Jared Shurin's Blog, page 119
July 5, 2013
Announcing... Pandemonium: Ash
Jurassic London are delighted to announce the explosive return to the world of Pandemonium. A Town Called Pandemonium introduced readers to a mysterious town in the American West. 1853 shared glimpses of the rest of the world, in that same fateful year.
Ash, coming in November, continues exploring the world of Pandemonium, thirty years later. In 1883, the great volcano Krakatoa exploded and shook the Earth. The stories in this chapbook explore what happened in the days that followed - d...
July 4, 2013
New Releases: The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood
The Last Banquet,out this week from Canongate, is Jonathan ("Jon Courtenay") Grimwood's first foray outside of the speculative arena. The result is, no pun intended, suitably fantastic. Despite the disconcertingly direct prose, The Last Banquetis a complex feast, with a lot to say about itself. (Yes, I mixed metaphors.)
The story - an autobiography - begins in 1723. Jean-Marie d'Aumont is a young boy, sitting by a dung heap and eating beetles. He is an aristocrat and an orphan, and his famil...
July 3, 2013
The Lowest Heaven - Out now!
Launch day!
There's a tendency to bust out the Oscar speech, but I'll save that for the third pint. Suffice it to say, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the authors, Joey Hi-Fi, the National Maritime Museum & Royal Observatory Greenwich, handebooks.com, Joey Hi-Fi again and a zillion other wonderful people for their sharing, reading, shouting, helping and general amazeballishness.
So, hey - we're partying at Forbidden Planet tonight! Come by and join us (and, more importantly, many of the...
Underground Reading: Witness to Myself by Seymour Shubin
This is the latest installment in my steady quest to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week (more or less).You can follow along here.
After a run of five strong reprints, Hard Case Crime dives back in to original novels with Witness to Myself(2006). Seymour Shubin's writing career spans over six decades and includes a dozen novels, including Anyone's My Name(1953), his acclaimed debut novel (and another lost noir classic, returned thanks to the magic of ebooks - hu...
July 2, 2013
My Year of Disney: Quarterly Progress Report #1
At the the start of this year, I decided to embark on a (possibly insane) quest to watch every single feature-length official animated Disney film this year and to blog about it at my site, Dreampunk.me. You can find all the posts here. I decided to include only the main films done by Walt Disney Animation Studios (therefore, alas, I won’t be covering acknowledged enduring classics such as A Goofy Movie and Bambi 2), and the live-action animated hybrids (mostly because I couldn’t bear skippi...
July 1, 2013
Announcing... The Reef by Mark Charan Newton
Jurassic London are proud to announce a new luxury edition of Mark Charan Newton's debut novel, The Reef.
First published in 2008 by Pendragon Press, The Reefis a tale of Weird pulp adventure, packed with mad science, swashbuckling heroes and monsters on an epic scale. Clever, exciting and ambitious, The Reef is the oft-overlooked debut novel of one of fantasy fiction's most intriguing contemporary writers.
Fans of Mr. Newton's Legends of the Red Sunor his new Drakenfeldseries will recognis...
June 29, 2013
Post-script: Buying, Making, Reviewing, Judging
A very quiet week on the blog which means there may be "mass reviews" in the near future as I try to catch up. Oops.
First, a few new finds:
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, edited by Marie O'Regan. I started reading up on this because, well, they're a competitor. Then I saw that it had folks like Kim Lakin-Smith and Gaie Sebold and Nina Allan and...
Now that I've got it in my hands, I'm even more excited - some of the 'vintage' contributions are amazing. Amelia Edwards and Mary...
June 28, 2013
Announcing... The Book of the Dead & Unearthed
As revealed by the nice folks of Tor.com, our next anthology is on its way!The Book of the Dead isnew collection of
original stories, themed around the most mysterious, versatile and
under-appreciated of the undead: the mummy.
The Book of the Deadwill be published in collaboration with the Egypt
Exploration Society, the UK’s oldest independent funder of archaeological fieldwork and research in Egypt, dedicated to the promotion and understanding of ancient Egyptian history and culture.
Table...
June 24, 2013
David Gemmell Legend Awards: Longlists announced & voting begins
David Gemmell Legend Awards season! The organisers have made the sensible decision to organise this year's prize around major conventions - with the shortlist announcement coming at Nine Worlds and the winner at World Fantasy.
So... Longlists for the Legend (Novel), Morningstar (Debut) and Ravenheart (Art) are all up. Some folks are already bandying around the world "finalist" which is... wrong. We've got a round of voting thenthe shortlists, so don't get too excited just yet.
It is fair to...
June 21, 2013
A few tips for writing flash fiction
Jurassic London is one of a few publishers in the flash fiction market. There's plenty of advice about pagination and font selection already out there, so I thought I'd throw in a few tips about what we look for when we go through submissions.
Please note that these are my ownopinions for the types of stories Ilike and commission. Other editors and publishers will look for different things, but these may be worth keeping in mind when you tackle a flash fiction brief.
Really short stories are...
