This is not to say there will never be another Sybil’s Garage or another publication from Senses Five Press, only that due to time constraints I have to adjust my priorities, and for the time being that is toward my novel and short-fiction writing.  I do hope you’ll join me over at www.matthewkressel.net.

The Segment by Genevieve Valentine
After the Cure by Carrie Ryan
Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin
Visiting Nelson by Katherine Langrish
All I Know of Freedom by Carol Emshwiller
The Other Elder by Beth Revis
The Great Game at the End of the World by Matthew Kressel
Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan
Blood Drive by Jeffrey Ford
Reality Girl by Richard Bowes
Hw th’Irth Wint Wrong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv by Gregory Maguire
Rust With Wings by Steven Gould
The Easthound by Nalo Hopkinson
Gray by Jane Yolen
Before by Carolyn Dunn
Fake Plastic Trees by Caitlin R. Kiernan
You Won’t Feel a Thing by Garth Nix
The Marker by Cecil Castellucci

Early in the year, my story “The History Within Us” was reprinted in The People of the Book.  An excellent anthology of Jewish-themed science fiction & fantasy, I was pretty darn happy to share a table of contents with Neil Gaiman, Peter Beagle, and many other talents.

Another Jewish-themed story (do you sense a pattern?), “The Hands that Feed” appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.  About an aging Jewish woman in a steam-punked Lower East Side of 1895, this story was a lot of fun to write.  People seemed to like this one quite a bit too, which made me very happy.

My big publication of the year was “The Bricks of Gelecek,” which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s urban fantasy anthology Naked City. Ellen said this story “blew me away” when she first read it.  And Shelf Awareness called it the “true gem in the collection.”  I’m quite proud of this story, especially since it takes place in the same universe as my novel in progress.  Over on the SFWA.org boards, Ellen has posted a copy of the story for SFWA members.  If you care to check it out, please let me know what you think!

GUD Magazine purchased my small-town tale “One Spring in Cherryville,” a story about a close band of twenty-somethings who discover something buried in an abandoned factory basement that changes their lives forever.  I don’t have a publication date for this one yet.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling purchased “The Great Game at the End of the World” for their YA dystopian anthology, After.  This was the first time that I’d written a story that put children in real harm, and I found some scenes painful to write.  But I think this is one of my best stories, and I’m excited to hear what people think of it when it comes out this fall.

Sean Wallace purchased a reprint of “The Hands that Feed” for The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, which will be out in June of this year.

Sadly, there was no issue of Sybil’s Garage in 2011.  Though I really wanted to do a new issue, a number of other projects have prevented me from finding the time.  This is not the end of the magazine, however.  It will return!

For my work on Sybil’s Garage and Senses Five Press I was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the category of Special Award, Non-Professional.  Though I did not win, it was a great honor to be nominated.  Even better was sharing the ballot with my Altered Fluid mates Mercurio David Rivera and N.K. Jemisin.  Go team!

This year I did several readings of my work.  In February I read along side Rick Bowes at the Wold Newton reading series.  In a crowded bookstore in Cambridge, MA I read with other contributors of Naked City, and I participated in three more readings at Readercon.  At the San Diego World Fantasy Convention, Jeff Ford and I both read our stories from After.  Jeff was awesome by offering to merge our separate readings into one large one.  Overall I believe I did about eight different readings this year, which seems like a lot now that I think about it.

At Readercon I hosted a popular panel called “Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology and Folklore in Speculative Fiction.”  I had a lot of fun talking about the many great stories of Jewish fantasy and science fiction with the panelists, and the overcrowded room was testament to the panel’s success.

So, you may be wondering, what’s with all this Jewish-themed stuff?  Well, I’ve been working on a novel based on the Jewish myth of the Lamed Vav, the Thirty Six just men who sustain the world.  I finished a draft in August, the same day (no actually the same minute) that the northeastern U.S. was struck with a minor earthquake.  I had been writing about minor earthquakes in the final scene, so when the world actually shook, I was like, whoops!  Next time I’ll write about rainbows and universal harmony.  Anyway, I have recently begun revisions on the novel and I am about 25% of the way through.  I hope to have a final draft by the end of February.

The Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB has been going strong all throughout 2011, with many excellent guests and regular large crowds.  The fundraiser from 2010 has allowed Ellen and I to continue to run the series throughout most of 2012.  I noticed a lot of new faces in the audience, which suggests that the series is expanding in popularity as well.  2012 is already shaping up to be amazing with January’s guests, James Patrick Kelly and Kelly Link.  In March, we will also have Terry Bisson, the series’ founder.  It’s going to be a good year.

Overall 2011 was a very good year for me, and I’m working hard to make sure 2012 continues that trend.  On that note, here’s hoping your New Year’s was a happy one and that 2012 brings you all the success you deserve.  Bye, for now.

Or this song from Sigue Sigue Sputnik, “21st Century Boy”:

Anyway I’m not so much trying to relive an earlier period of my life, but to discover artists who are exploring similar areas of sound today.  This “retro-future” soundscape hasn’t been explored as much as it could have been, I believe, and as an amateur musician I hope to one day be able to write something that I wouldn’t be ashamed to play in my bar.

Too much happens at a con to summarize easily.  So I’ll try to summarize my thoughts before they all fade into a blur.

I met Charles Tan in person, who was flown to the U.S. all the way from the Philippines based on a fund that Lavie Tidhar set up. We were all strangely enough nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the same category (Special Award, Non-Professional), but the award went to Alisa Krasnostein for her work with Twelfth Planet Press.  Yeah, I’m not going to lie, it would have been cool to win, but I really wasn’t expecting too, and I was happy to see Alisa go home with the Lovecraft bust.  Charles is also twice as nice in person as he is online.

On Friday night I had dinner with Kit and Joe Reed and Jeff Ford and a few of Jeff’s former Clarion classmates.  (One was Rebecca Rowe and forgive me but I can’t recall the other’s name.)  Kit was her usual charming self and Jeff was awesome as usual.  When I told Jeff he and I had a reading at the same time and I was sad to miss his, he graciously offered to merge our readings into one.  Jeff is one of my favorite writers, so this was pretty damn awesome. Turns out we both are in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s After anthology, so we both read our stories from that.  Jeff’s piece was about a high school where all the kids pack guns and wear them as accessories.  It was amazing as usual.

The parties are kind of a blur, but highlights for me include hanging out with the Canadian ChiZine Press crew, Brett Savory and Helen Marshall, and Robert Shearman of the UK who wrote the Doctor Who episode “Dalek.”  I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in years.  Had a lovely chat with Leanne Renee Hieber, spoke politics and future WFCs with Jetse de Vries, awards with Gordon Van Gelder, and economics with Rani Graff from Israel.  Also lots of fun hanging out with the Australian crew, who may perhaps be the snarkiest people on the planet (I like snark.)  Friday night we were on the lawn chairs at 3 a.m. talking Australian football with DoSelle when the security guard shut us down.

Saturday, N.K. Jemisin threw her pajama party, where there was Twister, sippy-cups, the game Operation.  I got to see Ellen Datlow playing Hungry Hungry Hippo like it was nobody’s business.  I wore my PJs, but just for a little while.  World Fantasy has never been keen on costumes.

(Pillow fights on the other hand are encouraged.)

I also did a reading for JoSelle Vanderhooft’s Steam-Powered series.  A little more intimate than a conference room, we staged the reading in one of the suites, and I got to hear a lot of young, talented writers, like C.S.E. Cooney read excerpts of their stories.  I read the beginning of my piece “The Hands That Feed.”  Also got to spend some time talking novels with JoSelle and Eric Vogt, who both are working on novels where the gender disparity is much greater than our 51/49.  The ideas were so cool, I smelled a James Tiptree award on the breeze.

What else?  As you can tell, I haven’t been talking too much about the panels.  I didn’t go to many.  Devin Poore sat on a panel with Harry Turtledove about ships and sailing in speculative fiction, and it was cool (and frightening) to hear stories of some of the panelists describing the sensation of being lost in fog, or watching bioluminescent creatures approaching.  Devin’s Navy experience, as well as the other panelist’s varied and knowledgeable backgrounds made the panel a highlight.

I also got to see Genevieve Valentine, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mercurio D. Rivera and Rajan Khanna read.

At the awards banquet I got to sit next to the fabulous and fabulously dressed Kate Baker, where we talked Sybil’s Garage and novel writing as her glittery dress dropped sparkly powder over everything she touched.  We said the dust were tiny dead fairies.

Connie Willis gave a hilarious toast, and Neil Gaiman was his usual charming and audience-flattering self.

And, no, as I said, I didn’t win.  I was rooting for Mercurio and Nora too, but alas they didn’t win either.  Still, I was happy just to see my friends nominated, to see their hard work recognized, and I’m really happy for the winners too.  There’s always next year, and the most important thing to take home from any con is the desire to keep doing what we love: reading and writing.  And that, despite the New York noise, I did.

(You can see a few photos I took of the con here.)

(Also be on the lookout for a huge Sybil’s Garage announcement this weekend.)

Shut up before your god!

In the Book of Job, the titular Job suffers all sorts of maladies, boils, burning, utter agony, the loss of loved ones.  He cries out to God, “Why?  I have been a good man all my life.”  For the next several hundred lines or so in beautiful, timeless prose, Job’s friends try to convince him of the superiority of God’s ways, and though God’s ways are hidden from humanity, Job should just accept his fate.  It’s all part of God’ plan.

But Job is not one to roll over easily.  It takes the presence of God himself to cow him down into submission.  Many people take this to mean that Job finally accepts God as the ultimate power, and that Job ultimately rediscovers his fate.  But Carl Jung in his book Answer to Job, believes differently.  Jung posits that God is just a schoolyard bully, who says to Job, “Obey me, otherwise I’ll cause you more suffering! After all, I created the mountains and the sky!”  Job finds his faith only for fear of God’s terrible wrath, which Jung says isn’t faith at all because it’s not based on a choice.

A half-century after Jung’s thesis came the film Blade Runner, with its band of replicant humans seeking more life.  And it occurred to me this morning that Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants, can be thought of as Job.  He has been created by a force he doesn’t understand (he is essentially a cloned soldier).  He has to suffer unfairly (replicants die after only four years) and watches his loved ones die, one by one.  But instead of waiting for God to come to him in a whirlwind, Roy goes to his God, the CEO of the Tyrell corporation, Dr. Eldon Tyrell.

“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker,” Roy says to Tryell in his gigantic bedroom.

And Tyrell, with all the arrogance of the Hebrew God says, “And what can he do for you?”

Roy complains to his maker.  I am half-made.  You did not give me a chance to flourish.

And Tyrell says, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

The platitude is not enough for Roy, who finally understands that he has transcended his God.  He has become “more than human.”  He kisses Tyrell, then kills him by crushing his head.

And what is this, but Job’s story with a twist?  Instead of falling to his knees, Roy confronts his God and wins.  I think that’s why the story of the replicants in Blade Runner is so powerful.  Without consciously realizing it (or perhaps scriptwriters Hampton Francher and David Peoples did know) they were retelling a biblical tale.

Authors put their blood, sweat and tears into their work (I know, I’m one of them), and it can be horribly frightening and demeaning to see someone take that hard work and pass it off as their own, without permission, without credit.  The act is despicable, especially since it seems this offender — I dare not call him an “author” for he is nothing of the kind — has done this multiple times.

So I propose we celebrate original fiction.  I kindly ask that you please support Livia by reading her story “Jetsam” here and writing a comment in support of her and in support of original fiction. Please help spread the word that originality matters.

Today, I came across more ammunition for this ancient argument.  This morning as I was reading Pakn Treger, a Yiddish culture magazine my father subscribes to, I saw this micrograph:

It’s hard to see here in this reduced-size image, but this is a penned image of Karl Marx assembled from the text of the Yiddish translation of the Communist Manifesto.  Tiny Yiddish words in alternating light and dark strokes creates the likeness of Marx.  It reminded me a bit of ASCII art.

The article goes on to say, “This exquisite form of calligraphy is centuries old. From the Middle Ages onward, Jewish scribes turned Hebrew texts into virtuoso religious artworks, decorating amulets and wedding certificates with elaborate scenes and portraits.”

Here’s the article, if you’re curious.  And another web source on the art of the micrograph (with another image.)

I’m not sure I’d want the likeness of Marx hanging on my wall (I much prefer nature scenes!), but I think this type of art is wonderful!

I wish I could remember that professor’s name so I could email this to him. 

• The Segment by Genevieve Valentine
• After the Cure by Carrie Ryan
• Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin
• Visiting Nelson by Katherine Langrish
• All I Know of Freedom by Carol Emshwiller
• The Other Elder by Beth Revis
• The Great Game at the End of the World by Matthew Kressel
• Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer
• Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan
• Blood Drive by Jeffrey Ford
• Reality Girl by Richard Bowes
• Hw th’Irth Wint Wrong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv by Gregory Maguire
• Rust With Wings by Steven Gould
• The Easthound by Nalo Hopkinson
• Gray by Jane Yolen
• Before by Carolyn Dunn
• Fake Plastic Trees by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• You Won’t Feel a Thing by Garth Nix
• The Marker by Cecil Castellucci

The anthology is set to come out in 2012.

People also want to know what I think about this.  The short answer.  I don’t think it sucks.  I’m actually quite excited.  I’ll admit, when I first heard about Purefold several years back, how it was to be used as a vehicle for advertising, I cringed and wrote my feelings about it here.  When, a few months ago, I’d heard Alcon Entertainment acquired the rights to the Blade Runner franchise and would make a new film, I rolled my eyes.  We all know how Hollywood can take a brilliant concept and add so many cooks that the end result is pablum.  I was skeptical, to say the least.

But then I heard Ridley Scott is coming on board.  All over Facebook today, people are red with rage and skepticism.  But despite my doubts about Hollywood, I still believe good films can be made.  And let’s face it, Ridley is a great director.  I like to believe he understands the huge reverence fans have for his film, that he would treat any sequel with the same reverence.  And let’s remember, it’s his film.  We all know that Hampton Francher’s & David People’s script was brilliant, but it wouldn’t have been the immersive and haunting Blade Runner film we love without Ridley, who threw himself fully into the production of the film to escape the pain from the death of his brother.  Of course, we don’t wish any such pain on Ridley again.  But if anyone can make this prequel/sequel a good film, it will be him.

But upon my reading of the Book of Job, I came across this passage. (Job:31-32)

Canst thou bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season? Or canst thou guide the Bear with her sons?

The Pleiades and Orion are well-known constellations across many cultures.  The Bear is most likely Ursula Major, the Great Bear, also known as the Big Dipper.  But what, I wondered, is Mazzaroth?  The annotated text I was reading from said the true meaning was unknown.  But surely in this day of instant information, someone had an opinion on it, right?  A very similar word, I soon discovered via Google & Wikipedia, occurs in the book of Kings (23:3-5), where it is translated as “constellations.”

The consensus I found after some research is that Mazzaroth is an ancient word for “Zodiac,” the belt of stars on the ecliptic and the constellations therein.  It’s also supposed that the word “mazel” in “mazel tov” was derived from this word, Mazzaroth.  So you could say that “mazel tov!” really means, “good constellations!”  And since to the ancient (and modern) astrologers, a good constellation means good fortune, the phrase “mazel tov” came into use as a way to congratulate people on their good fortune.

by Anil Menon

to the sound of Yaarodu Yaaro by Yuvan Shankar Raja & Ustad Sultan Khan…

This story appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 7.

I, ZULAIKHA, MUTANT, inconvenient and sixteen-point-two miraculous years old, declare myself Eve of a bold and brilliant species. I am Singular. Protoplast. Odd. In short, fucked. I am besieged by fallen apes, hairy and quarrelsome. I am besmirched on the neighborhood’s limestone walls. I am virginal, insolvent and oppressed. Says Zulaikha: bring it!

###

Note On Rejecting Modesty: Should a comet apologize for its blaze? I will bellow my existence, even though I’m motherless, solitary and desolate beyond human imagining. Unnatural Zulaikha, doomed to be a thinking angel amongst quarreling beasts. Unnatural Zulaikha, doomed with ocular excess in the Country of the Blind. Unnatural Zulaikha, doomed to love YUSUF!

###

I am the only child of a Coptic Christian man in Heliopolis, Egypt. Technically, that makes me Christian and an Egyptian. But that’s merely an accident of geography and biology. To what country does the Opposable Thumb belong? Under what species’ haunches does an America crouch? I imagine myself free. I must imagine myself free.

###

Imagination is the name of a river in Egypt. All things exist, absolute and immutable, in its incarnadine waters. Did I not fish my world from its sunless depths? Through imagination have I achieved freedom, escape velocity, solace. I imagine I am not Copt. I imagine I am not Egyptian. I imagine, therefore I deny.

###

Father says imagination is a form of denial. If so, there are many who would imagine a world without Copts. The Pharaoh denies them political representation. The Pharaoh denies the Copts permits to build their churches. The Pharaoh denies them licenses to start businesses. My father’s God kept a close tab on the Pharaoh’s denials.

###

There are all kinds of Gods. Gods who begat. Gods with thunder-throats. Gods lost in desert lands. Gods who court frightened swans. Gods who turn grief into pearls. Gods who giggle at funerals. Gods who pooh-pooh and Gods who march ahead. Gods with winter-faces and Gods not quite dead. There are all kinds of fathers.

###

I once asked Yusuf whom his God preferred more: the chaste or the virtuous. He thought about it, a smile playing about his shy lips.

“The virtuous seek to slay themselves, Zulaikha, but the chaste seek to slay the lover. Yahweh certainly prefers the virtuous.”

Hai Allah, how do I get Yusuf to plough me!

###

Additional Note on Rejecting Modesty, Sexual: I was born without webbed thighs, and so I infer I’m intended to spread, with a modicum of the infinite benevolence and generosity, that which Allah, praised be his name, hath left so delightfully hinged. Why won’t my Suleyaman grant this Hurrem a shoulder to rest her henna’d foot!

###

I have battled Life these sixteen-point-two miraculous years, and though the exterior of my corpus is without blemish, the interior — alas! My interior is Guernica. My interior is Soft Construction With Boiled Beans. My interior is engaged in two ruinous wars:

Enemy ###2: Yusuf.

Enemy ###1: Father and Arch-Villain: the Moody Djinn.

###

There are all kinds of fathers. Fathers who wilt in the sun. Fathers who cry in the rain. Fathers with desolate beds. Fathers with forbidden wings. Fathers lost in Egypt. Fathers who plot dreadful things. Fathers who are Moody Djinns. Fathers who will soon be dead. Fathers beloved beyond measure. My father is many fathers.

###

Yusuf, being of Adam-kind, has both a father and a navel. He’s a tall, loose, rumpled fellow. Such long fingers! I like the way he eats tomatoes. I like his gray eyes that once saw me naked; gray eyes that looked once and then twice. I like his smile when I make our eyes meet.

###

Yusuf, being of the tribe of Manasseh, has no foreskin. No, I have not verified the absence of the fact directly. The sense of an absence, I have read, can often substitute for the absent. Phantom limbs, phantom roots. I wonder if Yusuf has a phantom foreskin. I can’t get it out of my mind.

###

Dear Yusuf,

How’s it hanging, bro? Check this out:

“In conclusion, circumcision removes the most sensitive parts of the penis and decreases the fine-touch pressure sensitivity of glans penis. The most sensitive regions in the uncircumcised penis are those parts ablated by circumcision.” (Sorrells et. al., British J. Urology, 99, pp. 864-869, 2007)

Hugs,

Foreskin

###

The removal of the foreskin is an optional maneuver for Coptic Christians. I asked the Moody Djinn if he had exercised that option.

“No,” he replied, with unnecessary irritation.

Good, good. But my relief was temporary. The Moody Djinn turned melancholy, even remorseful.

“Not everyone is as righteous as Yusuf. He’s a true tzaddik, Zulaikha.”

###

Yusuf, a tzaddik! A teacher to those black-hatted, forelocked, Talmud-toting, Yiddish-speaking, Zulaikha-ignoring Hasidic Jews? Impossible! I hurried to query the Righteous One.

“No, I’m not a tzaddik,” says Yusuf. “I’m a Bnei Menashe. And I’m far from righteous.”

Exactly! Besides, what would a righteous soul be doing with the Moody Djinn? Some fathers are liars.

###

Tidbit: In the land of Hindustan, where the plausible is a malnourished sibling of the actual, Jews have long been welcome. There’s the Cochin Jews of Kerala, the Telugu-speaking Bene Ephraim, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Kolkata Baghdadi and the Bnei Menashe of Mizoram. Bnei Menashe imagine they’re descendents of Manasseh, son of Joseph.

###

About Joseph: Abraham begat Isaac begat Jacob begat Joseph begat Manasseh, whose name tombstones all that Joseph has had to forget, namely: sold to Midianite traders by his own brothers, the decade of salt and slavery, the brush of Potiphar’s nipples on his back, the screams in Pharaoh’s prison, the rat-nibbles of other people’s dreams.

###

Manasseh’s mother is Asenath, mute daughter of Potiphar and Zulaikha. Asenath is clever, slender, and full of orgasms. When Asenath smiles, Potiphar imagines strange things: that she’s not his daughter, but a foundling, a secret given flesh. Othertimes, he imagines parenthood: his daughter, an hour-old, nestled in Zulaikha’s arms. Fatherhood is compatible with both explanations.

###

Old Potiphar has a wife. Zulaikha is her name. She perches on his shoulder, nibbles his ear. When she is bored, he opens windows and lets her out. She returns in minutes, days, sometimes weeks. She returns; bruised lips, folded wings. Then he buys her gifts: pearls, perfumes, salves and slaves. Let’s imagine him happy.

###

When Joseph’s lips meet Asenath’s mute lips, he forgets things. He forgets a desert God perched on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. He forgets a boy in a well, a boy in a splendiferous coat, a boy in a slaver’s grasp. These Josephs, Joseph is certain, differ from the Joseph kissing Asenath’s soft lips.

###

When Joseph’s lips meet Asenath’s lips, he imagines strange things. He imagine a little house with yellow slats on a cypress-scented hill. He imagines not being righteous, not being chosen, not being an exemplar, not knowing the meaning of dreams. He imagines being Egyptian. These Josephs, Joseph thinks, are also the immigrant kissing Asenath’s lips.

###

Joseph is an immigrant. An immigrant is ninety-percent imagination and ten-percent trace minerals. They are one solution to Kafka’s psychograms: the waiting-list, the penal colony, the courtroom, the burrow, the absurd metamorphosis. These moral instruments are categories of containment and cannot hold immigrants, for imagination devours all categories. Thus did Joseph ben Jacob become Zaphnath-paaneah.

###

What Asenath said: When my lips meet his, mother, and when my dust mingles with his, mother, and when I make him forget, mother, and when I seize what father seized, mother, and when I demand what you demanded, mother, why does Zaphnath-paaneah say: “It’s not you I love, beloved, it’s what you are not.”

###

On some cold and braziered nights, as the slave Amen plays the flute, opium entranced, and Asenath dances naked in front of Zaphnath, her upraised arms fluttering like the flame’s forked tongue, Zaphnath unlocks his burdened chest, shrugs on his imagination, luxuriates in the coat’s whorls, colors, and pockets, and then joins Asenath, dancing, dancing.

###

When Zaphnath, rich and powerful, brought Joseph’s family to Egypt, they dare not comment on his splendiferous coat. The guards wait, hands on swords.

“I use it to imagine,” says Zaphnath, smiling. “I imagine justice. I imagine forgiveness. I imagine happiness, family. I can imagine anything.”

Smiling, he insists they try his coat; smiling, smiling.

###

Their wedding is a noisy affair. Such laughter!

“Quiet, quiet,” mutters Zaphnath. “If I could but quiet the lord’s mouth as the lord silenced yours, Asenath.”

“Then let’s rename our first-born,” signs Asenath. “We’ll call him Manasseh: made for forgetting.”

It’s cold in the desert. Zaphnath dons his splendiferous coat, but the infernal cold endures.

###

Of Manasseh, son of Egypt and Israel, son of Zaphnath and Asenath: loyal, strong, married to a Syrian concubine, serene, responsible, and by tradition, a role-model for future Jewish kids. His tribal banner has a prancing unicorn against a black background. Over time his tribe spreads out of Canaan, perhaps into Asia or even: Mizoram.

###

Tidbit: Mizoram is a mountainous North-Eastern state of Hindustan. It has bamboo forests and bandicoot rats. The bamboo flowers every forty-eight years, the rats gorge on the seeds and multiply, the bamboo seeds run out, the rats turn to the food grains, people starve, the rats retreat, the bamboo flowers over and over and over.

###

In this land of bamboo forests, bandicoot rats and famines, nineteenth century British explorers came across a small Mizo tribe who had a harvest song about a divided red sea, a terrible desert exodus, pillars of cloud and fire, and about water that sprang from a rock. It’s true. Yusuf has sung me this song.

###

The people of Mizoram are short, stocky, nut-brown and have almond-shaped eyes. Yusuf is tall, slender, fair and has no epicanthic folds. He believes nonetheless that his ancestors were chased out of Canaan, two-thousand and seven-hundred years ago, by short, stocky, nut-brown Assyrians. The Moody Djinn agrees. He says Yusuf is as Jewish as Manasseh.

###

When the Moody Djinn and I had gone to pick up a tall, slender, fair, boy with no epicanthic folds in Neveh Dekalim, I caught my first glimpse of Yusuf’s people, the Bnei Menashe. They beat their palms against the tinted windows of our Mercedes. Chanting. Cursing. Spitting. Weeping. Wrinkled faces like old leather slippers.

###

Neveh Dekalim is one of the nineteen Jewish settlements in Gush Katif, a pretty-postcard place wedged between the blue Mediterranean in the northeast and the Negev. The settlement was being demolished, and the Jews forced out. This time, there were no plagues or pillars of cloud and fire. Just brother against brother. Just politics.

###

Moody Djinn greeted Yusuf with the warmth he reserved for the trusted. Yusuf was not much older than me, a few miraculous years at most, but Moody Djinn talked to him as an adult. Plotics. Giraffography. Horrorstory. Atrocity Theory. The car’s interior was very cold, but as the Moody Djinn talked, the desert crept in.

###

How to make Copts feel Somewhat Unwanted: Why do they take public safety for granted? Abduct their women while they’re shopping (Ingy Helmy Labibe, 01/04/2004), while enroute to work (Marianna Attallah, 05/2005), or just like that (Ingy Nagy Edwar, 09/27/03). Launch futile investigations. Insist they must have been asking for it. Deny the events happened.

###

How to make Copts feel Strongly Unwanted: Torture converts (Yousef and Mariam Suliman, 10/20/2003, Alexandria). Set them on fire (06/17/81, El-Zawia El-Hamra, Cairo). Murder Coptic monks (04/11/94, St. Mary’s Monastery, Asyut). A tender act of randomness (the slaughter of a dozen Sunday School students, 02/12/97, Abu Quorcas). The possibilities, as the advertisements say, are endless.

###

How I miss my mother. There are two types of mothers: Takiti and Maluma. Takiti is jagged, ragged, raven-beaked, the splint in Oedipus’ eye. Maluma is milk-heavy, curvy, cuddly, the feel of a soft thigh. Takiti mothers make good altars. Maluma mothers excel at making altar boys. These two X chromosomes are found in all women.

###

Yusuf: What’s the matter? You look sad.

Zulaikha: I’m trying to imagine my mothers.

Yusuf: Mothers? How strange. You have a child’s imagination.

Zulaikha: Yes, I’m a child. Leave me to my childishness.

Yusuf: No, no, dear Zulaikha. I envy your imagination.

Zulaikha: It’s contagious. Beware. Don’t sit so close.

(Space & Time)

Close. Kissing-close.

###

Isaac Newton on Space & Time: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration. Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.”

Zulaikha on Space & Time: What bunk.

###

I’ve discovered why Yusuf wouldn’t kiss me this afternoon. I’m HIDEOUS!! A pimple the size of the Bedou crater adorns the tip of my proboscis. Any further out, and it could issue Visas, print currency, compose national anthems. How can he ever sleep again! Burnt into his synapses is this… pimple. I’ve slapped myself twice.

###

“We have come to think of the actual as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one.” Nelson Goodman, ‘Fact, Fiction & Forecast,’ 1983.

This is Djinn’s favorite quote. I’ve never understood it, until now. Pimples and princesses are not mutually exclusive. Fucking universe.

###

The Moody Djinn has not stepped out of his office for days. Yusuf rarely leaves his side now. Strange men come and go. So it is going to happen again. Linear time, encircled. This time I must stop it. This time I must act. This time I must teach Yusuf to imagine a different ending.

###

I begin with an easy question. Time: Lunch; Venue: dish-washing; Situation: elbows touching, hips touching.

“Can robots kiss, Yusuf?”

“Let’s talk about something else. What colleges do you intend to apply—”

“If you were a robot tzaddik, is that what you’d counsel?”

“A robot tzaddik…” Yusuf smiles. “Theologically, I suppose robots could kiss.”

Wrong.

###

Question: Can robots kiss?

Answer: No. Though robots have identity, they lack individuality. Without individuality, robots might as well kiss the mirror. It is why robots can’t do jokes, hold conversations, or imagine a world where choice, not necessity, brings lips and hips, thighs and sighs together.

Conclusion: Student has misunderstood the question, perhaps willfully.

###

Time: Lunch; Task: dish-washing. It is very soothing: water, suds, the simple sounds of making things clean. Yusuf hums quietly, looking cow-happy. We could do this forever.

“Yusuf! Yusuf!”

“Pretend you don’t hear him,” I say. “Just pretend.”

He hesitates. Only for a second, true, but against a God, a whole second! O frabjous day!

###

Yusuf has offered to read the Bible with me, but there are such difficulties. Such parallels. Such brutalities. Time’s loom has folded and re-folded us, but here we are again, revenant, immutable: Joseph and Asenath.

“I remember a cold night,” I say, “when the fires fell low, and you showed me a coat. Remember, Joseph?”

###

Then spake Yusuf, the Righteous One: You blasphemy, dear Zulaikha. The gift our Lord God offers is linear time. We are crooked, true, and the past doubles back upon us, mottled and serpentine. But accept my God, your God, your father’s God, and we partake of his gift, for our Father’s world is our world.

###

“So this world is just a fantasy,” I say. “Incest, child sacrifice, genocide, murder… all shadows on our Father’s eternal face? Eternity allows everything to be imagined away?”

He considered my question as if it mattered. As if I mattered.

“Not everything,” says Yusuf, slowly. “There are unimaginable things. Some things even the imagination resists.”

###

Imaginative resistance. I looked it up. Professor Gendler defines it as the unwillingness of people to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. I was in the bathroom, post-shower, so lost in wondering if readers could be so perverse, somehow I accidentally flashed Yusuf, who happened to be passing by. Damn unknotted bathrobe!

I hope he saw me.

###

Dinner consisted of roasted red-pepper strips, golden focaccia, lemon wedges, and filleted slices of white haddock seasoned with Moroccan spice. I told them about Dr. Gendler’s paper.

“Gendler merely named one of Hume’s puzzles,” growled the Moody Djinn. “Hume claimed that moral imagination had its limits. Rubbish. People can be made to imagine anything.”

###

It’s his tone. It’s the tone that bothers me. It makes me nothing. It flicks me away like lint. Yusuf smiles and compliments me about the food; he’s playing umpire, as always.

“I don’t know, father. Dr. Gendler’s stories are convincing.”

“Naturally.”

“How about an example, Zulaikha?” asks Yusuf.

Such a knight, my dear Jew.

###

“Okay, here’s one: In killing her baby, Giselle did the right thing. After all, it was a girl.”

The Moody Djinn frowns. “And?”

“Make that story morally acceptable!”

“Please. Let’s say Giselle has some terrible disease, peculiar to women. Alas, it’s transmissible and incurable. Why shouldn’t she kill her baby? After all, it’s a girl.”

###

“Imagination is not a choice,” says the Moody Djinn. He has the air of a man nursing a personal sorrow. “Necessity is God’s confessor. What must be done may always be forgiven, Zulaikha. Must be forgiven. Who will not forgive a robot?”

“Truly,” said Yusuf, in a quiet voice. “Truly, truly.”

False. False. False.

###

I found Yusuf in the garden, between dusk and a cypress tree. “So you’re leaving.”

“Aren’t we all? Sit, Zulaikha. Let’s sit here forever. Just you and I in this little house with yellow slats on a cypress-scented hill. So small a dream should be imaginable. Even for me. Show me how, Zulaikha. Come closer.”

###

The first kiss: With Yusuf, in the cypress-scented garden. I remember our teeth clickety-clicking as we kissed. We were so eager we kissed air a couple of times. I remember the flickering thrust of his tongue. Such wet urgency. His gray eyes ate me. God bless Yusuf, bless his dirty, pure soul. I am so Maluma.

###

We broke off, breathless (as I’d often read happened). Stupid, grinning, happy mammals. I was ready to sprout placenta then and there. I began to open my blouse, but he stopped me.

“Why not?”

Because.

I placed his trembling hands on my breasts. He suggested instead that we try kisses from the Kamasutra. Some Jew.

###

Moody Djinn had been teaching me statistical physics, and I’d never seen the point, but now an experiment occurs to me.

“What experiment?” Yusuf sounded cautious.

An equilibrium experiment, my dear mammal. If X = number of times I kiss you, then for what X would kissing you become as uninteresting as kissing myself? (Five points)

###

Tidbit: Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, like all Hindu grammars, conquers by dividing. Kisses are classified into two main groups. The first set is recommended for virgins, the second for experienced sluts. For virgins, there are three recommended types: the Casual, the Throbbing, and the Insinuation. All require a complete lower-lip. Upper-lip kisses are not recommended for beginners.

###

Tidbit: For the experienced, the lower-lip types include the Equal kiss, the Sideways kiss, the Turned-around kiss, and the Impressing. The cynical may attempt the Hard Pressing. The perverted upper-lip kisses are treated separately. There are sleepy kisses, armpit kisses, navel kisses, kissing games. In each, the tongue plays the role of a verb modifier.

###

Conclusion: X is undefined. I could kiss Yusuf till the end of time, and it would always beat self-osculation.

“We’ll leave the Creeping Vine for later,” says my Vatsyayana, smiling. He finger-tests his lower lip, where I had bitten him.

“I wonder if kissing is ergodic,” said I, sighing. “So many boys. So little time.”

###

Ergodicity: it’s one of Moody Djinn’s dark passions. He’d been trained as a physicist, and the damage showed. He saw timepieces everywhere. He’d say “random” but he meant “covered timepiece.” When he says “statistical,” it’s short hand for “lots of timepieces.” When he says “ergodic,” perhaps he means “melting clock.” Absolute time for absolute fathers.

###

Ergodicity equates sequences and ensembles. One coin tossed a thousand times. A thousand coins tossed all at once. Statistically, there’s no difference! Coin tossing is ergodic. Moody Djinn claims no one really knows why. A single boy kissed a thousand times. A thousand boys kissed all at once. Kissing isn’t ergodic. That’s for sure.

###

Poincaré’s Theorem: Take a dough ball and add a blot of ink. Start kneading. Soon, the blot will stretch and spread throughout the dough. But keep kneading, and Poincaré proved that for such ergodic transformations, the original inkblot will recur. Maybe in a different spot, maybe after a long, long time, but reappear it will.

###

My lips are still sweetly sore from kissing. I’m sprawled out in the living room, lying my way through a college application. Yusuf is lost in deep thought. Or perhaps its guilt and remorse.

“It’s asking here for my strongest quality,” I say, looking up. “Virtue? Or is it Chastity? Whom does your God prefer?”

###

Poincaré’s Theorem (the formal version): Let T be a measure preserving transformation on a probability space (?,F,P). If B ? F, then for almost every point x ? B (with respect to P), ?k: T^k(x) ? B. Roughly, almost every point x in B is recurrent.

###

Yusuf: That was wrong.

Zulaikha: Yes, so perverted. I thought I’d faint.

Yusuf: It’s wrong. I can’t — mustn’t — fall in love.

Zulaikha: Hai Allah.

Yusuf: I betrayed your father’s trust.

Zulaikha: Well, he’s got an even greater shock coming.

(Silence)

Zulaikha: You’ll tell him, won’t you? That you can’t go through with it. Not anymore.

###

I think I am going mad. The kiss transformed me. Even now, I feel the weaving magic, sparking along my exhausted nerves, caressing me with the camel-brush of memory. The thighs’ wetness, the bristle’s brute scrape, lips wounded red — How could it not have made him anew? Cave animal. How can he still contemplate murder?

###

It has begun to happen. I overhear the Moody Djinn test-reading Yusuf’s note: “Do not mourn my death. Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet. It is my time to be strong, to yield something sweet. I, Yusuf, am not afraid. I tread the road walked by my ancestors…”

###

The Moody Djinn is cleaning out the powder residue from the barrel, slide and magazine of his Kahr MK40. He’ll test-fire a round and then holster it in the De Santis, now cracked with age. Soon he’ll come to say goodbye. He will be very parental, even tender: “Nothing will happen to me, Zulaikha.”

Correct.

###

My father thinks: We Copts are a brutalized people. God, I love this weapon. We’ve been beaten, robbed, humiliated, raped, murdered and desecrated. Wonder if Yusuf checked his vest straps? We’ve kept our peace, our Word. Our patience has been misinterpreted. The situation cannot continue. Zulaikha loves tilapia; I’ll get some on the way home.

###

Yusuf thinks: I remember the jib of her thigh. A whorl of lime and haddock. O God, I’m so frightened. I need Galilee’s sands between my toes. We didn’t try the Creeping Vine. I must change my underwear. Did Gideon worry about underwear? I wish Zulaikha were here. Why do I panic? All things pass.

###

Moody Djinn: Let’s get you ready.

Yusuf: I’d like to say goodbye first.

Moody Djinn: Better not. It’ll only upset you.

Yusuf: Does it matter now what I feel? I’m a robot.

Moody Djinn: Rubbish. This is necessary. You’ve to avenge our innocents. The Lord will strengthen your arm.

Yusuf: She’s here! Kiss me, Zulaikha.

###

I wanted to dissolve in Yusuf, and he in me. I wound my right leg around my lover’s waist, threw my right hand around his neck, lowered his head to my upturned face — two statues around a temple pillar — and kissed Yusuf as if I would suck out his life. Ours was the world and time.

###

The Moody Djinn was so angry, his eyes mottled a urine red. Some fathers are demons. Some fathers are bone gardens. Some fathers must be sprung in bear traps and some fathers must be put to bed.

“Go to your fucking room,” he says. “Now.”

“Kiss me, father.” I throw my arms around his neck.

###

The filet knife is sharp. Sharper than a razor, sharper than my hate, sharper than the circumcision of Zipporah. Someone is trying to kill father. He stands so still, my bridegroom of blood. I slice everything in the quarter-traversal around the jib of father’s neck. It’s nothing like filleting fish. I’ll never be clean again.

###

The blot won’t stop spreading. My hands, the fallen knife, the fallen souls. It bleeds out of the little house with the yellow slats on a cypress-scented hill, over the green glad Earth, blotting out the sun.

Yusuf: It was necessary, beloved.

I shiver. What a chilly day.

Yusuf: I love you.

I shiver again.

###

What is necessary may be forgiven. Must be forgiven. The choice of love and the necessity of death. I have chosen love, so death shall have no forgiveness. All those stories in the Good Book. Why isn’t patricide one of them? Imagine a God of Choice. Imagine a God who dares imagine His own death.

###

I, Zulaikha, a few seconds old, sixteen-point-two miraculous years old, ten-thousand years old, deathless and ageless, unborn and perennial, a smudge in Time’s dough. I gaze at my father, squinting to blind the light crowning his head. He is smiling. He cradles me. We are going to be friends, I can tell.

###

In some world, there’s a Yusuf; burnt offering, spattered flesh. In some world, there’s a Moody Djinn, tribal and vengeful. In some world, there’s a Zulaikha, forever complicit and mute. Many worlds, many strange things. But all these worlds are guilty, and so cannot be this world, womb of all possible worlds, this blessed, bloodstained world.

###

Old Yusuf has a wife. Zulaikha is her name. She perches on his shoulder, nibbles his ear. When she’s bored, he opens windows and lets her out. She returns in minutes, days, sometimes weeks. But return she does; bruised lips, folded wings. Then he buys her gifts: pearls, perfumes, salves and stories. Imagine them happy.

— The End —

Anil Menon worked for about nine years in software before shifting to writing fiction. His short stories can be found in a variety of magazines such as Albedo One, Chiaroscuro, Interzone, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Strange Horizons. He was nominated for the 2006 Carl Brandon Society Parallax Prize, the 2007 Million Writers Award, and  the 2010 Last Drink Bird Head Award (non-fiction). In 2009, he helped organize  India’s first in-residence spec-fic writing workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. His novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan, 2009) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award. He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.

The Carl Brandon Soicety is an organization to help build further awareness of race and ethnicity in speculative literature and related fields. The Parallax Award is given for an outstanding speculative fiction work by a self-identified writer of color.   The Kindred Award is given for an outstanding speculative fiction work dealing with race, ethnicity, and culture.

Congratulations to Anil Menon for his nominations!

* [8/10/2011 -- Correction: Anil's story has been longlisted for both awards.  Anyone may nominate a story by going here.  The shortlist will be announced in February 2012.  We still wish to congratulate him for the nomination! ]

I’m so proud of my friends, Nora & Mercurio for making this list.  Both work so hard and it’s nice to see them getting their well-deserved attention.

There are also many fine nominees in the Special Award, Non-Professional categories, and I’m very flattered to be included among this list.  Also, I want to send my huge congrats to all the nominees!  I wish you all good luck.  Can’t wait to see everyone at WFC.

You can see the full list of nominees here.

Thursday July 14th

7pm – Naked City Reading (Off-site!)- Ellen Datlow, editor of Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy will host a reading/signing on 07/14/2011 7:00 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA, 617-491-2220, http://www.portersquarebooks.com/.  The readers for this event will be Jeffrey Ford, Kit Reed,  Matthew Kressel, John Crowley, Ellen Kushner, & Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Friday July 15

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

7:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

8:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology and Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Chris Moriarty, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the minuscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

Saturday July 16

2:30 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Michael J. DeLuca, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work

Thursday July 14

7:00 PM – Naked City reading at Porter Square Books, Porter Square Cambridge, 25 White St, Cambridge, MA — Not part of Readercon proper, I hope folks can make it out to this reading, which will also feature Kit Reed, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner & John Crowley.

Friday July 15

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

8:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

Saturday July 16

2:00 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies/Small Beer Press group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Chris N. Brown, Michael J. DeLuca, Gavin J. Grant, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Small Beer Press authors and contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work.

9:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

8:00 PM G    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

I’m looking for suggestions/names of Jewish-themed SF stories or Jewish SF authors that might add to the discussion above.  Please feel free to suggest some.  Thank you!

* I may also be participating in additional readings.  Schedule tba.

“The very first Naked City event will be the evening Readercon begins and will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I hope some of you can make it. I’m hoping to set something up in New York during the summer or fall.

Naked City: Urban Fantasy stories edited by Ellen Datlow

Readings/signing hosted by Ellen Datlow at

Porter Square Books
Porter Square Cambridge
25 White St, Cambridge, MA
617-491-2220

Thursday 7pm, July 14th

Matthew Kressel
Matthew Kressel’s fiction has or will soon appear in Clarkesworld Magazine, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, GUD Magazine, and the anthologies The People of the Book, After, and Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, as well as other markets. He runs Senses Five Press, which publishes the magazine Sybil’s Garage and published the World Fantasy Award-winning Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy.

Kit Reed
Kit Reed is the author of The Baby Merchant, Dogs of Truth, and Thinner Than Thou. Her short novel Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, and the collection, Weird Women, Wired Women were both finalists for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her most recent novel, Enclave, appeared in 2009. Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies, and magazines. Her short story collection, What Wolves Know, was recently published.

Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Her latest novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, will be released by Penguin in 2012. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others.

Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been published in three collections. His fiction has won The World Fantasy Award, The Nebula Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, and Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire.

Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner‘s first novel, Swordspoint, was hailed as the progenitor of the “Mannerpunk” or “fantasy of manners” style. Its eventual sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, won the Locus Award, and was a Nebula nominee and a Tiptree Honor book. A third novel set in the same unnamed city, The Fall of the Kings, was co-written with Delia Sherman. She is also the author of Thomas the Rhymer, winner of the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award, and many short stories

John Crowley
John Crowley is the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award), the Premio Flaianno “Superprize,” and an Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Prominent in his ouevre are the novel Little, Big and the four-volume Aegypt series (1987 – 2007). Other works include The Translator and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. His most recent novel, Four Freedoms was published in 2009.”