New LCRW on the Horizon

Mon 28 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 49 is nearing completion, although Kelly’s in Seattle today, so, no, it won’t be quite ready for a bit yet.

In the meantime, I’m emailing 10.1 million subscribers to see if they’ll renew — with a note that, hey, we appreciated that past subscription! Also of interest, we send a backlist title out with new or re-subscriptions.

Must admit it is kind of weird not to have any new books — not counting the limited edition of The Book of Love — since Kathleen’s collection, Kindling. What am I going to do next year? Monthly issues of the zine? (Ha. No.)


1 Year of New Kij

Thu 24 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

The Privilege of the Happy Ending cover - click to view full sizeIt’s a dozen years since we published our first Kij Johnson collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, and I’m delighted to say that last month we received copies of the sixth printing.

Today is the one-year anniversary of Kij’s wide-ranging second collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending. At the start of this month, she was at the Kansas Book Festival at Washburn University in Topeka where she was quoted as saying, “Sometimes you’re reading for story and sometimes you’re reading for art,” which is an especially good thought to hold while reading the new book.

Also, Phoebe Cramer, Publishers Weekly’s SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor chose it for PW Picks, a newsletter whose “best feature is its most personal: each week, our reviews editors single out the titles they’re most passionate about and excited for you to read.”

The Privilege of the Happy Ending
Kij Johnson. Small Beer, $18 trade paper (302p) ISBN 978-1-61873-211-8
Formal experimentation and fairy tale elements are like catnip to me, so Johnson’s latest collection was hard to resist. Featuring squirrel ghosts, squid girls, and sphinxes, these wild speculative shorts take the form of classic fables, modern bestiaries, and riddles told by crows.

Besides Kij’s Patreon, if you’d like to keep up you can now subscribe to her newsletter.


Scary Books

Thu 17 Oct 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Every October I think, Darn it, should have posted about our scary books so instead of occasionally thinking that for the next two weeks here’s a skeleton’s handful of scary books all pretty much guaranteed to be a mistake to start reading after 10 p.m. (Although maybe I should have included Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius which is terrifying in a completely different way.)


Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 49

Thu 17 Oct 2024 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

December 2024. 56 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731234.

A surprisingly quick turnaround from the previous issue, mere months, a blink in the (imagined) eye of a tree that one day may become a future issue of this zine. The chocolate has barely been bought but many stories have been read and these two (just two? one of them is quite long) rose to the top of our particular list. We have a suitcase full of stories to look in for the next issue which should be out next May.

This issue features Jessica Bromley Bartram’s nonchalant individual on, as are we all, their way somewhere. May the place we’re going be filled with excellent fiction, unexpected poetry and art, a helping hand from a fabulous cook, chocolate for those so inclined, and peace in our time.

Reviews

“The issue contains two works of fiction. . . . A charming and somewhat romantic tale. . .  Another lovely story.”
— Paula Guran, Locus

“[M]ore hopeful than I anticipated and left me feeling rejuvenated.”
— Alex Brown, Reactor, on Susan DeFreitas’s “Hannah and Grackle, Lost in the Woods”

“An antidote to the stagnation and monotony.”
— Jessica Dylan Miele, Lit Mag News

Fiction

Dora Holland, Pomegranate Hearts
Susan DeFreitas, Hannah and Grackle, Lost in the Woods

Poetry

Jessy Randall, Five Poems
Seth Wade, Three Poems

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, How to Knock a Feast Day Out the Park
About These Authors

Art

Jessica Bromley Bartram, Cover
Dawn Kimberling

Celebrating

Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche received the Blurred Boundaries Award from the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards.

Masthead & colophon

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

Memorization not expected but applauded. 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 (see page 17 of this issue for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO.

DRM-free ebooks available from the lovely weightlessbooks.com.

Contents © 2024 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration © 2024 Jessica Bromley Bartram. 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 authors, artists, readers.

About These Authors

An American with roots in the Caribbean and upper Midwest, Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, as well as the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. Her work has been featured, or is upcoming, in the Writer’s Chronicle, LitHub, Story, StoryQuarterly, Daily Science Fiction, Oregon Humanities, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dora Holland is a writer and editor. She graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a PhD in Creative Writing in 2023. She lives in northern Virginia with two big, happy cats. She is currently working on a cyberpunk-fantasy novel. You can find her on Twitter @phantasmadora.

Nicole Kimberling is a novelist and publisher who catered her own wedding reception for one hundred. She does not recommend this at all.

Jessy Randall’s poems and stories have appeared in Asimov’s, LCRW, Nature, and Scientific American. In 2025, MIT will publish her new book, The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science. She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is bit.ly/JessyRandall.

Seth Wade is a tech ethicist studying and teaching philosophy at Bowling Green State University. You can read his fiction and poetry in publications such as Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hunger Mountain Review, Apparition Literary Magazine, HAD, hex, The Cafe Irreal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, BAM Quarterly, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Gateway Review, and now Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can follow him on X @SethWade4Real or Instagram @chompchomp4u.