We just received our copies of PS Publishing’s The Very Best of Gene Wolfe, and will be sending them out next week. We have over 100 orders to ship, along with keeping up with new SubPress releases, so please be patient. We’re packing and boxing things as quickly as possible. And if I haven’t said so lately, many thanks for being so supportive of our efforts. It’s always very much appreciated.

We’re proud to announce Mirror Kingdoms, a huge (over 200,000 words) career spanning retrospective of Peter S. Beagle’s short fiction. We’re offering this collection, projected at more than 500 pages, at a special price for a very short time, so head over to the book’s page and have a look. In the meantime, here’s the full description:

When New York Times Bestselling writer Tad Williams described Peter S. Beagle as a “bandit prince out to steal reader’s hearts” he touched on a truth that readers have known for fifty years. Beagle, whose work has touched generations of readers around the world, has spun rich, romantic and very funny tales that have beguiled and enchanted readers of all ages.

Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin.

During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like “Come Lady Death”, “Lila and the Werewolf”, “Julie’s Unicorn”, “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros”, and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, “Two Hearts”, WSFA Small Press Award winner “El Regalo”, and wonderful stories like the surrealist “The Last and Only”, the haunting “The Rabbi’s Hobby” and others.

Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It’s a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he’ll keep on doing so.

We’re down to our last dozen copies of PS Publishing special Tim Powers bibliography, Secret Histories, an over 500 page oversize hardcover printed in full color, copiously illustrated by Powers. The book includes not only a 24,000 word excerpt from an unpublished nove, To Serve in Hell, but the outline and original, never before published chapters to Powers’ signature novel, The Anubis Gates.

Also in short supply is the Deluxe Limited Edition, which, in addition to the main volume, includes an unpublished, unfinished novel by Powers, The Waters Deep, Deep, Deep.

SF Site has just weighed in, quite positively, on Purple and Black, K. J. Parker’s first fantasy novella: “Actually, I think Parker deals well in general with the limitations of her chosen structure. She manages to tell a complete story that gives due acknowledgment of the impact its events have on the characters who live through them (even if the distance of the telling means we don’t necessarily experience that impact so much ourselves). She weaves in the back-story skilfully, and raises some difficult ethical issues.”

The first review for Peter Straub’s The Skylark — the 200 manuscript pages longer, original version of his next novel, is in, and while it contains a few quibbles, it also contains the following bit of flat out praise: “The Skylark is a stunning story which captures both the heartbreaking innocence of being a teenager and the heartache of realizing one is middle-aged and has failed to attain the dreams, large and small, which seem to come so easily when one is young and innocent. The characters of the high school friends, both in their older and younger incarnations, are three dimensional and believable, including their very human flaws, and the journey each of them must make to reclaim the pieces of the puzzle are as fascinating for their psychological insights as for the unsettling hints at the magic world which remains mostly obscured. Individually and collectively, I was caught up in their story and wanted to know how it would all turn out for them.”

Not to be outdone, R. A. MacAvoy’s novella, In Between, her first book in a decade and a half, wasn’t treated too shabbily either: “I was deeply satisfied when I finished the story, and would definitely recommend it, quibbles and all, to anyone interested in art, the supernatural, healing, Buddhism, kung fu, bonsai, and a dozen other threads that weave through this particular tapestry.”

Yes, we’re doing a limited edition of Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, the first volume of one of the grittiest, most exciting, bloody epic fantasy trilogies to come down the pike in over a decade. Abercrombie is going to be huge, and is already selling tens of thousands of the novels in The First Law trilogy in trade paperback in the US, and has a new novel, Best Served Cold, which is receiving even stronger buzz than the trilogy. We aim to give you an edition that will feature sewn signatures, be fully bound in cloth, with a unique dust jacket to match the storytelling in its pages.

We’ll post more information soon, as the art details are worked out.

We’ve just ordered ARCs for Dan Simmons’ unimaginably frigid exploration novel, The Terror, and are putting it through one final round of proofing. The signature sheets will be en route to Dan later this week for signing, and, as you can see, John Picacio has done his usual bravura job in creating a cover for this novel of epic horrors.

We’re pleased to announce a new entry in the epic fantasy world of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man. The Great Bazaar and Other Stories includes a long new story, as well as several outtakes from the first novel in the series — really, standalone short stories themselves — as well as additional material to flesh out Brett’s bravura storytelling.

In addition to the small trade hardcover, we’re producing only 200 signed numbered copies, which, given Brett and epic fantasy’s popularity, are certain to sell quickly.

In their day, the three novels in Philip Jose Farmer’s nearly 500 page omnibus, The Other in the Mirror, drew some pretty hefty praise.

Here’s a taste…

“…outrageous and intriguing.”

—Science Fiction Review on Jesus on Mars

“…the author has been one of the most innovative (and often the most innovative) in the SF field. This story, we think, upholds that reputation.”

—Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine on Jesus on Mars

“Night of Light is one of Farmer’s most successful novels.”

—Edgar L. Chapman in The Magic Labyrinth of Philip José Farmer

“Night of Light is an intensely interesting action tale set against an incredibly bizarre, almost hallucinogenic background that warrants re-reading and closer examination.”

—Science Fiction Review Monthly

Still more good news in the month of Jack Vance here at Subterranean. Another review for his new collection, Wild Thyme, Green Magic, has just been published, this time in Fantasy Literature: “I recommend Wild Thyme, Green Magic to any Jack Vance fan — you’ll enjoy this collection of typical Vance stories: cagey heroes (some of them already familiar), exotic locales (again, some familiar), high adventure, grand and sometimes bewildering ideas, sarcasm, irony, and occasional ten-dollar words. If you’re not yet a Jack Vance fan, here’s a good collection to get you on your way. I suggest starting with ‘Chateau d’ If,’ ‘The Seventeen Virgins,’ and ‘The World-Thinker.’ If you don’t find those stories highly entertaining, there’s probably no hope for you.”