Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

“Special Collections,” Kurt Fawver, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #728

  “Tom, Thom” K. M. Ferebee, tor.com

  “Haunted,” Sarah Gailey, Fireside Fiction #31

  “Shooting An Elephant,” David Hartley, Ambit #224

  “Little Widow,” Maria Dahvana Headley, Nightmare Magazine #59

  “The Day My Heart Stood Still,” Andrew Hook, Postscripts 36/37

  “The Dream Quest of Vellit Boe,” Kij Johnson, tor.com

  “The Girl Who Escaped From Hell,” Rahul Kanakia, Nightmare Magazine #59

  “The New Ancient of Sophocles High,” Marco Kaye, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #34

  “Postcards from Natalie,” Carrie Laben, The Dark #14

  “Your Orisons May Be Recorded,” Penny Laurie, Tor.com

  “The Ballad Of Black Tom,” Victor Lavalle, Tor.com

  “The Old Women Who Were Skinned,” Carmen Maria Machado, Fairy Tale Review: The Ochre Issue

  “The Drowning Line,” Haralambi Markov, Uncanny #10

  “Things With Beards,” Sam J. Miller, Clarkesworld #117

  “Nothing Is Truly Yours,” Sam J. Miller, Pseudopod

  “The Throat is Deep and The Mouth is Wide,” Sunny Moraine, Singing With All My Skin and Bone

  “A Tub Of Squid And A Faded Chair On A Sunny Day And The Human-Centered Nature Of Narrative As It Relates To Communicating With Aliens, Listening To Other People’s Dreams, Or Watching Porn In Which You Are Not Interested” K. S. O’Neill, Orthogonal Vol. 2: Code

  “Animal Parts,” Irenosen Okojie, Speak, Gigantular

  “Presence,” Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours

  “Recursion,” Michelle Podsiedlik, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #34

  “A Windowless Kitchen,” Trevor Shikaze, Liminal Stories #1

  “Two Small Birds,” Han Song, The Big Book Of Science Fiction

  “Every Day is The Full Moon,” Carlie St. George, Lightspeed Magazine #79

  “The Trinitate Golem,” Sonya Taaffe, Clockwork Phoenix #5

  “Badgirl, Deadman, and The Wheel of Fortune,” Catherynne M. Valente, The Starlit Wood

  “Lotska,” D.P. Watt, Almost Insentient, Almost Divine

  “The Ravisher, The Thief,” Marian Womack, Barcelona Tales

  “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers,” Alyssa Wong, Tor.com

  “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight,” E. Lily Yu, Uncanny #15

  “The Doom Of Principal City,” Yefim Zozulya, The Big Book Of Science Fiction

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Alex Andreev is a freelancer artist based in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was senior concept artist on the animated film Koo! Kin-Dza Dza, winner of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards best animated film 2013.

  A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of the forthcoming In the Night Wood, as well as The End of the End of Everything, The Subterranean Season, and five other books. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

  Gary Budden is the co-director of independent publisher Influx Press . His work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and websites, and his debut collection, Hollow Shores, is published by Dead Ink Books in 2017. He writes about landscape punk and more at newlexicons.com

  Octavia Cade has had stories in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. Her most recent novella, The Convergence of Fairy Tales, was published by The Book Smugglers. She is currently working on a collection of stories—of which “The Signal Birds” is one—that mixes speculative fiction with the WWII scientific research related to signal collection and the subsequent code-breaking at Bletchley Park.

  Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is an Indian writer. His debut novel, The Devourers (Penguin Books India/Del Rey), was shortlisted for the 2016 Crawford Award and the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is a 2012 Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. He grew up in Kolkata, but has also lived and studied in the United States and Canada. You can find him on Twitter: @IndrapramitDas. His website is http://www.indradas.com.

  Malcom Devlin’s stories have been published in Black Static, Interzone, and Shadows And Tall Trees, among others. His collection, You Will Grow Into Them, is published by Unsung Stories.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. His work has won The Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, Hayakawa, and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards and has appeared in translation in over fifteen languages. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

  Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in art history and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta.

  Daisy Johnson was born in 1990 and currently lives in Oxford. Her short fiction has appeared in The Boston Review and The Warwick Review, among others. In 2014, she was the recipient of the AM Heath prize.

  Michael Kelly is the editor of Shadows & Tall Trees, and series editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Weird Fiction Review, and others. As editor he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award.

  Katie Knoll’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Day One, and Black Warrior Review, among others. Her work has been featured as one of Narrative’s 2013 Top 5 Stories of the Year, awarded a 2016 AWP Intro Journals Honorable Mention, and selected for First Place in The Masters’ Review’s 2016 Short Story Award for New Writers. She currently lives in Cincinnati.

  Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. His work has won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards, been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award, and appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies. He resides in two worlds, but you can find him on Twitter @usmantm.

  Helen Marshall is the Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, and Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her debut novel will be published by Random House Canada in 2019.

  Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel The Art of Starving is out now from HarperTeen, to be followed by Blackfish City in April 2018. He lives in New York City, and at Samjmiller.com

  Irenosen Okojie is a writer and arts project manager. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask award. Her work has been featured in The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and was featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular published by Jacaranda Books was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. www.irenosenokojie.com and Twitter: @IrenosenOkojie

  Aki Schilz is a writer, editor, and poet. She is a Qu
een’s Ferry Press Finalist (Best Small Fictions), has been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 (2015) and is the winner of the inaugural Visual Verse Prize, supported by Andrew Motion, and the inaugural Bare Fiction Prize for Flash Fiction, judged by Angela Readman. Her short fiction and poetry have been shortlisted for the H. G. Wells Prize and the Fish Prize, and appear in print (Synaesthesia Magazine, Popshot, InkSweatTears, The Colour of Saying, Kakania, An Unreliable Guide to London) and online (theNewerYork, The Bohemyth, Annexe Magazine, Cheap Pop Lit, The Vagina Project, Mnemoscape Magazine, And Other Poems). She is a judge for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award, and is on the judging panel for the Creative Future Literary Awards for marginalised writers. She is a member of #BAMEinPublishing and a Speaker 4 Schools.

  Aki lives in London, UK, and is the director of The Literary Consultancy, the UK’s first and leading editorial consultancy for writers. She writes micropoetry on Twitter @AkiSchilz, and co-curates the #LossLit project with Kit Caless (Influx Press). She is co-founder and editor of LossLit Magazine: losslit.com

  Johanna Sinisalo (b. 1958) called “the Queen of Finnish Weird,” has won several literary prizes, among them the Finlandia Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her first novel Not Before Sundown (U.S. edition Troll—A Love Story) has been translated into 19 languages. There are three other novels available in English: Birdbrain, The Blood of Angels, and her latest, The Core of the Sun, which made the James Tiptree, Jr. Award honor list in 2016. Sinisalo’s novelette “Baby Doll” was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2008 and the Nebula in 2009, and she has edited The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy. Sinisalo also works as a screenwriter and script consultant for television and cinema. Among her most well-known works is the original story for the 2012 cult SF comedy Iron Sky. Her “writer’s cut” novelisation of the film, Renate’s Story, has already been sold to Finland, Germany, and France, and will be published in conjunction with the premiere of Iron Sky II: The Coming Race. Sinisalo was a Guest of Honour of Worldcon 75, held in Helsinki, Finland, in 2017.

  Sarah Tolmie is the author of three books with Aqueduct Press, the novel, The Stone Boatmen (2014, shortlisted for the Crawford Award), the short fiction collection, NoFood (2014), and the dual novella collection, Two Travelers (2016, in which The Dancer on the Stairs was originally published). Her poetry collection, Trio, came out with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. She has contributed poetry and flash to The New Quarterly and Grain. Her website is sarahtolmie.ca

  J. Robert Tupasela is a Finnish-Australian, New-York-raised translator with a particular interest in English translations of Finnish fiction of the weird persuasion.

  Alligator Tree Graphics (www.alligatortreegraphics.com) is run by writer and designer Robert Freeman Wexler. As a book designer, he has created cover and interior designs for many works of weird fiction and non-fiction, for publishers including the University of Iowa Press, PS Publishing, Subterranean Press, Tachyon Publications, and Undertow Publications. His stories have appeared sporadically in various magazines and anthologies, including Postscripts, The Third Alternative, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Books include novel The Painting And The City (PS Publishing 2009) and others.

  FORTHCOMING FROM UNDERTOW

  I Will Surround You by Conrad Williams, November 2017

  Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma, March 2018

  The Silent Garden, curated by the Silent Garden Collective, June 2018

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 5, edited by Robert Shearman, October 2018

  Nothing is Everything by Simon Strantzas, October 2018