Search Results for: Soyka

Apex Magazine re-opens to Submissions

Apex publisher Jason Sizemore has announced that the magazine has re-opened to submissions. This is great news for fans, since the magazine announced last May that it was temporarily suspending publication. It began as print edition Apex Digest in 2005, swtiching names to Apex Magazine when it became online-only in 2008. It resumed online publication in June 2009 and has published monthly since.  Note that Apex has new Submission Guidelines. The pay rate is five cents a word, and the new fiction editor is…

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Short Fiction Review #27: Conjunctions 52

The Spring 2009  issue of Conjunctions (yeah, I know, my reading is way behind) edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson, the twice yearly literary magazine published by Bard College, is a follow-up to its New Wave Fabulists issue of about eight years ago. This time around there’s less effort expended in attempting to define a “new” subgenre. Instead, there’s a simple page-and-a-half introduction and a title, Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism, that I find more concisely descriptive of this type…

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Short Fiction Review #26: Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Vol. 3

I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with  Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States).  Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…

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Short Fiction Review #25: Interzone #226

The January/February Interzone features a very cool, magna-like cover by Warwick Fraser-Coombe; he’ll be doing the cover art for all six issues in 2010, which are intended to be put together to form a larger image. Collect them all and assemble the collage to see exactly what’s up with this. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the contents of the magazine, which, by the way, has  returned to a color interior; it’s a very attractive…

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Short Fiction Review #24: Realms of Fantasy February 2010

The new Realms of Fantasy coincides with the relaunch (as of December 11, 2009) of an actually informative website since Warren Lapine took over as publisher beginning with the August 2009 issue (and perhaps the fact that  the website of previous owner Sovereign Media was essentially just a placeholder was indicative of the company’s general lack of interest in the magazine that eventually led to its sale). There was a free PDF version of this bimonthly available for a time,…

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Short Fiction Review #23: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Thirty Two

McSweeney’s is a quirky quarterly  that  breaks conventional publishing boundaries with each issue devoted to a unique theme, both in terms of editorial content and physical packaging. For McSweeney’s 32, its last issue of 2009, ten contributors were tasked with writing tales specifically set somewhere in the world that take place fifteen years hence in 2024. According to the editors: …we wanted to hear about where we’d be — to see what the world could look like when things had…

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Short Fiction Beat, Shameless Self Promotion Division

Steampunk Tales offers an interesting convergence of the new and old,  a pulp magazine for the iPhone (don’t worry, non-Apple heads, there’s also a downloadable PDF version). Volume 4  features ten stories: “Convergence Culture, Pt. 2” by C.B. Harvey “The Brass Pedestal” by Natania Barron “The Gods of War” by Arkwright “Miluth” by Alison Boyd “Stormada, Pt. 3” by SatyrPhil Brucato “An Unfortunate Engagement, Pt. 6” by G. D. Falksen “Sideways” by Andrew Singleton “The Choice for Cibyl” by David…

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Short Fiction Review #21: Love in Infant Monkeys

While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.  Yet Millet’s work  is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running…

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Short Fiction Review # 20: “Unbound” from GUD 4

For this edition of my irregular review of the latest (more or less) short fiction, I thought I’d try something a little different.  Usually I try to focus on the stories that worked the most for me, with maybe some attention on those that didn’t and why; at the same time, I also try to convey a flavor of everything else, if only just to alert you that an author is in the publication without, for any number of reasons,…

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Short Fiction Review #19: Fantasy & Science Fiction 60th Anniversary Issue

Fans of Tom Waits are often divided into two camps: those who favor the early boozy Kerouac, be-bop inspired crooner of life’s derelicts and losers up until he transmogrified beginning with the “Heartattack and Vine” album and “crossed over” into Kurt Weill cacaphonous orator of the absurd; fans of the later period sometimes disdain the earlier, and vice versa, despite the obvious connections.  Me, I’m in the third camp as a huge admirer of both milieus.   (I suppose there’s…

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