Just one week after announcement, our surprise Signed, Limited Edition of Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon is over 85% sold out. Furies marks our lowest print run yet for a Jim Butcher edition, and likely the lowest print run one will ever see. Pick up a copy now, before it's too late.

Limited: 250 signed numbered hardcover copies, in custom slipcase: $175

We happen to think The Dragon Griaule is one of the most important books of Lucius Shepard's lengthy career, and are pleased to make it available as an ebook. Doubt us about its importance? Check out the reviews the hardcover edition received:

From Publishers Weekly:
“These six stories explore ground far from the high fantasy with which dragons are frequently associated. Fans of Shepard's unusual and often powerful Griaule tales will be delighted to have them all in one place.”

From SFRevu:
“The stories may be enjoyed as pure fantasy or as political metaphors to suit the individual reader. Either way, they are the creation of a master storyteller and present a fascinating world different from the usual fantasy world of dragons.”

From Tor.com:
“It just goes to show that there's more food for thought in each of these stories than you'll find in most full length novels. Each of them really deserves a review as long as this one, making The Dragon Griaule simply a brilliant collection. Subterranean Press has to be commended for collecting them all in one volume, because they're hard to track down individually but work together so incredibly well. Highly recommended.”

From Strange Horizons:
“'The Skull' ends one strain of the Griaule narratives, and leaves an infinity more open for further exploration. It ends at a certain moment of happiness and heroism after many long journeys through sorrow, terror, and ordinary human failure. It dreams itself toward light. As does each story in the book, it makes art out of fantasy and pain… The stories together here show that the last sentence of ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ was the truest one. Regardless of the forces determining our fates and telling our tales, we all live our happy endings in advance.”

From SF Site:
“For many readers, several of these stories will be already familiar, three of them were Hugo nominees and widely anthologized. For new readers, rest assured that The Dragon Griaule contains stories that will alternately entrance, amuse, perplex, shock, enlighten, confound, and compel you to keep reading. It's a journey of altered lives in an altered landscape, where the fantastic and the real mingle in the lives of people who are never quite sure where their desires end and the dragon's desires begin. That's left for the reader to ponder, and in that way, the dragon Griaule remains as alive as ever.”

From San Francisco Book Review:
“For fantasy lovers, this is the event of the year!”

From SF Crowsnest:
“This collection brings together six short stories and novellas about this enormous dragon, giving different perspectives on his life and influence… ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ tells the story of Meric Cattanay, a man who in 1853 proposes to kill the great dragon by painting an enormous mural on its side and thus slowly poisoning him with the toxic compounds in the paint. In ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’, we get a glimpse of the inner workings of the dragon as we journey with Catherine inside his vast body. ‘The Father Of Stones’ takes us to the nearby town of Port Chantay, where a man accused of murder is pleading innocence because it was the dragon’s malevolent influence that caused him to commit the atrocious act. ‘Liar’s House’ is Hota’s tale of the beautiful woman he met on the dragon’s back and their unusual relationship. ‘The Taborin Scale’ is the story of George and Sylvia, mysteriously transported to another time at the whim of the dragon Griaule, but for what purpose they do not know. Finally, ‘The Skull’ brings us to a modern-day story set in a deeply political South America, where a young woman is leading a cult obsessed with the large dragon skull hidden in the jungle.”

Here's a nifty visual representation of how John Scalzi deals with trolls over at his blog, Whatever. It's also the cover to The Mallet of Loving Correction, which is due to drop on September 13, the 15th anniversary of the blog. We like to think of this cover as Shel Silverstein meets the internet.

The first and second printings of the trade hardover of Robin Hobb's The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince are both sold out. While shipping the latter, we discovered a small stash of copies of the Signed, Limited Edition. There's a limit of one copy per person, so don't hesitate. These won't last long, and we have no current plans to reprint the trade edition again.

We're pleased to announce the publication of Robert McCammon's classic vampire epic, They Thirst, as an ebook. (The Signed, Limited Edition hardcover will follow next year.)

About the Book:

First published in 1981, They Thirst was Robert McCammon’s fourth novel, and it remains one of the major milestones of an ambitious, constantly evolving career. Like its predecessors—Baal, Bethany’s Sin, and The Night Boat—They Thirst made its initial appearance as a paperback original. In the years since, it has acquired an intensely devoted following, and is now widely regarded as one of the significant vampire novels of the 20th century.

The story begins in the tiny Hungarian hamlet of Krajeck, where nine-year-old Andre Palatazin awaits the return of his father from an unspecified—but clearly dangerous—mission. The man who finally returns is no longer Andre’s father—is no longer, in fact, a man. Pursued by this undead entity, Andre and his mother barely escape with their lives. Decades later, Andre—now Andy—Palatazin is a homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, and spends his days dealing with the quotidian terrors of a large metropolis. His life takes a darker turn when the demonic forces he first encountered in Krajeck arrive in L.A., led by an ancient vampire known as The Master. The Master’s plan: to overrun the city and use it as a stepping-stone toward wider, ultimately global, domination.

They Thirst marks the earliest appearance of McCammon’s penchant for epic, wide-angled narratives. With the unobtrusive ease of a natural storyteller, the author propels a wide assortment of vividly created characters through an apocalyptic scenario that combines gritty urban realism with a powerful portrait of supernatural forces at large in the modern world. The result is a genuine classic of the genre, a novel that is as fresh and absorbing today as it was more than thirty years ago.

Vincent Chong recently turned in the dust jacket for Caitlin R. Kiernan's major new collection, The Ape's Wife and Other Stories. As with Caitlin's most recent books (Two Words and In Between, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart), we suspect the limited edition will set our prior to publication. It comes with an original 96 page hardcover novella, Black Helicopers, available nowhere else.. Please check out the book's page to read "One Tree Hill" or see the wraparound version of Vincent's dust jacket.

John Varley's newest collection, Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories has arrived in our warehouse. Our crew is currently sending out all preordered copies while we wait for the distributor orders the recent Publishers Weekly review is likely to generate. As to that review…

Eleven long-unavailable science fiction stories showcase Varley’s signature themes of freedom and free love in this literary tour of the odder byways of the solar system. Varley (Slow Apocalypse) loves exotic settings: talking black holes in “Lollipop and the Tar Baby,” a hollowed-out comet turned into a space ship in ‘The Funhouse Effect,’ an orbiting resort shaped like a champagne glass in ‘Blue Champagne,’ a tropical ‘Disneyland’ on Pluto in the title story. The collection serves best as a time capsule of Varley’s less-known work and silver-age science fiction.

Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe contains eleven long unavailable tales, most of them last reprinted no more recently than 1985, and some making their last appearance in the 1970s. Consider this a chance to see what cutting ege work from a SF master looked like in decades past. If you'd like a free taste, "Bagatelle" is posted to the book's page.

Late news: Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe just received stellar coverage in the new issue of Locus:

Here the Nifty Skiffy technologies—nullfield vacuum suits, symbiotes, sex-changes, and the colonization of insanely hostile environments—compete for our attention with equally revolutionary and transformative changes in social, psychological, and moral realms… The shelf life of much SF can be surprisingly short, but the freshness and vividness of these stories after nearly four decades suggests that Varley’s work belongs in the permanent canon.

Head over to Sci-Fi Bulletin, where Michael Marshall Smith talks about his new SubPress project, The Gist, as well as his Straw Man novels, Clive Barker, and a host of other nifty projects and notions.

We've just made the first of a number of Poppy Z. Brite titles avialable as an ebook. You can look for her collection, The Devil Youu Know, down the line, as well as the collaborative novel, Triads, written with Christa Faust. For now, fill your need for Poppy's sharp observations and impeccable prose with Antediluvian Tales.

About the Book

The work of almost every New Orleans writer has been irrevocably split into two periods: pre-Katrina and post-Katrina. As Poppy Z. Brite writes in the foreword to this new mini-collection, “After the events of 2005, I couldn’t see pairing stories I’d written before the flood with those I’d written after; for better or worse, my life, my outlook, and, necessarily, my work has changed forever ... These are literally antediluvian tales, stories written before August 29, 2005… Whatever else they may be, the stories in this little collection now seem almost impossibly innocent to me.”

Antediluvian Tales contains five stories of the Stubbs family, the New Orleans clan whose adventures Brite has chronicled in her popular Liquor novels and other works. Two more stories revisit the author’s fictitious alter ego Dr. Brite, the coroner of New Orleans. Completing the book is “The Last Good Day of My Life,” a nonfiction look at the changes the past two years have wrought on Brite, filtered through a reminiscence about a day she spent knocking around Cairns, Australia.

Any reader who loves New Orleans will treasure these antediluvian tales for the city that exists in them: a city that will never again exist in its pre-Katrina form, but which cannot be killed by hurricanes, floods, or governmental neglect as long as its artists continue to chronicle and cherish it.

Not only will we be releasing one of Michael Marshall Smith's finest new stories (The Gist) as a special, two color hardcover, the exemplar of fine short fiction has a full-length collection coming out later this year from Earthling Publications. We don't have a ton of copies of Everything You Need, so please get your order in soon!

About the Book:

An aimless driver in the mountains comes upon something that’s both more and less than he hoped for. A child discovers why you should always stay in bed if you wake up in the middle of the night. A homeowner unpacks the wrong bag of groceries, and comes to suspect his neighbors might have secrets that he doesn’t want to know. A cable shopping channel presenter is confronted with disgruntled customers from a *very* long way out of town ... and a man sets himself to rid the world of one of its most famous lies, and winds up destroying himself instead.

Michael Marshall Smith’s last short story collection was hailed as “stellar” by Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) and a “major publishing event” by Ellen Datlow, and it won the International Horror Guild Award. You’re invited to return to the short fiction of New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Michael Marshall Smith: it is Everything You Need.

Limited: 1000 signed numbered hardcover copies: $45

Table of Contents

• This Is Now
• Unbelief
• Walking Wounded
• The Seventeenth Kind
• A Place For Everything
• The Last Barbeque
• The Stuff That Goes On In Their heads
• Unnoticed*
• The Good Listener
• Different Now
• Author Of The Death*
• Sad, Dark Thing
• What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night
• The Things He Said
• Substitutions
• The Woodcutter*
• Everything You Need*
• Story Notes

*Original to this collection