Artist Vincent Di Fate, 73, has been inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, and will be honored at the induction ceremony to be held June 14, 2019 in New York.
Inductees are honored “for their distinguished achievement in the art of illustration. Artists are elected by former presidents of the Society and are chosen based on their body of work and the impact it has made on ...Read More
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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced their first annual Summer Scares Reading list.
ADULT
YOUNG ADULT
MIDDLE GRADE
Finalists for the 2019 Darrell Awards have been announced:
Best Midsouth Novel
Best Midsouth Novella
Best Midsouth Short Story
My reading was weird and scattered this year even by my usual weird-and-scattered standards, and the Goodreads shelf I’ve labeled “comfort re-reads” has a lot more entries than usual, as I retreated from the various unpleasant aspects of this year’s reality into old, beloved fictional worlds. I wasn’t sure I’d read enough new SF, fantasy, and horror to even justify a year-end round-up this time, but going over my list ...Read More
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Brad Linaweaver was associate producer of documentary Robert A. Heinlein: The Puppet Grand Master, included with the deluxe Blu-ray version of The Puppet Masters (1994), based on Heinlein’s 1951 novel, released in December 2018. Contributors to the documentary include David Gerrold, Eleanor Wood, and others.
This story and more like it in the February 2019 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with ...Read More
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Mercedes Lackey, The Bartered Brides (DAW 978-0-7564-0874-9, $27.00, 314pp, hc) October 2018. Cover by Jody A. Lee.
Though the title evokes the comic opera The Bartered Bride by Smetana, this latest novel in the Elemental Masters series owes a lot more to Sherlock Holmes, or maybe the Sherlock TV series. Holmes’s death at Reichenbach Falls has just been announced, but the Watsons (both Elemental Masters), psychic Nan Killian, and medium ...Read More
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Winners for the 2018 Children’s and Young Adults Bloggers’ Literary Awards (Cybils) have been announced. Titles of genre interest are listed below:
Young Adult Speculative Fiction
The Society of Authors announced the winners of its translation prizes on February 13, 2019 in a ceremony at the British Library in London, UK.
TA First Translation Prize
The £2,000 TA First Translation Prize is sponsored by Daniel Hahn and the British Council, and given “for a debut literary translation into English published in the UK.” Hong shares
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Several authors of genre interest are recipients of 2019 Literature Fellowships awarded by The National Endowment for the Arts.
Ama Codjoe, Ilya Kaminsky, Kiki Petrosino, and Keith S. Wilson are among the writers who received grants of $25,000 each. The grants are meant to give “writers the time and space to create, revise, conduct research, and connect with readers.” A total of 35 creative writing grants were given, for a ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 9/18
Lightspeed 11/18
Omenana #12 8/18
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/8/18, 11/22/18
Fireside 10/18
Apex 9/18, 10/18
Terraform 9/14/18, 9/23/18
e-flux 9/18
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores 9/18
Clarkesworld brings us five original stories for the month of September, of which the strongest is “When We Were Starless” by newcomer Simone Heller. Starting out with an alien tribe eking out a subsistence living in a blasted wasteland, we learn about ...Read More
Read moreLegendary editor and publisher Betty Ballantine, 99, died February 12, 2019 at home in Bearsville NY. Her career in publishing began in the 1930s, and she was instrumental in the rise of mass-market paperbacks and helped found both Bantam Books and Ballantine Books.
Elizabeth Norah Jones was born September 25, 1919 in India to a colonial family. At 12 she moved with her family to Jersey in the Channel Islands, ...Read More
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Looking back on 2018, the year feels rather longer than mere chronological time can account for. I don’t imagine I can remember all the books I’ve read this year – a year in which I became engaged, hunted for a house, moved house, and most recently, acquired a pair of very boisterous bouncy kittens: the mere quotidian logistics of living have absorbed rather more of my energy and memory than ...Read More
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Fright Into Flight, Amber Fallon, ed. (Word Horde 978-1-939905-44-4, $15.99, 246pp, tp). September 4, 2018.
Fright Into Flight, Amber Fallon’s editorial debut, is an anthology featuring women as authors and story subjects. Despite the “Fright” part of the title and the “horror” label invoked in the description, not to mention Fallon’s Introduction, “Now Boarding: Your Ticket to Terror”, the stories compiled within are not all horror stories. Those that fall ...Read More
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Author Jenni Fagan has been named the 2019 Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow, winning a one-year residency at the Summerhall arts venue in Edinburgh, Scotland. The fellowship, supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland, “provides a mid-career or established writer with time and support to develop new work… on the theme of change, sustainability and how the past informs the present.”
Fagan will receive a private workspace at Summerhall, access ...Read More
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City of Ghosts, Victoria Schwab (Scholastic Press 978-1-338-11100-2, $17.99, 285pp, hc) August 2018.
The plot for Victoria Schwab’s City of Ghosts is delightfully straightforward: 12-year-old Cass sees dead people and that leads to many uncomfortable situations. Her life is complicated by the fact that her parents are successful paranormal investigators/authors and actively search out places full of ghosts. Her best friend Jacob also happens to be a ghost, but that ...Read More
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Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke has started Clarkesworld Books, a new imprint of Wyrm Publishing dedicated to publishing translated fiction. The imprint plans to launch with A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by Xia Jia.
Clarke also announced that Clarkesworld has received a grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) to translate and publish Korean science fiction stories, the first of ...Read More
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Finalists for the 2018 Analog Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) and Asimov’s Readers’ Awards have been announced. Most are available to read online.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact Analytical Laboratory Award Finalists
Best Novella
Best Novelette
The Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) has announced the shortlists for the 2019 Romantic Novel Awards, including titles of genre interest.
The Fantasy Romantic Novel Award
Winners will be announced March 4, 2019 at the Gladstone Library in London. For more information, including complete shortlists, see ...Read More
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The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) has announced the finalists for the 2019 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award:
The award honors the best first SF/fantasy/horror novel of the year, and ...Read More
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The way we read fiction is changing. We’ve been told this repeatedly. Where once we had a single medium – ink on paper – to deliver new stories to us and only a few ways – face-to-face discussion, mail, reviews etc. – to discuss them, now we have many. Print is not dead; digital is not king. Instead, we read the way we like and when we like: in printed ...Read More
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DEREK STÉPHANE KÜNSKEN was born March 13, 1971 in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada. He attended the University of Guelph as an undergraduate and earned a master’s degree in molecular biology at McMaster University, but he left science behind to work with street children in Honduras. After returning to Canada he worked various jobs until he joined the Canadian Federal Public Service, working on refugee and diplomatic postings in Colombia and Cuba. ...Read More
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The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0374168353, $26.00, 212pp, hc) August 2018.
Laura van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel, takes place in Havana, Cuba where Clare is attending the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema. She’s there on behalf of her husband, Richard, who intended to be at the festival until he was unexpectedly killed in a hit and run incident. Clare plans ...Read More
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W.L. Goodwater, Breach (Ace 978-0-451-49103-9, $16.00, 357pp, tp) November 2018.
Cold War espionage and magic mix in this fantasy spy thriller. Karen O’Neil is an American magician, a government researcher tired of dealing with men who don’t believe women can be competent. She’s excited to be assigned to a secret mission in post-WWII Berlin, where the Wall has developed a hole, small but growing. The Wall was erected overnight by ...Read More
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NPD Bookscan released their final statistics for 2018, counting 696 million print books sold in the US, up 1.3% over last year’s 687 million – the smallest gain seen over the past five years of steady print growth. Adult hardcover sales went up 1.3%, while YA and juvenile sales rose by fractions of a percent. Trade paperbacks declined slightly, and mass-market paperbacks continued to shrink, down to 52 million copies ...Read More
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These end-of-the-year lists always make me uncomfortable, if only because I know I haven’t read even a plurality of titles published in any given 365 days. Not only that, I haven’t yet read a bunch that have been highly praised, like Blackfish City, Revenant Gun, and Unholy Land. Having said that, what I do feel comfortable with is flagging a few titles that I’m mildly infatuated with, that happened to ...Read More
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The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales, Michael Bishop (Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet 978-1-933846-72-9, $17.99, 282pp, tp) August 2018.
Michael Bishop has been defining his own uniquely eclectic brand of humanistic SF since his emergence as one of the most prominent new writers of the 1970s, and it’s likely that this has been both good and bad news for his career. On the one hand, he’s given us works that ...Read More
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Author Christopher Rowe was recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes: “Cue many major life changes…. I’ve decided to be proactive about the whole thing… by training to ride the 62-mile leg of the Kentucky edition of this year’s Tour de Cure, an annual fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association.” He’s raising money for the organization at <main.diabetes.org/goto/cnrowe>.
This story and more like it in the February 2019 issue of Locus. ...Read More
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Knaves Over Queens, George R.R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass, eds. (HarperVoyager 978-0008283599, £16.99, 550pp, hc) June 2018. (Tor 978-1250168061, $29.99, 560pp, hc) August 2019.
This 27th book in the laudable (but often underestimated) Wild Cards series is the first to focus solely on the British Isles. The cycle’s long history now spans more than three decades (since 1987) in publishing time and more than seventy years in fictional chronicling. ...Read More
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Shortlisted titles for the 2019 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize have been announced in the Illustrated Books, Younger Fiction, and Older Fiction categories, including several of genre interest:
Older Fiction
Younger Fiction
Temper, Nicky Drayden (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-249305-7, $15.99, 400pp, tp) August 2018.
I didn’t feel connected enough to the world of Temper for much of the book: it was far enough outside my experience, and there were few clues to help me get into it. There was enough going on to keep me going, and I’m glad I found that, because in the end, it really made me think about privilege ...Read More
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