Reviewers call Marly Youmans’ work angelic, beautiful, magnetic, wonderful and immersive. And it is all those things. She is praised for her boundless creativity and her uncanny ability to surprise even her most dedicated fans over and over again. She has often been referred to as a best kept [...]

A simple walk, rich with impending doom. A chance encounter, taut with peculiar familiarity. A main character whose back-story drips into the surface action with maddeningly beautiful precision and poignancy.
Last month, N. K. Jemisin’s short story "Non-Zero Probabilities," was nominated as a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Award. A well-deserved honor.
"N. [...]

Kij Johnson didn’t really want to be thought of as "a tentacle-porn girl," but she knew her story, "Spar," worked as a story so she sent it off. 
Last month, "Spar" was nominated as a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Awards in the short story category.
"This is a story I [...]

Over the past twenty-five years, Jeffrey Ford has earned a reputation for being one of the best writers working today. His short stories and novels collect tales from a wild and unique imagination steered by a craftsmen’s eye for narrative and prose. His fiction could stand as comfortable next to Jonathan [...]

There’s an old saw about writers, are you a Hemingway or a Faulkner? Do you travel the world to write, or hunker down and find the secret language of one place like no one else? Lucius Shepard’s work ignores such binary sound bites. Instead, his fiction carries the weight of a [...]

Nnedi Okorafor is the award-winning author of Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Seeker, and Long Juju Man. Her writing is beautiful, relentlessly weird, and utterly engrossing.
"I enjoy nonsense and weirdness," Okorafor said. "Carnivorous hummingbirds, for example. An enormous wormlike creature moving beneath the sands who is obsessed with [...]

For twenty years, Elizabeth Hand has generated an accomplished and compelling body of work spread over short stories, novellas, novels, comic books, and media tie-in fiction. She often blends a literary flare for language, eclectic research, and realized worlds with occasionally sharp, dark, and painful human experiences that range from [...]

It’s hard to believe that Ken Scholes’ Lamentation is a first novel. It lacks the rough edges of apprenticeship and resonates with sure-footed and exciting story-telling.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this fantasy with science-fictional elements (or is it science fiction with fantastical elements?) is the first volume in The Psalms [...]

Every once in awhile, it’s good for a fool like me, entering mid-career, to check the pulse of what’s going on among the emerging writers who will one day call you a curmudgeon. Keeping tabs on this unruly, diverse lot not only lets you see the end of the road coming from [...]

The first half of this interview appeared in our July issue.
Slow openings, rushed endings, point of view shifts, gaps in logic, over-blown language, book editors see it all—even in manuscripts they’ve bought from masters in the field.  They also see manuscripts that need little or no work, manuscripts that [...]