It took us well over a decade of trying, but first we managed to pull a new Langdon St. Ives novella, The Ebb Tide, out of James P. Blaylock, which we published last year. Just a few short weeks ago, he mentioned he was finishing an even longer novella, The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs, which we’re reading now and will be sending on to J. K. Potter to illustrate. You can look for it on our 2011 schedule.

Also appearing in 2011 will be the thirtieth anniversary edition of Joe R. Lansdale’s first novel, Act of Love. It will not only include the underground classic novel, but a long brand new story written with the same unsparing attitude as the novel proper. Joe’s told us it might even feature the novel’s protagonist, Marvin Hanson.

Mike Resnick recently turned in a 30,000 word novella, “Six Blind Men and an Alien” for Subterranean Online. This means we have two long novellas by Mike in our mag’s inventory, the other being “Shaka II”, as well as a number of his popular Lucifer Jones tales.

Finally, much of SubPress publisher Bill Schafer’s reading of late has consisted of very vintage (as in first published 50 years ago) pen name novels by Lawrence Block. You can expect a volume containing a pair of the Block’s offerings from the early days of his career next year, the perfect accompaniment to Hellcats and Honeygirls, the omnibus of the three early novels he wrote with Donald E. Westlake.

We just approved the last step along the way to way to publication of Patrick Rothfuss’s definitely-not-a-kid’s-book, The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, which means that we’ll have finished books in just a few weeks.

At this point, though we haven’t received our large retail and wholesale account orders, the trade hardcover is well over half sold out to individuals. If you’d like your copy to ship out in the first wave of orders, you might want to head over to the product page and place your order.

Update: The Signed Limited Edition is sold out. Trade copies remain.

We just unpacked some wholesale account returns of the trade edition of Peter S. Beagle’s mammoth short story collection, Mirror Kingdoms: the Best of Peter S. Beagle. We aren’t planning to reprint this title, so this is a good time to snag a copy if you missed it the first time around.

In addition, we have eight copies of the limited edition we held back until we made sure all pre-ordered copies had reached their destinations safely. These are limited one to a customer, and unlikely to last long.

Update: A quick count shows we’re now down to the last 15-20 copies.

Our shippers are now fully engaged in getting copies of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles out the door to customers. We’ve received feedback from a few folks who were shipped complimentary copies, and couldn’t be more pleased at their reactions.

We expect the bulk of the shipping to be done by early next week, though copies will likely be going out as late as midweek. If you’re interested in Chronicles, you might consider ordering one soon. We’re down to fewer than 40 copies of the numbered edition, with more orders arriving daily. Also, we’ve been asked this a few times and wanted to make it clear — The Martian Chronicles will not be available via large online retailers or our wholesale accounts. The only way to get a copy is to order one direct from SubPress.

Update: Copies of The Graveyard Book are now sold out.

We’ve been closely going over our inventory, and found four copies of the signed numbered edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. They’re $250 per copy (the original price, limit one per customer) plus shipping, so please drop us an email if you’re interested in one.

If you own The Graveyard Book you can purchase the same number copy of Neil’s upcoming limited edition short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, which will be designed and heavily illustrated by Dave McKean. (This project is running a bit behind schedule as Dave fits the design and art around other projects.)

Terry Dowling’s latest short story collection, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder, has just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. His previous collection, Basic Black, was similarly honored, and sold out within a month of publication. This time around, according to PW, “Dowling’s newest collection…highlights his rich and complex sideways storytelling with 12 stories that run the speculative fiction gamut… Dowling’s terse and enigmatic style is subtle and brain stretching, enticing readers with fully realized worlds that clearly extend far beyond each story’s boundaries. Insightful afterwords complete the sensation of being transported someplace truly alien by Dowling’s intelligent and thoughtful work.”

Amberjack is currently at the printer, right on schedule for its June release.

While shipping of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles commences at our warehouse, one of our other shippers, Matt, managed to put together all of the individual orders for Brian Lumley’s 180+ page Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer. The packages will be shuttled over to our warehouse, where they’ll apply the postage and have them on hand for USPS pickup in the next day. Large online retailer and wholesale orders for the Lumley will likely ship next week.

As a reminder, the Signed Limited Edition has not only a different dust jacket than the trade hardcover, it’s leatherbound, with five full-page illustrations by Bob Eggleton you can’t find anywhere else.

Just off the phone with Robert McCammon’s agent with most welcome news. In early 2011 we’ll be releasing The Five, one of Robert McCammon’s most ambitious novels to date, a mammoth 180,000 word epic thriller with a very dark fantastic backbeat. More news on the limited and trade editions soon.

Kage Baker won the Nebula Award for Best Novella on Saturday for The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, her steampunk tale about a group that aids the precursor organization to a certain Company.

The novella proper is out of print — and bringing over-the-top prices on the collector’s market — but we’ll remedy that this fall with Nell Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy, a trade paperback which reprints the novella that won the freshly minted Nebula award and includes the first book appearance of a long Nell Gwynne story, “The Bohemian Astrobleme“, as well.

The stories are now coming at a regular clip in the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean Online, guest edited by Jonathan Strahan. The last pair includes “Under the Moons of Venus” by Damien Broderick and “The Bodhisattvas” by Gord Sellar. We hope you enjoy them both.

Looking just a bit farther out, in addition to the William Browning Spencer novelette I think we mentioned earlier, we have an original story by Cory Doctorow (accompanied by an original Dave McKean cover), as well as “Case of the Lighthouse Shambler”, the first in a supernatural detective series by SubPress favorite Joe R. Lansdale.