Kay Kenyon’s latest work is a science fiction series with a fantasy feel. The lead title, Bright of the Sky, was in Publishers Weekly’s top 150 books of 2007. The series has twice been shortlisted for the American Library Association Reading List awards. Rounding out the quartet are A World Too Near, City Without End and Prince of Storms. They are available in trade paper, Audible.com and Kindle editions. She is the chair of Eastern Washington’s Write on the River organization and conference and lives in Wenatchee, WA with her husband. At her website, www.kaykenyon.com, she regularly blogs on writing fiction.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010). In 2008 she received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and has been nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Talebones, and several Year’s Best anthologies. She is the Vice President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor, recording fiction for authors such as Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit www.maryrobinettekowal.com.
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are Pinion from Tor Books, The Specific Gravity of Grief from Fairwood Press, The Baby Killers from PS Publishing, and The Sky That Wraps from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
Catherine MacLeod lives in Nova Scotia. She has had short fiction in On Spec, Black Static, and several anthologies, including the upcoming Horror Library #4 and The Living Dead 2. And, of course, Talebones, which she’s going to miss. “Seepage” was her first US sale.
Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild nominee Move Under Ground, the Kurd Lasswitz Prize nominee Under My Roof, and the forthcoming Sensation. He’s co-edited the anthologies Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake) and Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow) and has published over sixty short stories, many of which were collected in You Might Sleep... “Your Life, Fifteen Minutes From Now” was Nick’s first ever fiction publication, and ten years later he’s still happy about it.
Louise Marley is a former concert and opera singer who found a new career in speculative fiction. Her works often weave her musical background into historical and fantastic settings, as she does in her newest novel, Mozart’s Blood. Louise lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she divides her time between writing, teaching, yoga, and golf.
Sandra McDonald is the author of the recent collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories and the novels The Outback Stars, The Stars Down Under, and The Stars Blue Yonder. Her short fiction has appeared in more than 30 national, small press and online magazines. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches college in Jacksonville, Florida. Visit her at www.sandramcdonald.com.
Terry McGarry is a freelance speculative-fiction copyeditor and Irish musician. In her past lives, she has been a bartender on Wall Street, an English major at Princeton, a street trader in Ireland, a Page O.K.’er at The New Yorker, and a SFWA officer. Her short fiction has appeared in more than forty magazines and anthologies, and her poetry is collected in the award-winning chapbook Imprinting. Her novelsfrom Tor are Triad, The Binder’s Road, and Illumination.
Paul Melko’s first novel, Singularity’s Ring, postulates a future of group-conscious humans, telling the tale of one such quintet learning to be a starship pilot. It won both the Compton Crook and Locus Awards for Best First Novel in 2009. His second novel, The Walls of the Universe, is an expansion of his Hugo-, Nebula-, and Sturgeon-Award nominated novella of the same name. In it, a teenager from Ohio is tricked out of his life by his doppelganger from another universe. Paul lives in Ohio with his beautiful wife and four children.
Bill Mingin has published two dozen short stories and over 300 reviews, essays, and articles; he currently reviews for Strange Horizons and AudioFile Magazine. He’s a graduate of Clarion West, is married, and runs a small book-export business in New Jersey.
Devon Monk has sold over fifty short stories to magazines and anthologies. Her Allie Beckstrom urban fantasy novels, beginning with Magic to the Bone, are available through Roc books, and her first steampunk novel Dead Iron will be released in July 2011. Devon has one husband, two sons, and a dog named Mojo. She lives in Oregon and is surrounded by colorful and numerous family members who mostly live within dinner-calling distance of each other. Visit her at www.devonmonk.com.
William F. Nolan is the best-selling, award-winning author of Logan’s Run and 84 other books. He has had some 200 short stories printed, and was voted a “Living Legend in Dark Fantasy” by the International Horror Guild. Among his other honors: the Silver Medal for Excellence by the Independent Publishers of America, two Golden Medallions in Europe for his TV work, two Edgar Allan Poe Special Awards, the Stoker Award for Life Achievement, and SFWA’s “Author Emeritus Award. Nolan lives in Vancouver, Washington in an apartment crowded with books, momentos, awards, and his extensive collection of toy cars.
Patrick O’Leary’s first novel, Door Number Three (Tor), was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the best novels of the year. His second novel, The Gift (Tor), was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and The Mythopoeic Award. His third novel was The Impossible Bird (Tor). Other Voices, Other Doors (Fairwood Press) was his first collection. His short stories have appeared in Postscripts, Scifiction.com, Electric Velocipede and Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists. The Black Heart (PS Publishing 2009) is a collection of his newest stories. He lives in Troy, Michigan with his wife, the artist, Sandy Rice. http://web.mac.com/paddybon.
Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’imagination.
J. A. Pitts is a native Kentucky son who migrated to the Pacific Northwest with his family over a decade ago. He’s trained in English and Library Science, so of course, he works as a Computer Consultant. His first novel, Black Blade Blues, was published by Tor Books in 2010. The next book in the series, Honeyed Words, will appear summer of 2011. Visit his website at www.japitts.net
Sarah Prineas lives near the Iowa River in Iowa City, Iowa with her mad scientist husband, two kids, two cats, and the best dog in the world. She’s published lots of stories in places like Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons, but quit stories for novels in 2006. Since then she’s sold six books to HarperCollins, including the award-winning Magic Thief trilogy, which has sold in 21 languages around the world.
Ken Rand was the prolific and versatile author of more than a hundred short stories, two hundred humor columns, and a dozen books, including The Ten Percent Solution, The Eternity Stone, Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon, Phoenix, Rock ‘n’ Roll Universe, A Cold Day in Hell, and others. His two-volume exhaustive story collections, The Gods Perspire and Where Angels Fear, are available through Fairwood Press. He wrote thousands of articles and did numerous interviews for Talebones magazine. Ken passed away in 2009. See more about Ken at www.kenrandmediaman.com.
Mark Rich spent some fifteen years preoccupied with the life of Cyril Kornbluth, a writer whose works were central to 1950s science fiction. In March, 2010, McFarland published the results of that preoccupation: C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary. Rich’s other books include a Fairwood Press collection of short stories, Across the Sky. Besides Talebones, his fiction has appeared in magazines including Amazing Stories, SF Age and Analog. As a measure of his success in the writing trade, he lately has been working as a blender and bottler of organic maple syrup, and as a grape-picker for a Wiscon
sin winery.
Uncle River lives on the Continental Divide in New Mexico, where he gardens, and serves in his local Volunteer Fire and EMS Department. For more Uncle River stories, look for his collection: Counting Tadpoles, from PS Publishing, which includes work that appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Amazing Stories, and a Hartwell/Cramer The Year’s Best Fantasy. Also from PS is River’s Camp Desolation And An Eschatology of Salt. His Jacinth is newly out from Sam’s Dot Publishing.
Patricia Russo’s stories, in addition to Talebones, have appeared in Fantasy, Chizine, Lone Star Stories, Electric Velocipede, Tales of the Unanticipated, Not One of Us, the anthologies Corpse Blossom and Zencore, and many other places, online and off, extant and long gone.
Jim Sallis has published multiple collections of poems, stories and criticism, the definitive biography of Chester Himes, a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, and by last count thirteen novels, including the six-novel Lew Griffin series, the three Turner novels comprising What You Have Left, and Drive, currently in production as a film. His latest novel, The Killer Is Dying, is due in May of 2011. An editor of New Worlds “back when dinosaurs ruled the earth” and longtime columnist for the Boston Globe, Jim continues to contribute a quarterly books column to F&SF.
Ken Scholes is a Pacific Northwest original whose quirky, off-beat short stories have been showing up in magazines and anthologies for a decade. His award winning series The Psalms of Isaak is available from Tor books. His first collection Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Strange Journeys, as well as his second, Diving Mimes, Weeping Czars and Other Unusual Suspects, is also available from Fairwood Press. Ken lives in Saint Helens, Oregon, with his wife and twin daughters. He invites readers to look him up at www.kenscholes.com.
Jack Skillingstead’s professional writing career began in 2003 with the publication of “Dead Worlds” in Asimov’s. The story was a Sturgeon Award finalist and appeared in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Since then, Jack has published more than thirty short stories in Asimov’s, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and a variety of Year’s Best and original anthologies. In 2009 a hardcover collection, Are You There and Other Stories appeared from Golden Gryphon Press and his first novel, Harbinger, came out from Fairwood Press. Both books made Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list. Jack lives in Seattle with fellow writer Nancy Kress and her adorable poodle.
Bruce Taylor, aka “Mr. Magic Realism,” writes magic realism, surrealism and bizarro. Kafka’s Uncle and Other Strange Tales was nominated for the NOW Award for Innovative Writing. A Writer in Residence at Shakespeare & Company, Paris, he most recently was president of the Seattle Free Lances. The book, Stormworld, co-authored with Brian Herbert, will soon be published. Currently Bruce is publishing a “spiritual trilogy.” The first book (Mountains of the Night) was published on the Espresso Book Machine; Bruce is the first publishing author to have a book released on the EBM. His first collection, The Final Trick of Funnyman is from Fairwood Press.
Steve Rasnic Tem’s latest book is In Concert from Centipede Press, collecting all his short story collaborations with wife Melanie Tem. His audio short story collection, Invisible, is available from Speaking Volumes LLC. He has upcoming stories in Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and the anthologies Mountain Magic, Blood Lite 2: Overbite, and Visitants. You can visit the Tem home on the web at www.m-s-tem.com.
James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. His fiction has made numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, includes the Nebula finalist title story, and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel Summer of the Apocalypse was released November, 2006. The recently released The Radio Magician and Other Stories received the Colorado Book Award. James blogs at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com.
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. The most recent, Kitty Goes to War, was released in 2010. Kitty’s Big Trouble will hit shelves in 2011. She also writes young adult novels (Voices of Dragons in 2010, Steel in 2011), contemporary fantasy (Discord’s Apple in 2010, After the Golden Age in 2011), and numerous short stories in all genres. She’s a 1998 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, where she returned as an instructor in 2009. She lives in Colorado with her yappy dog Lily and too many hobbies. “The Girl with the Pre-Raphaelite Hair” in this volume was the second science fiction/fantasy story Carrie sold, and the first to see print.
Ray Vukcevich’s new book is a collection of short stories from Fairwood Press called Boarding Instructions. His earlier books are Meet Me in the Moon Room from Small Beer Press and The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces from St. Martin’s. He lives in Oregon.
Table of Contents
Foreword
The Yard God
The Winds of Brennan Marcher
Ten Sigmas
Cats, Dogs, and Other Creatures
Still Life with Boobs
The Girl with the Pre-Raphaelite Hair
Swoop
Two
Snow on Snow
Night Shift
The Next Best Thing
23 Skidoo
Hail, Conductor
The Parable of Satan's Adversary
The Acid Test
The Dandelion Clock
Comachrome
Robbie
Song of Mother Jungle
Jack in the Box
Spiders
Love of the True God
Tall Spirits, Blocking the Night
From Sunset to the White Sea
Landlocked
Seepage
Zothique Mi Amor
Sugar
Wolf Song
Safe, Child, Safe
Your Life, Fifteen Minutes from Now
The Forever Sleep
Roofs and Forgiveness in the Early Dawn
Nothing But Fear
Caucasus
Bluebeard by the Sea
The Dog Prince
Three Chords and the Truth
Death Comes But Twice
The TWA Corbies
God of Exile
Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk
About the Contributors
The Best of Talebones Page 46
