FBS Stuff for the week

Just want to highlight some recent FBS stuff:

- Craig Gidney gets the Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier.

An elegiac mediation on grief created out of scraps of genre fiction.

-Val continues going through the classics, this time hangin’ on Discworld for the second spin with The Light Fantastic. I love me some Discworld as it’s really one of the few childhood books that I enjoyed that has evolved with the reader over time.

He also checks out Mark Summer’s The Last King. Being the go-to-guy recently he also reviews the first title I had to cut-and-paste, Leerling Tovenaar Vader & Zoon by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, giving you the heads up (don’t tell Richard Morgan!) on the newest wave, the Dutchmasters.

-Speaking of classic, Roxy digs into the one O.G. IA reading Pebble in the Sky.

- Brian reviews one of my favorite writers period, giving you the low down (or at least one hell of a long quote) from Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain. If you are one of those people looking for great writers and you have gone through all the Booker long lists, already have a residence in Ambergris, and applied for the job of fantasy writer’s assistant, this is the guy.

If Jim Thompson were alive today he’d want to write a novel like this.

-Also a reminder that we put up an exclusive chapter excerpt of R.A. Salvatore’s The Ancient.
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Part of my lack of blogging here is I really get conflicted sometimes. Should I make a blog post, or post a psuedo-E article at FBS? Should I talk about a specific subject here or make a column? We are going to rectify this problem as I think Brian and I are going to sign our FBS exclusive contracts, yet, in one motion usher in a new age of independence. Next couple of months is going to bring a lot of our plans into the first visible signs of fruition, and I want to thank all our readers who are with us as we continue to try to always improve The Spot. Damon, Mark and Dave are working on a number of projects that include, but not limited to, our first major step into Crime/Mystery.

Heliotrope will be out next week. There has been some confusion because though I posted we are currently closed to submissions on the front page there was a area that stated we were still open to them. I apologize for that - to be clear we are closed to submissions currently and I’m at work putting together our Fall issue (which is basically filled - excluding some names in the black book I’m looking to hear back from). I have got some worried queries lately - Heliotrope is fine and when you see release of the initial contributors to that fall issue you will believe it! It’s a bit of a special, focused issue - but more on that and even bigger news later!

More soon!