA, with her husband and sons.

William Alexander lives in the middle and writes on the side. This particular story is dedicated to Kelly, both of them, the sister and the author and the editor. His stories have appeared in Zahir, Weird Tales, and Postscripts, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008. He contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Jedediah Berry‘s debut novel, The Manual of Detection, comes out in February 2009 from The Penguin Press.

Christa A. Bergerson is a guardian of Nature and all of her wondrous inhabitants, even those who writhe betwixt the veil. In twilight hours, she finds pleasure traversing the wilds of Illinois and beyond. She is a Luddite, a bibliophile and suffers from occasional bouts of Chronophobia. Her poetry has appeared in Quantum Pulp, The Candor, Open Ways, Faerie Nation Magazine, and Balticon 42. She was a finalist in The Mattia Family 11th International Poetry Competition. Her poem “Sekhmet Upon the Horizon” garnered third place in the 2008 B.S.F.S. Poetry Contest.

Ted Chiang is a mild-mannered reporter by day, but at night he dons a costume and commits crime. Or fights crime. Or is a victim of crime. History will be the judge.

Abby Denson is a cartoonist and rock’n'roller in NYC. She is the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, Dolltopia, and Night Club, among others. She has scripted Powerpuff Girls and comics for Nickelodeon. She has webcomics on gurl.com and a dessert comic column in The L Magazine.

Daniel Lanza was born and raised in Northern California, but currently resides across country while he finishes a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. His work has appeared in Toasted Cheese Literary Quarterly and Zephyr. Like half the known world, he is currently at work on a novel. He is also collaborating on a graphic novel which will, at some point, have a website.

Kat Meads‘s most recent book publication is a novel, The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan (Chiasmus Press). She lives in California.

Chris Nakashima-Brown lives in Austin, TX. His most recent story is in the anthology Fast Forward 2.

Kim Parko is a writer, visual artist, and seasoned worrier who lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband and dog. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3rd bed, The Bitter Oleander, Caketrain, Diagram, and 5AM.

Mark Rich has two new fiction collections: Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood). New stories are in Talebones, Tales of the Unanticipated, Zahir, and Analog. He is working on two books for McFarland, one on C.M. Kornbluth and what that author says about us, the other on Modern-century science fiction toys, and what they say about us. He and Martha Borchardt and Scottie Lorna, an avid squeak-toy aficionado, live in the Wisconsin coulee region.

Anna Sears is a writer/artist currently employed as a migrant holiday store worker in Staten Island, NY. She hopes to settle down soon and adopt a cat.

Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer studying for a PhD in Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in Shimmer, ONSPEC, Strange Tales II, and Twelfth Planet’s 2012. Three of her stories gained honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 20; her story “The Angel Wood” was short-listed for the Aurealis Award, and she was short-listed for the Ditmars Best New Talent award in 2008.

Jodi Lynn Villers has her MFA from North Carolina State University. She lives in downtown Raleigh with a beagle named Turtle and has written a novella about a rehabilitation camp for girls who have killed their parents. Her short-shorts have also appeared in Staccato and Quick Fiction.

Susan Wardle is a graduate of Clarion South. Her fiction has been published in the Shadow Box e-anthology, Overland, Andromeda Spaceways, Antipodean SF, Fables & Reflections, Shadowed Realms, Ticonderoga Online, and The Outcast to name a few. Susan currently lives between Sydney and the South Coast (Australia) and spends her daylight hours (and some of her night time hours) working for local government.

Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov’s, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Outlaw Territory II (Image), and elsewhere. He runs the audiobook project Telltale Weekly and publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art.

Nick Wolven‘s short fiction has appeared recently in Asimov’s and Paradox. He lives in Brooklyn.

Subscriptions: $5 per single issue or $20/4. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library and institutional subscriptions available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as an ebook through Fictionwise.com, lcrw.net, and lulu.com, and as a trade paperback from lulu.com/sbp.

Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Thanks for reading.

masthead
Made in the May of 2008 by:
Gavin J. Grant · Kelly Link
Jedediah Berry · Michael Deluca · Katharine Duckett · Margaret Kinney · Sara Majka · Julia Botero

William Alexander lives in Minneapolis with spouse and cat. His stories have appeared in Zahir, Weird Tales, and Postscripts, and one will be reprinted in Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008. He contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books. In the summer of ’06 he attended the Clarion Workshop. It was fun.

Miriam Allred has a BA in Comparative Literature and French from Brigham Young University and an MA in English from Cleveland State University. She lives in Salt Lake City, near many supportive friends and family members, where she earns a living writing about routers and wireless networks. She also writes stories.

Charlie Jane Anders blogs about science fiction and futurism for io9.com. She’s the author of Choir Boy and the co-editor of She’s Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Salon, Sex For America, Paraspheres, and MonkeyBicycle. She’s the co-founder of other magazine and the host of a reading series, Writers With Drinks, in San Francisco.

Gwenda Bond is writing young adult novels on a tin machine that has no internet access.

Becca De La Rosa has recently had fiction published in Strange Horizons and the Fantasy Magazine anthology, among other places. She is currently studying English at an art college in Ireland.

Michael J. DeLuca has published fiction in Interfictions and Clockwork Phoenix. He makes beer and other libations in Massachusetts.

Abby Denson is a cartoonist and rock’n'roller in NYC. She is the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, Dolltopia, and Night Club, among others. She has scripted Powerpuff Girls and comics for Nickelodeon. She has webcomics on gurl.com and a dessert comic column, “The City Sweet Tooth” (citysweettooth.com) in The L Magazine. abbycomix.com
Kristine Dikeman lives in NYC. Her work has appeared in The Many Faces of Van Helsing, The Book of Final Flesh, Sybil’s Garage, and All Hallows. She is working on a novel, Eating Manhattan, a lighthearted romp through New York, with zombies.

Carol Emshwiller‘s most recent books are a novel, The Secret City, a young adult novel, Mr. Boots, and a collection, I Live with You. Small Beer published her novel The Mount and her collection, Report to the Men’s Club as well as reprinting her first novel, Carmen Dog.Recent awards include a couple of Nebulas for short stories, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. She lives in New York City.

Eileen Gunn is the author of a collection, Stable Strategies and Others, and co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles Two. She is the publisher of the Infinite Matrix, and in the dead of night can hear it stomping around in the attic. For nearly 20 years, she has been on the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and she thinks it’s time for someone else to take over.

Alex Dally MacFarlane has been writing ever since the discovery of computer games made her think that if stories could be found on a 32-bit cartridge, why not in the mind of an 11-year-old girl? Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and a few other places. Her longer fiction is still being kick-polished.

Maureen F. McHugh‘s most recent book is a collection of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters. She writes novels and Alternate Reality Games. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Jeremie McKnight was born under the restless skies of Ohio farm-country where he began his storytelling at an early age. By high school he was a published and award-winning author. And then he stopped. He now lives in Pittsburgh PA., and this is his first story in over a decade. It has made him very happy.

Mark Rigney is the author of Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical. His short fiction has appeared in Shadow Regions, Talebones, The Bellevue Literary Review, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, &c. His plays for the stage have won national contests and been performed in six states. Having worked as a zookeeper, he is now proud to be a stay-at-home father.

David J. Schwartz is all around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship. His first novel, Superpowers, is in stores as you are reading this. He is allergic to midichlorians.

Cara Spindler likes apples, broccoli, and eel, but hates ham and cantaloupe. She likes strolling, running, swimming—but hates to sit. And she still has five continents to visit before she dies.

Jodi Lynn Villers has her MFA from North Carolina State University. She lives in downtown Raleigh with a beagle named Turtle and has written a novella about a rehabilitation camp for girls who have killed their parents. Her short-shorts have also appeared in Staccato and Quick Fiction.

Caleb Wilson‘s fiction has appeared in places like Diagram, Weird Tales, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He and his wife life in Illinois. His alter-ego works in a bookstore.

LCRW 21 is the latest iteration of the eleven-dimensional being known as LCRW. Although it has always been there, it began protruding into our space time consciousness in November of 2007 as a sixty-page stapled zine with a lovely creamy cover.

Humans cannot perceive the other seven dimensions of LCRW, but if they put it against the top of their head while jumping off a small box of caramels, they can get a hint of what they are missing.

See Scribd preview below.

masthead
Made in the Autumn of 2007 by:
Gavin J. Grant · Kelly Link
Jedediah Berry · Michael Deluca · Annabel Link

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 21 ebook

$5 · Approximately 30 sheets of paper, printed on each side and folded making 30 pages of Good Stuff all in glorious technicolor black & white.

masthead
Made in the Spring of 2007 by:
Gavin J. Grant · Kelly Link
Jedediah Berry · Michael Deluca · Heidi Smith · Lauren Smith · Caitlin Beck

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 ebook

November 2006 · $5 · 56 pages · Black & white.

See Scribd preview below.

masthead
Made in the autumn of 2006 by:
Gavin J. Grant · Kelly Link
Jedediah Berry · Michael Deluca · Heidi Smith · Lauren Smith · Caitlin Beck

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 ebook

See Scribd preview below.

Two Notes

1. LCRW comes out twice a year. Should you wish a third issue, please send us a check for $500. That issue will be the Your-Name-Here Issue. It will also be numbered for our simpler editors.

2. A new literary award. We believe everyone is special (even those people who don’t read — or write for — LCRW, but this award is not for them). Here is the press release:

those writers

Matthew Lee Bain writes: I am twenty-nine autumns old. My avocations include the study of psychology, German (language and culture), and philology. In my free time, I enjoy strength training, viewing avant-garde cinema, and rolling around on the floor while screaming in agony. My vocations include writing fiction and poetry; I’m a freelance daydreamer of dark fantasies.

Gwenda Bond wears an N95 mask while posting about books and writing at her blog, Shaken & Stirred.

Fred Coppersmith finds it difficult to write about himself in the third person. He writes stories, and sometimes things that aren’t stories — and sometimes, late at night, things that are caught in some weird place in between. As luck would have it, he lives in New York.

Jenny Benjamin-Smith has had poems published in the New York Quarterly, Poetry Motel, Wisconsin Review, Iowa Woman, Columbia, and Crab Orchard Review. She has poems forthcoming in the South Carolina Review, Chelsea, The Baltimore Review, Hubbub, and Carquinez Poetry Review. She teaches literature to high school students in Milwaukee, Wisc.

Peter Bebergal is the co-author, with Scott Korb, of The Faith Between Us (forthcoming, Bloomsbury), and is an editor at Zeek.net. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Becca De La Rosa lives in Ireland and is studying English at university. She refuses to apologise for this. Her fiction has appeared most recently at Strange Horizons, among other places.

Tsultrim Dorjee lives in Southern New Hampshire where he is a student at Vermont College. He received his Tibetan name from Lama Pema Wangdak, and works as a crisis line operator for a peer support center. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in, The Awakenings Review, Puckerbrush Review, Sacred Journey and Red Owl.

Michael Emmons was born and raised in Missoula, MT, where he now lives. In 2004 he graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in English. This is his first published story.

Erik Gallant lives in Northampton, MA.

Sunshine Ison works in Mexico, is writing a book on beauty pageants, and next year will be working in Vietnam.

Will McIntosh has sold stories to Interzone, Futurismic, Abyss & Apex, Albedo One, and Challenging Destiny. By day, he’s a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University.

Sarah Micklem published her first novel, Firethorn, in 2004. She is currently working on the sequel, Wildfire (Scribner., 2007). She lives in New York and Indiana, where she teaches at Notre Dame University. “The Fabricant of Marvels” is part of a series of folk tales from the nonexistent island, Abigomas.

Famous Novelist is working on his umpteenth Great American Sleep Device. His “story” here was written in 1972 and is published in an attempt to pull in more readers for this zine and to pay for his coffee this week.

Stephanie Parent is a recent graduate of Franklin & Marshall College, where she majored in English and Women’s Studies. She is currently working as a piano teacher in Baltimore, Maryland while working on a young adult novel. She hopes to attend graduate school in England next year.

Scot Peacock is a senior editor in the academic reference field. His works of weird romance, published in such journals as The Suburbanite and Pluto’s Orchard, are few and far between. A novel about a ghost and his mother will remain unfinished for years.

Veronica Schanoes is a writer and scholar whose work has previously appeared on Endicott Studio, Jabberwocky, and Trunk Stories, as well as LCRW. Her poem “The Room” was recently published by Papaveria Press. She does not like cats.

Ma-tsu and John Schoffstall were out for a walk, when they saw some wild geese flying past.
“What are they?” asked Ma-tsu.
“They’re wild geese,” said John.
“Where are they going?” demanded Ma-tsu.
John replied, “They’ve already flown away.”
Suddenly Ma-tsu grabbed John by the nose and twisted it so that John cried out in pain. “How,” he shouted, “could they ever have flown away?”
“Well,” said John, “a bird’s wing is arched, so that air takes longer to pass over the top than the bottom. Through the Bernoulli principle, this creates lift, enabling flight. Muscular activity provides forward thrust. Birds’ bodies also have a number of specializations for flight, including hollow bones that decrease their weight relative to other vertebrates, and a streamlined shape. Birds in flight will rapidly out-distance individuals on the ground, eventually disappearing from their view behind trees or other landscape features. Thus, the birds were able to fly away.”
“You’re never going to achieve enlightenment, are you?” Ma-tsu asked.
“I just think birds are cool,” John replied. “I’m hungry. C’mon, let’s get lunch.”

David J. Schwartz lives in Chicago with a guitar named June. Cyberdavidjschwartz lives here, but is moody. His stories and poems live in The Third Alternative, Say…, Talebones, and Strange Horizons, as well as previous issues of this publication and others. Han kan norsk, men ikke saa bra.

Angela Slatter is a Masters in Creative Writing student at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. Her flash fiction has appeared on Antipodean SF several times and she ghost-writes finance articles to help pay the bills. She can often be found pushing papers around a desk at the Creative Writing & Cultural Studies Discipline at QUT, putting her admin-nerd skills to good use.

William Smith makes spanky new books and sells dusty old ones. Find him at trunkstories.com and hangfirebooks.com.

E. Catherine Tobler climbed mountains in her youth, in a bright yellow coat, with shoes that were red, yellow, and blue, and made her feel like a clown. She endured. Writing, she decided, is not that much different. In addition to other places, her short fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Strange New Worlds, Mota 3, and Would That It Were.

Jeannette Westwood is seventeen years old and has attended the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers. She likes paper-mache cats. This is her first publication.

Emily Wilson finds stories inspire her and enable her to create more than she could on her own — she loves to collaborate. She believes that with all our powers combined we can fight for justice much more easily, and wear really fun outfits — perhaps matching, in fluorescent colors.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.18 June 2006 (The Ethereal Issue). ISSN 1544-7782 Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996 LCRW has usually appeared in June and November from Small Beer Press: info@lcrw.net lcrw.net/lcrw $5 per single issue or $20/4. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 413-585-0414. Thanks for reading.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 ebook