“Liar. No you didn’t.”
“It always does.”
She’s going to argue further, but instead she holds her breath as one by one the stars fire up again.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
KAARON WARREN
Kaaron Warren’s short story collection The Grinding House (CSFG Publishing) won the ACT Writers’ and Publishers’ Fiction Award and two Ditmar Awards. Her second collection, Dead Sea Fruit, published by Ticonderoga Books, was shortlisted for a Ditmar Award and an Aurealis Award. Her critically acclaimed novel Slights (Angry Robot Books) was nominated for an Aurealis Award, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly First Novel Award and won the Australian Shadows Award fiction, the Ditmar Award and the Canberra Critics’ Award for Fiction. Angry Robot Books also published her novels Walking the Tree (shortlisted for a Ditmar Award) and Mistification, which launched in June 2011.
Her stories have appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy as well as in Australian Year’s Best Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies.
She has recently been named Special Guest for the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2013.
Kaaron has stories upcoming in Visions Fading Fast, from Pendragon Press, and a series of four stories from Twelfth Planet Press.
DEBORAH BIANCOTTI
Deborah Biancotti's first short story collection, A Book of Endings, was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. An Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning writer, Deborah's work can be found in Clockwork Phoenix, Eidolon 1, Ideomancer, infinity plus, Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror and Prime’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, as well as a critical essay in Scarecrow Press' Twenty-First Century Gothic. Her second short story collection, Bad Power, has just come out from Twelfth Planet Press. She is working on her first and second novels.
CAT SPARKS
Cat Sparks is fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine. She managed Agog! Press, an Australian independent press that produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction from 2002-2008. She's known for her award-winning editing, writing, graphic design and photography.
Cat was born in Sydney and has traveled through Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico and North America. Her adventures so far have included winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers and working as dig photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan.
A graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers’ Workshop, she was a Writers of the Future prizewinner in 2004. She has edited five anthologies of speculative fiction and sixty of her short stories have been published since the turn of the millennium.
Cat has received fifteen combined Aurealis and Ditmar awards for writing, editing and art, including the Peter McNamara Conveners Award 2004 for services to Australia's speculative fiction industry and the Best New Talent Ditmar in 2002. In 2011 the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts awarded her a grant for Young Adult Literature.
She is currently working on a YA biopunk trilogy and a suite of post-apocalypse tales set on the New South Wales south coast.
Her story ‘All the Love in the World’ was reprinted in Hartwell and Kramer’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, Volume 16.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catriona_Sparks
www.catsparks.net
BIBLIOGRAPHY FROM ‘THE FIVE LOVES OF ISHTAR’:
Allard Brooks, B., 1923, ‘Some Observations concerning Ancient Mesopotamian Women’, in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 39: 3, pp 187-194.
Anonymous, 2006, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, Translated by: Clay, A.T., Edited by: Jastrow, M., The Project Gutenberg eBook: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11000/11000-h/11000-h.htm.
Black, J.A., 2000, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake.
Burke Hammons, M., 2008, Before Joan of Arc: Gender Identity and Heroism in Ancient Mesoptoamian Birth Rituals, Nashville: Graduate School of Vanderbilt University.
Collon, D., 2003, ‘Dance in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Near Eastern Archaeology, 66: 3, pp 96-102.
Cuto-Ferreira, E., 2010, Aetiology of Illness in Ancient Mesopotamia: on Supernatural Causes, Barcelona: Unversitat Pompeu Fabra.
Galt, C.M., 1931, ‘Veiled Ladies’, in American Journal of Archaeology, 35: 4, pp 373-393.
Goodnick Westenholz, J., 1989, ‘Tamar, Qědēšā, Qadištu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia’, in The Harvard Theological Review, 82: 3, pp 245-265.
Kramer, S.N., 1981, History Begins at Sumer, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press or online at http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/myths/texts/kings/shulgi.htm.
Lang, A., 1913, Myth, Ritual and Religion, Volume 2, London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Læssøe, J., 1963, People of Ancient Assyria, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lerner, G., 1986, ‘The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Signs, 11: 2, pp 236-254.
Marcus, M.I., 1994, ‘Dressed to Kill: Women and Pins in Early Iran’, in Oxford Art Journal, 17: 2, pp 3-15.
Mendelsohn, I., 1948, ‘The Family in the Ancient Near East’, in The Biblical Archaeologist, 11: 2, pp 24-40.
Oppenheim, A.L., 1956, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East. With a Translation of an Assyrian Dream-Book’, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 46: 3, pp 179-373.
Pangas, J.C., 2000, ‘Birth malformations in Babylon and Assyria’, in American Journal of Medical Genetics, 91: 4, pp 318-321.
Stol, M., 1995, ‘Women in Mesopotamia’, in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 38: 2, pp 123-144.
Troy, B., 2004, Legally Bound: A Study Of Women’s Legal Status In The Ancient Near East, Master of Arts, Miami University.
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