The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter


Book Description

“Beautifully written and morally ambivalent, this complex tale will appeal to readers of Gene Wolfe and China Miéville.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review The city is crumbling. Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: Beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake. “A breathtaking success of a fantasy story. Find yourself a copy, brew some strong coffee, and allow your mind to be blown.” —The Arcanist “Reading it is like waking up in the wrong bed, in the wrong apartment, under the wrong sun. The strangest part is the insidious way the strangeness of Hayward’s world becomes familiar as the story progresses . . . By turns surreal, macabre and stunningly violent, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is dreamlike in its strangeness and complexity. Like a dream, it is difficult to define and difficult to shake.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)




Broken Sun, Broken Moon


Book Description

From the author of Filaria, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter, and Head Full of Mountains comes Brent Hayward’s debut short story collection, featuring ten stories spanning his career, plus two new, previously unpublished pieces, the novelette Lake of Dreams and the titular novella. In Broken Sun, Broken Moon, the storm has passed but gravity is weak again. The scribe isn’t feeling well. Houses in palmetto break apart and float away. Mechanisms behind the sun and the moon are breaking down. And now government men sail into town, from the capital, bringing with them a newborn perfect—the first in years. They’re looking for the scribe, and they’re not very happy. In Lake of Dreams, George Triplehorn was passed over by rapture when it swept the planet. Dead people either stayed that way or got fed up with conditions and moved to the moon. Like the others left behind, George tried to muddle by, making a living with his new skills as an entertainer, but things just weren’t the same. When Myron, his agent, doctor, and sometimes shrink, lands him a gig in Lake of Dreams, the largest lunar necropolis, George figures it might just be the ticket to boost a flagging career and maybe even get his life back on track. But he’s never been to the moon before, his so-called skills are acting up, and he soon discovers that the dead are not his greatest fans. This collection, like Brent Hayward’s other works, breaks the boundaries of literary science fiction.




Jeroun


Book Description

Collected in a single omnibus edition, both novels set in Zachary Jernigan’s critically-acclaimed, genre-bending world of fierce sensuality, dangerous alchemy, and awakening gods. The Needle extends over the heads of all who live upon Jeroun. Composed of iron spheres massive enough to affect the tides, it is the god Adrash's ultimatum to the people on the planet below: Prove yourselves worthy, or be destroyed. Vedas is a member of the Black Suits, an order of men and women who show their opposition to Adrash by staging battles in the streets. After witnessing the death of a child in his care, knowing himself to be responsible, he sets off on a journey to the decennial fighting tournament in Danoor. Traveling with him across the continent are Churls, a mercenary haunted by the ghost of her daughter, and Berun, a constructed man possessed by the soul of his creator. Both come to understand that Vedas's victory would start an all-out religious war. Unbeknownst to these three travelers, the aristocratic outbound mage Ebn and her protégé Pol use powerful alchemy to travel into space. Their plan: engage Adrash in ways that threaten to bring the god’s wrath down upon the world. Meanwhile, one of the world’s deepest secrets is gradually revealed. A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, a pantheon of forgotten gods, offers the most tempting lie of all... Hope. Jeroun collects the two novels No Return and Shower of Stones in a single new omnibus edition. Together these works combine the mythic inventiveness of early Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany, the dark weirdness of China Mieville, and the dramatic scope of George R. R. Martin, creating a literary science fiction epic that defies easy categorization, resulting in one of the most critically acclaimed narratives of recent years.




Chilling Tales


Book Description

18 Spine Tingling Tales Best Served Chilled... Edited by the maestro of macabre, Michael Kelly, CHILLING TALES: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live will distress you, delight you, and disturb you with stories that slowly creep under your skin and linger in your mind long after the pages have been read. This tome includes selections by iconic Canadian dark fantasy and horror writers Nancy Kilpatrick, Claude Lalumière, Brett Alexander Savory, Robert J. Wiersema, Richard Gavin, Barbara Roden, Leah Bobet, Michael R. Colangelo, Simon Strantzas, Jason S. Ridler, Suzanne Church, David Nickle, Christopher K. Miller, Brent Hayward, Sandra Kasturi, Ian Rogers, Gemma Files and Tia V. Travis, with an introduction by Michael Kelly.




Shower of Stones


Book Description

The follow-up to Zachary Jernigan’s critically-acclaimed literary debut No Return. At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle. Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet's surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads. With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her—Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all... Hope. Concluding the visceral, inventive narrative begun in No Return, Shower of Stones pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic in the fascinatingly harsh world of Jeroun.




Head Full of Mountains


Book Description

When Crospinal’s ailing father finally dies, he is left utterly alone in the pen, surrounded by encroaching darkness. The machines that tended to him as a child have long ago vanished, and the apparitions that kept Crospinal company are now silenced. Struggling with congenital issues, outfitted in a threadbare uniform, he has little choice but to leave what was once his home, soon discovering that nothing in the outside world is how he had been told it would be. In his quest for meaning and understanding, and the contact of another, Crospinal learns truths about himself, about his father, and about the last bastion of humanity, trapped with him at the end of time.




The Ink of Melancholy


Book Description

Ink of Melancholy re-examines and re-evaluates William Faulkner's work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, one of his most creative periods. Rather than approach Faulkner's fiction through a prefabricated grid, André Bleikasten concentrates on the texts themselves—on the motivations and circumstances of their composition, on the rich array of their themes, structures, textures, points of emphasis and repetition, as well as their rifts and gaps—while drawing on the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. Brilliant in its thought and argument, Ink of Melancholy is one of the most insightful and stimulating studies of Faulkner's work.







Dream-Child


Book Description

An in-depth look into the life of Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and the legacy of his work A pioneer of urban Romanticism, essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) found inspiration in London’s markets, theaters, prostitutes, and bookshops. He prized the city’s literary scene, too, where he was a star wit. He counted among his admirers Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His friends valued in his conversation what distinguished his writing style: a highly original blend of irony, whimsy, and melancholy. Eric G. Wilson captures Lamb’s strange charm in this meticulously researched and engagingly written biography. He demonstrates how Lamb’s humor helped him cope with a life‑defining tragedy: in a fit of madness, his sister Mary murdered their mother. Arranging to care for her himself, Lamb saved her from the gallows. Delightful when sane, Mary became Charles’s muse, and she collaborated with him on children’s books. In exploring Mary’s presence in Charles’s darkly comical essays, Wilson also shows how Lamb reverberates in today’s experimental literature.




Filaria


Book Description

“A powerful, beautifully written dystopian tale concerning four inhabitants of a gigantic but dying artificial habitat.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review A drug-addled boy, living in dank recesses, sets out in an ancient car to find his ex, who has mysteriously vanished. A privileged girl, obsessed with the past and exiled by her esteemed father, learns more about her long-lost ancestors than she ever could have wished for. An old man, on his hundredth birthday, deserts his quiet post as an elevator operator, climbing the great shaft in hopes of seeing the fabled topmost level before he dies. And a fisherman, seeking answers to why his once-vibrant wife is now chronically ailing and wasting away, begins a quest to find and confront the god of all gods. They are four inhabitants of a strange, crumbling realm, and in this novel their stories intersect and wrap around each other like subterranean tunnels—revealing deeply disturbing truths about the artificial world in which they live. “A disquieting, claustrophobic, compelling hybrid of China Miéville and J.G. Ballard.” —Peter Watts, author of Blindsight “A great read, crackling with invention, energy, and suspense.” —Quill & Quire