The Hudson Prize and Blood: Stories

 
The first book written for adults that I ever coveted and loved and read to pieces was a short story collection: Stephen King's Night Shift, from which my cousin read me stories when we were both probably much too young, and which was one of the first books I ever bought myself. Ever since then, short story collections have seemed to me the most wonderful of all books.

I started publishing short stories professionally with "Getting a Date for Amelia" back in 2001. I barely remember the kid who wrote it (in the summer of 2000). I'm not a prolific fiction writer; I've been lucky enough to publish most of the stories I've written in the last decade or so, but I average only two stories a year. Fiction is the hardest thing in the world for me to write. Some stories have taken many years to find a final form. The kid who wrote "Getting a Date for Amelia" also managed to write a novel; it was mostly terrible (or, rather, not terrible, which might be interesting. Just nothing at all special. Rather boring, in fact. An extraordinarily useful exercise, though, dragging yourself through a novel-length piece of writing, even if the end result isn't all that great). I like fragments and miniatures too much to ever write a proper novel, I expect.

And—

What? Get on with it? Ah.

Yes, I am dithering here.

Because I am about to write a sentence that still feels unreal, though I've been writing various forms of it into emails to friends for a little while now:

I am the 2014 winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press for an unpublished manuscript titled Blood: Stories that will be published by BLP in January 2016.

Weird Tales Ann

Weird Tales magazine today announced that the great and glorious Ann VanderMeer will be taking over as editor, starting with the October 2007 issue.

I'm excited by this news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Weird Tales has, in various incarnations, been an important part of the fantasy and horror genre since 1923. It not only served as a home for stories by many of the prominent pulp writers (and is particularly noted for its connection to Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, among others), but also published Tennessee Williams's first story, "The Vengeance of Nitocris". (Hardly Williams's finest hour, but he was just a kid, and it's a fun bit of trivia.)

In 1988, WT was reincarnated under the editorship of John Betancourt, Darrel Schweitzer, and George Scithers, and when I was first falling under the spell of weird fiction of all sorts, I would make occasional pilgrimages to Boston to the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore, where I discovered those issues, each one with a featured writer and artist. It was through those magazines that I first discovered the writing of Thomas Ligotti, Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, Nancy Springer, David J. Schow, Brian Lumley, Karl Edward Wagner, Jonathan Carroll, and many others.

Ann is the perfect person to bring some new perspective and spice to WT, and help it become a vital source of new fiction. From working with her on Best American Fantasy, I know that she has eclectic taste in fiction, that she cares deeply about the fantastic tradition in literature, and that she is a meticulous editor. I am tremendously excited to read her first issue. (And as for Best American Fantasy, we'll figure out some sort of policy to account for Ann's new position in a way that is fair to her, to the writers, and to the spirit of our book.)

So congratulations, Ann -- with luck, we will all benefit from this news by getting to read a marvelous selection of strange fiction...

PKD LOA

Sez Jonathan Lethem to Mark Sarvas:

...I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select.

Here's a USA Today (actually, Associated Press) article about the upcoming book.