Locus Online

Rest Stop, Nat Cassidy (Shortwave 978-1-95956-536-9, $13.99, 160pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Alan Lastufka.

When done right, there’s nothing like a novella: short, fast, engaging, and easy to devour. Nat Cassidy’s Rest Stop brings all of that and more to the table. Besides being fast and engaging, it’s also weird, intense, and deeper than it seems on the surface.

A young vocalist and bass player named Abe is on ...Read More

Clarkesworld 1/25

Zun Yu Tan’s “When There Are Two of You: A Documentary” in the January issue of Clarkesworld is set in a world where people can implant digital clones of themselves in their heads or have them uploaded into artificial bodies. The story is told in alternating sections between a woman with a Sentience in her head, and a digital clone in an artificial body, effectively ...Read More

Baffling 12/24 Flash Fiction Online 12/24 Zooscape 12/24

Baffling closes out 2024 with plenty of steam in an issue that mixes queer themes, speculative elements, and a particular focus on intimacy and sex. In K-Ming Chang’s “The Glass Wife”, that focus illuminates a narrator and her lover, who is made of glass. For the narrator, having a lover made of glass means sometimes losing sight of her, ...Read More

Our Winter Monster, Dennis Mahoney (Hell’s Hundred 978-1-64129-633-5, $26.95, 304pp, hc) January 2025. Cover by Janine Agro.

Dennis Mahoney’s Our Winter Monster is a wonderful mix of pulpy horror and crime that has a struggling couple at its center; a strange monster that wreaks havoc in an idyllic little town in the middle of winter, and a killer on the loose. Fast-paced, full of chaos, and featuring a unique monster ...Read More

Luminous, Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster 978-1-66802-166-8, 400pp, $29.99, hc) March 2025.

The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and long blond hair, the kind that shone with each brush. She was falling apart. Her face had been shredded into confetti, held together by one bleary blue eye, while her torso was a smooth bioplastic vest, translucent as a milk carton. Ruijie had tried pressing ...Read More

Welcome back, book lovers! We’re starting the month of April off right with a lovely new video on our top picks for the best SF, Fantasy, Horror, and YA books of the week! We post a new video every week, so come on by our YouTube channel and subscribe to keep up-to-date on future releases! We hope to see you next week!

The 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize has announced its list of five finalists. The award honors “mid-career authors in fiction,” and the winner receives a $50,000 prize and a residence at the University of California, Berkeley and/or Bay Area. The award is given by the New Literary Project. Works and authors of genre interest include:

The judges for the Crawford Award, which honors “an author’s first work of fantasy in book form,” are soliciting books published in the year 2025 between March 30 and December 31, 2025. What qualifies as a book is flexible: “In addition to novels and novellas, collections of poetry, short stories, and fiction aimed at younger readers are all eligible.” The Crawford Award will be given at the International Conference of ...Read More

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has named Mercedes Lackey the 41st recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

SFWA President Kate Ristau said,

It is SFWA’s honor to recognize and celebrate Nicola’s past achievements, while looking forward to her future triumphs. Her work continues to inspire and challenge me, and when asked to pick a Grand Master to lead us into our Diamond Year, I ...Read More

We are so happy to release our sixth episode of The Storytellers, our series of Zoom-recorded author readings! Previously, we had Henry Lien read the first chapter of Peasprout Chen Today we are pleased to show Hannah Yang reading “A Monster in the Shape of a Boy“, a short story published in Apex Magazine and anthologized in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume 4 . This story was ...Read More

The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2025 has released its list of winners. Recipients of genre interest include The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please (Harper Collins), Overall Winner and the winner of Best Illustrated Book; and Rune by Carlos Sánchez (Flying Eye), winner in the Best Book for Younger Readers category.

Category winners each receive £2,000 and the overall Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year title ...Read More