Here’s a first look at Edward Miller’s wonderful dust jacket for Ian R. MacLeod’s new short story collection, Journeys, based on “The English Mutiny”, one of the nine strong tales that make up the volume. We’ll be back again soon to share the fully designed cover, but the image itself is so striking we decided to share it now.

Yanni Kuznia, our Director of Production, has been doing her usual excellent job of shepherding books toward production, while I mostly marvel at the world class Excel spread sheet she maintains, and try to stay out of her way. Still, I’m plugged in just enough to let you know how a number of titles are progressing.

– The Neutronium Alchemist (Peter F. Hamilton) — One of our best proofers, Jenny Crisp, just compared our edition to the trade paperback “bible” we’re using for this book. As soon as her corrections have been incorporated into the book, we’ll be sending out to have Advance Reading Copies printed. It’s a testament to Jenny’s dedication that this book is staying firmly on its track to be released later this year.

– The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard — Another of our freelancers, Gwenda Bond, has already proofed the main book and is going through the index one final time. We’ve already ordered ARCs, which should be in hand shortly. Look for REH Horror some time late this summer/early fall. Check out the book’s page for a good number of the color and black-and-white illustrations by Greg Staples that grace the volume.

– The Palace at Midnight and The Last Song of Orpheus (Robert Silverberg) — Bob Silverberg just finished a proofreading marathon on Palace, the fifth volume of his Collected Short Fiction, and then dove right in to Orpheus. He used the opportunity of giving Orpheus one final pass to add a short but necessary passage to the text. We’ve seen the first illustration by Alex Preuss for the latter, and expect the rest of the artwork in the coming weeks.

– Swords and Dark Magic (edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders) — The three sets of signature sheets are making the rounds for this 400+ page antho that’s billed as The New Sword and Sorcery. Proofreading is complete, and Dominic Harman has just turned in a stunning dust jacket illustration. We’ll post a copy of it as soon as the design is finished.

That’s all for this random sampling of production updates. Rest assured we’re hard at work on a lot of additional titles, and will update you on more in the coming weeks.

We called our friends at PS Publishing the other day to touch base on the Traycased edition of Gene Wolfe’s new epistolary fantasy The Sorcerer’s House, to find out copies were just being packed and shipped to us. We took advantage of the call to order more copies of the Signed Limited Edition, so it’s back to being listed in our store.

Sorcerer’s is one elegant looking hardcover, with an excellent introduction by Tim Powers that leads to Gene Wolfe’s matchless prose. You could well do worse than to spend some time with this excellent novel. Feel free to get your order in now — copies will be shipping in just a week or two, as soon as they arrive.

We should take one final second to point out that not only are we offering Free US Shipping on this title, as we do all PS Publishing books, but our price on the Signed Limited Edition ($50) is a full $10 off the retail price.

Our newest shipper, Matt, spent the past two days bubblewrapping and boxing copies of Ray Bradbury’s major new collection, A Pleasure to Burn. The packages will be taken over to our warehouse in the next day or so and then mailed to customers. Soon after that, retail and wholesale accounts of the Bradbury will ship.

Meanwhile, back at the warehouse, the last copies of Peter S. Beagle’s Mirror Kingdoms exited stage left, as have the final copies of Lucius Shepard’s new dragon Griaule novella, The Taborin Sale. Our shippers have moved on to Elizabeth Bear’s Bone and Jewel Creatures. The trade edition is sold out and then some, but we do have a small number of the signed limited editions (with bonus chapbook) left.

Next up on the shipping parade will be Jim Butcher’s Grave Peril, either late this week or early next.

We knew something was up last week when over the course of two days we received over 700 orders from individuals for Patrick Rothfuss’s definitely Not A Children’s Picture Book The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed. Turns out Pat announced on his blog that the book had just been sent to the printer.

As it stands, we have nearly 2000 individual orders for The Princess, making it one of the best-selling direct titles in our 15 year history. It’s also a damn clever bit of ghoulish fun. Don’t miss out.

We’ve been very busy in the SubPress offices, lining up projects for later in 2010 and into 2011, and can give you a glimpse behind the curtains.

– Carlos Ruiz Zafon has graciously given us permission to publish a signed limited edition of his masterful The Angel’s Game, which shares the setting, albeit a few decades earlier, of The Shadow of the Wind. We plan to lavish the same attention to detail and design on Angel that made Shadow one of the most impressive books we’ve ever published.

– Joe Hill and Steven R. Boyett each turned in novelettes for Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, which we should be announcing in the next month or so.

– William Browning Spencer just sent us an odd and disturbing novelette for Subterranean Online. Look for “The Unorthodox Dr. Draper” in a future issue.

– We’ve just reached agreement with Neal Barrett, Jr. for a mammoth career spanning short story collection.

– Last, but certainly not least, Joe R. Lansdale is penning a Hap and Leonard novella we’ll release next year, in a special hardcover along with the bonus Hap Collins short story, “The Boy Who Was Invisible”.

I’ll give them this: Stomping the Yeti reviews a book thoroughly. In the case of Norman Partridge’s new collection, Lesser Demons, (which they rated 4 out of 5), each story is individually covered and rated as well.

Overall, here’s their take on Norm and his writing: “A showcase of pulp heroics, sharp prose and dark horror, Lesser Demons delivers the American blend of horror quickly becoming synonymous with the name Norman Partridge… Fantastic prose with a distinctive structure that reads smoothly; Stories that recall the pulp adventures of the past while delivering a second layer of commentary; Small town American characters that are recognizable and relatable.”

We’re completely sold out of Peter S. Beagle’s mammoth career retrospective, Mirror Kingdoms, but the generous reviews continue to come in. Here’s a snippet of one from SF Site: “Mirror Kingdoms contains eighteen stories by Beagle that run a gamut of styles and venues, but have a tendency to look at recurring themes through different lenses. Readers who are only familiar with Beagle’s The Last Unicorn will be rewarded with the follow-up tale of Schmendrick and Molly while they also have the opportunity to read more of Beagle’s stories and discover how broad his talent is. The stories in Mirror Kingdoms are drawn from a broad variety of sources, many of which may have eluded Beagle’s readers, meaning the stories collected, which range from 1963 through 2009 for their initial publications, are almost sure to offer something new to all readers.”

We know copies of Mirror Kingdoms are still available out there in the wild, at large online retailers and some specialty shops. We think it’s well worth tracking down a copy.

We’ve seen a few advance review of Cherie Priest’s Clementine, the sequel to her breakout steampunk novel, Boneshaker, and here’s the first pair we can share with you.

From SciFi magazine: “The latest in Priest’s steampunk series about an alternate Civil War that still rages in 1880, thanks in part to the wide availability of hydrogen airships, is an over-the-top romp driven by pirates, aerial battles, revenge, conspiracies, secret weapons, and a forced alliance between deadly enemies… Priest alternates chapters detailing [Croggon] Hainey’s quest to retake his stolen vessel and [Real-life Confederate spy Belle] Boyd’s mission to intercept him – until circumstances inevitably place them on the same side. There are cliffhangers aplenty, and the world Priest has set up is a promising one, but the book’s real attraction is the well-realized portrayal of Boyd, who is as resourceful, charming, and dangerous as she was in real life.”

From The Mad Hatter’s Book Review: “Priest is gives us glimpses of a world that is wide and wild in a story that hardly touches the ground. Clementine shows off the southern flair that Cherie has become famous for, but will please even hardened Steampunk fans with her ingenuity at keeping everything fresh and yet historically stylized.”

We’ve finished packing up all individual orders for Connie Willis’s WWII time jaunt, Blackout, and will have them to the post office in the next day or so. After that, we’ll be at work on the bookstore orders.

Following that, our shippers will turn their packing peanuts and tape guns to individual and bookstore orders for Lucius Shepard’s The Taborin Scale. We’ve turned away orders for over 400 copies of the new dragon Griaule novella, so you might want to order a copy from your favorite source soon, as we currently have no plans to reprint. Lucius’s many readers will be pleased to know we’re due to see a new, long (50k words) Griaule novella from him in the near future.