Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 12
Tags: No Author Royalties CollectedGavin J. Grant. Right lane must turn right. Left lane must turn left.
Kelly Link. Good things, yes. Bad things, no.
Contents
Fiction
Jan Lars Jensen — Happier Days
The theme for our ten year grad reunion was “Happy Days.” I’m not sure why this particular show was selected, as we had graduated long after the ’50s, and the series had been cancelled before most of us met in high school. I’m not even sure why we needed a theme — a reunion wasn’t a prom. But I guess “Happy Days” generated a feeling of nostalgia that the organizers hoped would rub off on our event, and few people could claim they had never seen an episode.
David Erik Nelson — Bay
Ursula Pflug — In Dreams We Remember
Richard Parks — The Plum Blossom Lantern
Michiko’s servant girl Mai carried the deep pink lantern to light their way through the dark city streets. Mai was dead. Since Michiko was, too, that didn’t seem so strange. In fact, very little about the situation struck Michiko as odd or even very different from when she was alive. She did have one regret, however — her feet. Michiko missed having feet.
Nick Mamatas — Found Wedged in the Side Drawer in Paris, France, 23 December, 1989
Lena DeTar — Definitions
Jennifer Rachel Baumer — Spirits of Sage, Wind, and Sun
Philip Raines and Harvey Welles — The Fishie
Catchie hears first. “‘mam! Noisy in the ground!”
Spitmam scoops away sleep and releasing Catchie from her bed grasp, listens for the disturbance beyond the cottage.
“Hear? Under rock, ‘mam! Under and deep, calling to the folk!”
“You say, you say.” In a grumbly witter, Spitmam swings on her longcoat and unlodges the door. The night’s cold as groundstone, but Spitmam bends stiff knees to lay an ear to one of the pathway flags.
“You’re hearing it,” she tells the girl quietly. “That thumping’s surely under. And a grand thing’s there!”
Nonfiction
Jack Cheng — Mesopotamians, All
Richard Butner — How to Make a Martini
“I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.” – James Douglas Morrison
Drink what you like, so you can talk to assholes including yourself. But. But you might want to have a martini. And here’s how to make one.
First off, martinis are made of gin and vermouth. If you make one with vodka, it’s not a martini; it’s a vodka martini. If you make one without vermouth, it’s not a martini, it’s cold gin, which is a perfectly fine KISS song but perhaps not a perfectly fine beverage.
The state of being in a martini glass does not instantly confer martini-hood on any given concoction. Some perfectly fine drinks are served in martini glasses (aka cocktail glasses, as opposed to old-fashioned glasses or Collins glasses or cordial glasses). Gimlets, say. Hell, even Lemon Drops. There is no such thing as a Choco-Banana Martini, though.
L. Timmel Duchamp — What’s the Story? Reading Deena Metzger’s The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them
Zines reviews & credits
William Smith — The Film Column: Don’t Look Now
Poetics
Christoph Meyer — Death Ditty
Cara Spindler — Five Poems
Nancy Jane Moore — Resilience
Anne Sheldon — Two Poems
Contributors
Jennifer Rachel Baumer lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband/best friend/sometime editor Rick and a rapidly expanding number of cats. She wrote “Spirits” at Clarion after news from home of a shooting at the local market. When not writing fiction Jennifer can be found procrastinating on writing nonfiction, from which she makes a tentative living.
Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you. Read his story “Other Agents” from LCRW no.5. His story “Ash City Stomp” provided the inspiration for Shelley Jackson’s painting for the cover of Trampoline.
Jack Cheng works on archaeological excavations in Turkey and Syria. He is writing a book on Assyrian music when not playing with his new son Austin. Earlier contributions to LCRW include a review of Vanilla Sky, an email exchange in no.7, and illustrations in no.4.
Lena DeTar is currently teaching English in Nara, Japan. She will be attending a Science Writing (journalism) MA program at Johns Hopkins next year. As for philosophy, she may be Buddhist. Or not. It deserves more meditation.
L. Timmel Duchamp is a regular columnist for LCRW. She has published a prodigious quantity of fiction in addition to a modest number of essays. She is an editor at Fantastic Metropolis.Intrepid voyagers may discover and explore her work here.
Jan Lars Jensen grew up in Yarrow, B.C. and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. His first novel, Shiva 3000, was published by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the U.K. Raincoast Books will publish a nonfiction work, tentatively titled Nervous System, in 2004.
Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-losing short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull Press) and of short stories appearing in Razor, Strange Horizons, Wide Angle NY, and The Whirligig. This bio is already longer than his story, so just look at his website.
Christoph Meyer lives in Danville, OH. He is an enthusiast. His zine, 28 Pages Lovingly Bound with Twine, is indeed that, and should be read.
Nancy Jane Moore’s fiction has appeared in various anthologies, some magazines, and the occasional webzine, but this is the first time her poetry has appeared anywhere besides her high school literary magazine. Her story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” appeared in LCRW no.8.
David Erik Nelson currently lives somewhere in America with his anonymous fiancee and X number of dogs. He has never been associated with the publication Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), and asks that you disregard that vile, scurrilous rag entirely.
Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and three cats. His work has appeared inAsimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies. His first short story collection, The Ogre’s Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups, was published in 2002 by Obscura Press.
A contemporary fantasy/magic realist novel by Ursula Pflug, Green Music has recently been released by Tesseract Books. Pflug has had over forty short stories professionally published, at home in Canada and internationally in both speculative and mainstream venues, in print and on the web (Holy Mackerels, Late for Dinner, Sky Rise, Python). She has frequently written about art and books for Toronto’s Now Magazine and other venues, worked in editorial for three years at the cultural journal The Peterborough Review, and co-written several short films including,Memory Lapse At The Waterfront — based on a published Pflug short story, it has shown at festivals and has been sold to television. Pflug has taught writing workshops to both adults and children. She has read her short fiction at countless public readings. She has received several Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grants in support of her fiction; her theatre work has also been supported by the OAC and by the Laidlaw Foundation. She has had three plays professionally staged and has been writing and performing with Seaskum, a Peterborough based all girl comedy troupe. She is a member of SF Canada and Broad Universe. Formerly a full time graphic artist, she has concentrated on her writing since moving to the rural Kawarthas from Toronto with her family, fifteen years ago. In their spare time, they are building a teleporter together.
Philip Raines and Harvey Welles have published stories in The Fractal, New Genre, and Albedo One, and have won the UK Bridport Prize short story competition. Phil is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle. Harvey lives in Milwaukee.
Anne Sheldon was born in Washington, DC, in 1945. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Spitball, Weird Tales, and Edge City Review, among other small magazines, and in a chapbook,Lancastrian Letters, and a book, Hero-Surfing. She is a poet-in-the-schools, working through the Maryland State Arts Council, and teaches storytelling at the library school of the University of Maryland.
William Smith is a regular columnist for LCRW. He is on the cusp of publishing a zine, Trunk Stories. We are note with awe that his review of Don’t Look Now did not include a reference tothat scene.
Cara Spindler lives in Michigan and teaches creative writing, in high schools for money and prisons for free. Her poetry has most recently appeared in The Driftwood Review, Poor Mojo’s Almanac, and Spinning Jenny.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.12 June 2003. LCRW appears twice a year from Small Beer Press, info@lcrw.net www.smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. $4 per single issue or $16/4. Contents the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Thanks for those, Richard. No extras this time, no footnotes, no recipes spelled out in the first letter of each story (see no. 8). Apples, etc. read from back to front. Remove the figure from the head, what’s left? Is there a ship? Is there a state? There is a state, disunited. Mostly, when we read the news, we are sad. It is annoying to feel so sad and useless. We want to revolt, but non-violently, because we do not believe in violence. The ends don’t justify those means and all that. But what does it mean when every day, every day, another freedom is taken away, another imbalance is made law, another good law (yes, good) is wiped off the books. Revolution now.
A Slepyng Hound to Wake
Tags: No Author Royalties CollectedIn his second bibliomystery, Boston bookhound Henry Sullivan has a new girlfriend, a new apartment, and a shelfload of troubles.
Chaucer said “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.” Henry Sullivan, bookhound, is ready to be that sleeping dog: to settle down in his new apartment and enjoy life with his new girlfriend.
But the underside of the literary world won’t let him go. A bookscout sells Henry a book—and is murdered later that night. An old friend asks him to investigate a case of possible plagiarism involving a local bestselling author. To make matters worse, his violinist neighbor seems to have a stalker. And wherever Henry goes, there’s a cop watching him.
Henry can read the signs: to save those he loves he has to save himself.
“In 22 years of bookselling I find that readers remain endlessly fascinated with an insider look at the book business—an oxymoron right there.
Vincent McCaffrey offers a real insider’s view in A Slepyng Hound to Wake—a quote from Chaucer—the sequel to the splendid hit, Hound. I’d call them “biblio-noirs” rather than bibliomysteries: the deeds are dark even though bookhound Henry Sullivan becomes involved in what first seem academic rather than criminal matters. How likely is it that the possible ripping-off (OK, plagiarism) of a bestselling author could lead to murder? Dark, too, is Henry’s outlook on his professional world where centuries of tradition are daily eroded by digital publishing and internet bookselling. This gloom carries over into his relationships, freighting them in a classic noir fashion. Still, Henry is a character cut from Raymond Chandler: a modern knight on a mission to save those, and what, he loves.”
—Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen
“In McCaffrey’s compelling second mystery to feature Boston book dealer Henry Sullivan (after 2009’s Hound), Henry is unsettled by the murder of a fellow “book hound” down on his luck, Eddy Perry, who just sold Henry a rare volume of Lovecraft horror stories. Later, former girlfriend Barbara Krause, the owner of Alcott & Poe, an independent bookstore, asks Henry’s help in investigating a plagiarism case. Sharon Greene, one of Barbara’s employees, has accused a local literary heavyweight, George Duggan, of stealing from the work of the late James Frankowski, a little-known writer with whom Sharon lived for years. Meanwhile, Barbara struggles to keep Alcott & Poe afloat in an era of recession and e-commerce. A longtime bookstore owner himself, McCaffrey places less emphasis on crime solving than on the larger question of the printed word’s place in today’s world. Evocative prose and characterizations will remind many of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels.”
—Publishers Weekly
“There’s a Woody Allen tone to this one, and you’ll enjoy sharing it with bibliophiles or anyone who appreciates quirky characters. The plotting and weaving of story lines hide a clever puzzle, but most readers will forget they’re reading a mystery until all the pieces fall into place at the very end. Lisa Lutz fans could like this.”
—Library Journal
“Henry’s second (Hound, 2009) is not for those who require a fast and furious story line. The strong mystery is woven into a slow-paced, philosophical discussion of the painful demise of those special bookstores whose nooks and crannies once yielded fabulous finds.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Start reading:
Chapter One
The books were like corpses, the ink of lost dreams dried in their veins. On a bad day, Henry Sullivan felt like a mortician salvaging the moldering flesh of small decaying bodies to be preserved for a proper burial. But, on a good day, though there seemed to be fewer of those of late, he might save something which left him giddy.
Henry pulled the second box free from a mat of cat hair and dust beneath the bed, and peeked beneath the lid.
“Yes!”
The foul odor of the mattress too close to his face, made him swallow the word along with the impulse to gag.
A month before, after lifting the spoiled leaves of disbound volumes abandoned in a basement beneath the seep of a ruined foundation, he had uncovered loose pages sheltered by a collapsed box of empty Croft Ale bottles. Separating the layers until the fetor of mold had made him dizzy, he had salvaged a bundle six inches thick of cream colored rag paper broadsides, announcements, and advertisements, all in French. They had been discarded by a print collector interested only in the engravings originally meant to illustrate the words. And in the heart of that, Henry had found a first printing of ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.’
Those rare sheets were sold now to the highest bidder, but they were a part of the romance Henry imagined about himself. It was still his belief that long before Foucault and Derrida, when words still offered a common meaning, the world could be changed by the content of a few fragile pages. And this was why Henry Sullivan loved his job.
And this happened every once in awhile, more often to him than others he thought, because he had a nose for it.
Henry pushed a broom hand into the depths of the crevice below the bed frame. Again he heard the hollow strike on a box. . . .
Praise for Hound:
“There’s something charismatic and timeless about the way the story builds and McCaffrey opens Henry’s life to the reader . . . McCaffrey is . . . just telling a compelling, old-school yarn, the kind of story a man who knows his literature tells.”
—Time Out Chicago
“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love.”
—The Hippo
Cover by Tom Canty.
Vincent McCaffrey’s novel Hound was chosen as a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. He has owned the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years. He has been paid to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. A Slepying Hound to Wake is his second novel and he is hard at work on the next novel featuring Henry Sullivan.
Bad Power
Tags: No Author Royalties CollectedCover design by Amanda Rainey
Ebook conversion by Charles Tan
Yeah. They probably hate you, too.
“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”
“Thank you.”
“For implying you’re powerful?”
“For imagining those are two different groups.”
From Crawford Award nominee Deborah Biancotti comes this sinister short story suite, a pocketbook police procedural, set in a world where the victories are only relative, and the defeats are absolute. Bad Power celebrates the worst kind of powers both supernatural and otherwise, in the interlinked tales of five people – and how far they’ll go.
If you like Haven and Heroes, you’ll love Bad Power.
“These appetisingly wicked stories give you the perfect taste of Biancotti’s talents.” – Ann VanderMeer
Gwyneth Jones on the Twelve Planets series:
“These Australians give me hope for the future of female, and even feminist, writers in sf.”
Table of Contents
Introduction by Ann Vandermeer
Shades of Grey
Palming the Lady
Web of Lies
Bad Power
Cross the Bridge
Reckoning 2
Tags: No Author Royalties CollectedA locus for the conflict between the world as it has become and the world as we wanted it to be.
“In a world of disappearing futures, Reckoning arrives like a flock of undiscovered birds—a journal of speculative ecology that invents its own new genre, simultaneously urgent and atemporal, from a diverse array of mostly new voices—the freshest and most important new fantastic literature magazine in a very long time.” — Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas
Reckoning: an annual, nonprofit journal of creative writing on environmental justice, volume 2.
Ebook edition: December 21, 2017
248 pages; 67,000 words
Contents
Art
Cover: Rebirth – Archan Nair
Disintigreetings – Pepe Rojo
Once It Was a Tree – Oneslutriot
Poetry
Earthspun – Krista Hoeppner Leahy
The Bull Who Bars the Gate to Heaven – Zella Christensen
I’m the Villain, Ok? – Mary Alexandra Agner
A Hundred Years From Now – Mohammad Shafiqul Islam
Development – F.J. Bergmann
Will We Be Good and Kind At The End – Kelly Madden
Fiction
A Wispy Chastening – D.A. Xiaolin Spires
Rumpelstiltskin – Jane Elliott
To the Place of Skulls – Innocent Ilo
Girl Singing with Farm – Kathrin Köhler
The Complaint of All Living Things – Joanne Rixon
Fourth-Dimensional Tessellations of the American College Graduate – Marie Vibbert
Delta Marsh – Casey June Wolf
The Shale Giants – Marissa Lingen
An Oasis of Amends – Floris M. Kleijne
The Alice Grey – Santiago Belluco
Lanny Boykin Rises Up Singing – Jess Barber
Night of No Return – Grace Seybold
Nonfiction
Editor’s Note: On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse – Michael J. DeLuca
A Ghost Can Only Take – Justin Howe
From Paris, With Rage – George F.
‘You are from the U.S.’ – Yukyan Lam
A Kinder And More Caring Future? – Brian Francis Slattery
Reckoning 1
Tags: No Author Royalties CollectedReckoning: an imperfect means of navigation by which one determines where they’re going using only where they’ve been.
Reckoning: a settling of scores; justice.
Environmental justice: the notion that the people (and other living things) saddled with the consequences of humanity’s poor environmental choices and the imperative to remedy those choices are not the ones responsible for them.
Reckoning: a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. First issue: winter solstice 2016. Edited and published by Michael J. DeLuca.
Contents
Art
Cover – Mona Robles
from Concrete Jungle – Travis Macdonald
Reckoning – Steve Logan
Poetry
Erin Hoffman – Transition
Mohammad Shafiqul Islam – Rivers Lament
James Treat – Four Found Poems
Blythe Woolston – Agapostemon
Chloe N. Clark – Sidelong Catastrophe
Aozora Brockman – Kill or Be Killed
Tai Allen – third world problems
Brandon O’Brien – Papa Bois and the Boy
Fiction
Giselle Leeb – Wolphinia
Kate Schapira – Three Alternate Histories
Johannes Punkt – The Bumblebee-Maker’s Kiss
Goldie Locks – 2222
Daniella Levy – The Olive Harvest
Cae Hawksmoor – Civitas Sylvatica
Emily Houk – Plague Winter
Danika Dinsmore – Insanitary
Diego Reymondez – Wine and Wisteria
Robin Wyatt Dunn – The End of Occidentalism
Lora Rivera – When No One’s Left
J.R. McConvey – Eel of the Lake
Benjamin Parzybok – The Hole in the Reef
Justin Howe – Behind the Sun
LJ Geoffrion – Written in the Book of the Woods
Nonfiction
Michael J DeLuca – Editor’s Note: Love in the Time of Reckoning
Marissa Lingen – How Far Are We From Minneapolis?
Christopher Brown – Rule of Capture
George F – In Hambach Forst