Gollum to Bilbo:

This means you can get a cheap copy of The Skull & Laurel #3, that has Josh Pearce’s “Witches in Cold Mountain Halls” in it. One of the best short stories I’ve read in years that’s a sort of New Weird dark fantasy dungeon crawl told in postmodern epic prose poetry. It’s fucking sick.

Free shipping for @bookshop.org's Anti-Prime-Days! If you want to support ARB a little bit while you snag some books, click on any of the links in our reviews and essays, or check out our shop here:

The internet, 2026:

Bookshop.org is having an anti-amazon-prime sale, & you can get THE DEVOURERS slightly discounted there. A mythic realist, queer dark fantasy about love, sex, violence, & shapeshifting set in contemporary India & the Mughal Empire. It won a Lambda Award.

Pals! @tenebrouspress.bsky.social have an eBook and eMag sale on at the moment! ✨️🖤 Go and grab some horror gems! Also, includes Split Scream Vol 5 and my novelette paired with @bitterkarella.bsky.social - just £2! Tell your weird horror loving friends! ✨️🖤 store.tenebrouspress.com/products/spl...

🔥SALE🔥 Prime Day is now thru the 26th? COMPLETELY COINCIDENTALLY, ALL OUR E-BOOKS & MAGAZINES ARE 50% OFF THRU THE 26TH. Buy from our webstore, get your books & mags delivered INSTANTLY, + you own them outright! (Sorry, not applicable to preorders) 🖤☠️ store.tenebrouspress.com/collections/...

Sale's active as of this morning! It'll auto-apply on the website at checkout 🫡 Hope we can help you find a damn fine new summer read

Samir has such a way with their writing of picking at the scabs of complicated relationships and "Starspeaker" really digs into a parental relationship that encompasses pain, resentment, duty, love, and all the contradictions that having all those feelings at the same time involves. Love this story.

I was so excited to get to write a story and celebrate Katherine Dunn! She is probably at the top of my list of favorite writers. My story "Safety Features in Fabulon" pulls from Toad and Geek Love, exploring body modification, toxic friendships and isolation, all while set in a theme park ride!

In the last SSR I had occasion to talk about some old faves including Margaret St Clair, @ivygrimes.bsky.social @thomasha.bsky.social and yes, funkmaster flex buttondown.com/shortstoryre...

I’m gonna be dusting off my reviewing hat over the next few weeks in the Seize The Press newsletter. I’ve read some great stuff recently and the first books I’ll be reviewing are OLYOKE by Vincent Endwell, PERSONA by Aoife Josie Clements, and THE CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR by Ivy Grimes.

Let me tell you something. I’ve got four books nobody has heard of that would make great movies. You want Hell Pigs? You want Kelpies? You want a Historical Fiction about a weird little guy who is psycho sexually obsessed with chopping down trees? I’m your man. Ball is in your court.

The New Weird

I’m so happy to share that my Weird West story, “Twin Pistons”, is included in this anthology. This project was an interesting push of my creative boundaries and I’m so glad my work is sharing in this reimagining of what Western stories can do.

I genuinely love A Game of Thrones but using the word ‘bunghole’ in a fantasy setting inspired by Wars of the Roses era medieval Europe is a crime against literature.

Chicken Finger is NM Whitley at it again. He writes with a specific level of off-kilter surreality that unbalances you just enough to make you wobble before you realise you’ve fell flat on the ground.

Today is my 46th birthday. It's also publishing day for INHALATION. If it's alright with you guys, I'd like to talk about why this book exists, as well as spend some time thanking the folks who made this possible

Big shout out to the STP team James, Rebecca, and Karlo by the way. I started this thing solo four years ago with no expectation it would go anywhere and it somehow found an audience. Now there are four of us keeping the ship steady and I'm so grateful for everything they do to keep the mag going ❤️

I'm looking for richly imagined tales of strange, wondrous, and dangerous magic for our next anthology! Subs open until the end of July!

I do not fully trust critics who are not both lovers and haters. All I want is for you to have some kind of taste, some kind of ethic, and I want you to argue in favor of it, which should inevitably mean that you greatly admire some works in your chosen field and definitely don’t admire others.

I love reviews where the critic is openly grappling with their reading of a book. Too often it seems reviewers feel compelled to have formed an opinion set in stone, but one of the benefits of the critical review is the space to ask more questions. Rabbit, Fox, Tar sounds like a fascinating book.

I love reviews where the critic is openly grappling with their reading of a book. Too often it seems reviewers feel compelled to have formed an opinion set in stone, but one of the benefits of the critical review is the space to ask more questions. Rabbit, Fox, Tar sounds like a fascinating book.

I found this review interesting because of its assertion that a weakness of Radiant Star was its 'unfocussed plot'. That CAN absolutely be a weakness, but it can also be something interesting and engaging. Got me wondering what the deeper qualities are that make an unfocussed plot a weakness.

was just reading an interview with a writer who said, in essence, that they have a 2nd book idea but don't know if they'll write it bc they don't know if they'll make any money on it. and this made me blisteringly sad. everyone needs to eat & pay rent but I want to read the books ppl WANT to write!

It particularly caught my attention as I read it immediately after listening to the most recent Meal of Thorns, where @casella.bsky.social mentioned how Adrian Tchaikovsky's Pretenders to the Throne of God has so many disparate plot threads and yet it's specifically one of the novels strengths.

I found this review interesting because of its assertion that a weakness of Radiant Star was its 'unfocussed plot'. That CAN absolutely be a weakness, but it can also be something interesting and engaging. Got me wondering what the deeper qualities are that make an unfocussed plot a weakness.

This story also made me think more deeply as an editor. The ambiguity and thorniness about whether what happens at the end of MYCOPHILIA is 'good' for Asher isn't really the point; it's the contextualisation of how he got there and why what happens can be viewed as both horrible and relieving.

You need to read the rest of the preceding thread for this to make sense contextually, but this made something whir in my brain.

Enjoying the old notes I made on my last read of A Game of Thrones.

Submissions open next week for our our sorcery anthology! Writers living in the North of England: give us your tales of dark and wondrous magic, of nefarious wizards and eldritch tricksters. Find out more: carnyxpress.co.uk/anthology-2-...

As we all know, weird fiction isn’t just bizarre happenings: it troubles genre boundaries, it insists on the inexplicable and unresolvable, and it dedicates itself to the unsettling of the (story)world.

The newsletter today is an expanded discussion of Zach Gillan's 'Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism' essay and why it articulates so well the kind of stories we look to publish. It continues a loose series of articles on our ethos as an anticapitalist short fiction magazine.

[oc] Juno

The best historical artefacts are the accidental ones that freeze a moment in time forever. I thought I’d try to find all the times pets have ruined their owner's day and recorded that instant for all of history.

Reading an Iain Banks lit novel from the 90s where the characters watch a video and mean a VHS tape. A missing uncle leaves clues to his whereabouts on a floppy disc. They forget the name of a hotel they stayed at and can’t google it - they remember by finding a hotel-branded matchbook in a drawer.

As the editor of an anticapitalist genre magazine, I've been crystalising my thoughts over the years about the kind of anticapitalist fiction we look for. I've never been able to adequately articulate it before, but this Zach Gillan essay gets really close. It's about form, not content.

Tashan Mehta's THE MAD SISTERS OF ESI (Calvino-esque (reductive) meta galactic fantasy), Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON (exoplanetary sf mosaic novel, rich in political/cultural verisimilitude), Deena Helm's OUR CUT OF SALT (heartbreaking Palestinian haunted house story, not out yet).

Soon we will outgrow the need to reflect the human experience in our media at all. Just a series of plot resolutions so you can check off the series on your gamified consumption app and get precious dopamine without the danger of perilous introspection

Finished DENGUE BOY; excellent, gets weirder as it goes, using the focal point of what appears to be a videogame version of Borges' Aleph to prism capitalism's gamification of despair and death into a cosmic dread that draws out the contempt of the universe itself.

Yes, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 2 has a new cover. The first iteration was fine, but the art had been used on several books already. I am way behind on this. Still reading. Hope to have a ToC by July and publication in October/November.

Popping in to let you know TATRATEA is up on Netgalley! Grab this extremely weird ancient-manor cosmic post-apocalyptic eco-horror mystery SF riddled with Twin Peaks references and my actual recurring nightmare management techniques! (or ask me for the bootleg) www.netgalley.com/catalog/book...

So appreciative of eco-horror like Tiffany Morris' "So Full of the Shining Flesh", stories that lean into the bleakness of ecological collapse without offering 'hope'. 'They hadn't seen much point in trying not to die' is such a grim line, and I'm glad it just lets me wallow in how bad it feels.

A tricky question, but part is acknowledging the genre/style/mode of the work. A lot of bad criticism is like "this surrealist novel doesn't have rigorous worldbuilding" or "this dystopian satire doesn't offer hopeful solutions."

I think this is important to remember when talking about reviewing as criticism and analysis - we're engaging with art, and art isn't always fully translatable to formal communicative language. Arguably not being able to do so is a quality of great art.

Started Michel Nieva's DENGUE BOY (trans. Rahul Bery) and it's compellingly weird; anthropocenic climate anxieties mutating into a Cronenbergian nightmare of humanity in horrific flux. The capitalist apocalypse unearthing and channeling cosmic dread. Science fiction grotesque.

I am literally reading a book right now (DENGUE BOY by Michel Nieva, trans. Rahul Bery) set in a globally warmed future where the rise in pandemics has spawned 'virofinance', a profiteering industry based on pandemic speculating. Capitalist evil forever chewing on the heels of satire.

stupidest scifi future ever. robots on tv at my gym make me want to commit violence. ufo files get released & i'm too tired to care. no hot sensitive androids only shitty tech overlords with negative taste who look like crumpled up cheap wet paper towels

In the last newsletter I wrote about how much I love Amélie, so no one gets to say I don't like happy endings anymore. In all seriousness though it's genuinely a fantastic film, and I wrote here about how I thought it intertwined with one of my favourite novels, Sartre's Nausea.

"Crow and Cherry Blossoms" Art by Koson Ohara Woodblock Print 1930 #CorvidCrew