Just a quick note. The limited edition of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Alchemist sold out in less than 24 hours, though you may still order the trade hardcover. The limited edition of Tobias S. Buckell’s equally excellent The Executioness is also selling briskly, and not expected to last forever, so you may want to get your order in early.

Update: We have locked in 90% of the slipcased print run for Dread Island, which is quickly on its way to becoming the best-selling title we’ve ever offered by another publisher. In addition, we just had to increase our order on the regular signed hardcover.

Dread Island is a major new novella by Joe R. Lansdale, an 84 page, printed in two colors mash-up of Huck Finn, Brer Rabbit, and Lovecraftian Horrors.

Dread Island appears but once a month, in deepest fog. During its current appearance, Tom Sawyer is trapped, and it’s up to Huck Finn and Jim to save him before sunrise or lose their friend forever.

Here’s a taste of Lansdale’s narrative voice in the tale:

“This here story is a good’n, and just about every word of it is true. It’s tempting to just jump to the part about where we seen them horrible things, and heads was pulled off and we was in a flying machine and such. But I ain’t gonna do it, cause Jim says that ain’t the way to tell a proper yarn.”

Please get your order in soon, especially as we’re offering both editions of the novella at a discount off the published price for a limited time.

New stories by Glen Cook (a Black Company Tale), Robert Silverberg (a return to Majipoor), Joe Abercrombie (featuring the setting, grim humor, and violence of his The First Law trilogy), Scott Lynch, and a ton of other fine writers, all gathered together in the 400+ page anthology, Swords & Dark Magic.

We’ve decided not to fill large online retail and wholesale orders for this title, so your best bet is to order direct. Swords is one of the best–and most entertaining–anthologies we’ve read in years.

Limited HC:

$75

Peter Straub’s new collection, The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories, gathers for the first time the four novellas related to his landmark novels Koko, Mystery, and The Throat. In its starred review, PW said, “Readers of dark fiction will not want to miss this chilling addition to Straub’s extensive bibliography.”

Limited HC:

Sold out

Trade HC:

$35

The Sky That Wraps, the generous helping of Jay Lake’s fiction — 408 pages, to be exact — is in stock and shipping.

Check out what all the fuss is about, in the book about which Publishers Weekly noted, “One of Lake’s strengths is his ability to channel classic writers and styles, such as the heroic fantasy of Robert E. Howard in ‘The Leopard’s Paw,’ Cordwainer Smith in the baroque ‘The Man with One Bright Eye,’ pulp SF in ‘Lehr, Rex,’ and space opera adventure in ‘To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves.’”

Limited HC:

$40

We’re pleased to announce a brand new novella by recent Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, Paolo Bacigalupi, who may well be the hottest sf writer working today.

Paolo’s novella, The Alchemist, shares a common backdrop with a second novella by Tobias S. Buckell (more about his below). The cover and interior art are by J. K. Drummond, whose first work for us, for Daniel Abraham’s Leviathan Wept and Other Stories, was utterly perfect, as we think her work for these two new novellas is.

First, a bit about the world created for the pair of novellas:

Magic has a price. But someone else will pay.

Every time a spell is cast, a bit of bramble sprouts, sending up tangling vines, bloody thorns, and threatening a poisonous sleep. It sprouts in tilled fields and in neighbors’ roof beams, thrusts up from between street cobbles, and bursts forth from sacks of powdered spice. A bit of magic, and bramble follows. A little at first, and then more— until whole cities are dragged down under tangling vines and empires lie dead, ruins choked by bramble forest. Monuments to people who loved magic too much.

In paired novellas, award-winning authors Tobias Buckell and Paolo Bacigalupi explore a shared world where magic is forbidden and its use is rewarded with the axe. A world of glittering memories and a desperate present, where everyone uses a little magic, and someone else always pays the price.

And now, the description specific to The Alchemist:

In the beleaguered city of Khaim, a lone alchemist seeks a solution to a deadly threat. The bramble, a plant that feeds upon magic, now presses upon Khaim, nourished by the furtive spellcasting of its inhabitants and threatening to strangle the city under poisonous vines. Driven by desperation and genius, the alchemist constructs a device that transcends magic, unlocking the mysteries of bramble’s essential nature. But the power of his newly-built balanthast is even greater than he dreamed. Where he sought to save a city and its people, the balanthast has the potential to save the world entire—if it doesn’t destroy him and his family first.

***

We don’t expect the print runs of 300 signed numbered copies bound in leather to last forever — We will not increase the size of the limited editions, no matter the demand. The trade hardcovers will have more generous print runs, but still, we’ve seen the prices of some of our $20 editions (such as Angelic by Kelley Armstrong and A Fantasy Medley, edited by Yanni Kuznia) skyrocket in price on the secondary market into the $200+ price range for a copy of the trade edition, with the limited edition going for correspondingly more!

Both of these novellas represent the authors at the top of their considerable powers. You can’t go wrong in snagging copies to read or collect.

Here’s the second of the paired novellas we’ll be publishing in January, this one by NY Times Best-Selling author, Tobias S. Buckell. J. K. Drummond once again provided the stunning dust jacket image, as well as a number of black-and-white interior illustrations.

Here’s the description specific to Toby’s tale:

Magic has a price.

In Khaim, that price is your head if you’re found using it. For the use of magic comes with a side effect: it creates bramble. The bramble is a creeping, choking menace that has covered majestic ancient cities, and felled civilizations. In order to prevent the spread of the bramble, many lose their heads to the cloaked executioners of Khaim.

Tana is one of these executioners, taking the job over from her ailing father in secret, desperate to keep her family from starvation. But now her family has been captured by raiders, and taken to a foreign city.

So Khaim’s only female executioner begins a quest to bring her family back together. A bloody quest that will change lives, cities, and even an entire land, forever. A quest that will create the legend of The Executioness.

We’ve just finished shipping out all individual, wholesale, and retail orders for The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories (Peter Straub) and Return (Peter S. Beagle). If you’re interested in a copy, please order one soon, as we’re holding orders from our large accounts for enough copies to put both titles out of print, but want to give our direct customers one last crack a them.

All individual orders for The Sky That Wraps (Jay Lake) have made their way out into the word. We just have to fill orders for our large accounts and catch up on new website orders for in-print titles, and then we’ll be moving on to Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders’s major new anthology, Swords & Dark Magic, which features the likes of Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, Steven Erikson, Scott Lynch, Glen Cook, and many, many more fine writers. The print run for Swords is limited to only 500 numbered copies signed by all of the authors (except Gene Wolfe). The book is already 80% sold out via direct orders. If you toss in the orders from our large online and wholesale accounts, we could have sold over 750 copies so far. Given that, we’re reserving the rest of the print run to sell direct.

As some of you may know, my wife, Gretchen Schafer, is afflicted with lupus. This year a number of friends joined me to have some fun, and, we hope, raise a little money for the cause.

Here’s a short version of the particulars…

Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi and Subterranean Press are proud to announce the publication of CLASH OF THE GEEKS, a special and fantastical electronic chapbook. It features stories by Wheaton, Scalzi, New York Times bestseller Patrick Rothfuss, Norton Award winner and Hugo Best Novel nominee Catherynne M. Valente, Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Rachel Swirsky, and others, and is for the benefit of the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America.

The chapbook is available in multiple DRM-free electronic formats at unicornpegasuskitten.com. It is free to download, but voluntary payment is strongly encouraged, via Paypal or by tax-deductible donation, with links to both provided at the unicornpegasuskitten.com Web site. All proceeds from this chapbook will go to the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America.

It’s rare for Publishers Weekly to review $75 limited editions, but they made an exception in the case of Robert McCammon’s WWII werewolf adventure, The Wolf’s Hour. We’re glad they did, as the review fairly jumps off the page with superlatives: “Originally published in 1989, this powerful novel fuses WWII espionage thriller and dark fantasy. Richly detailed, intricately plotted, fast-paced historical suspense is enhanced by McCammon’s unique take on the werewolf myth… The limited edition hardcover reissue includes color illustrations from renowned artist Vincent Chong as well as a never-before-published companion novella, ‘The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs,’ which will raise interest in a planned collection of stories featuring Gallatin. McCammon’s fans will cherish this lovingly produced reissue of a werewolf classic that deserves to be unearthed and rediscovered.”