With a twang in its heart and a song for luck on its tongue, Songs for Dark Seasons takes readers back to the lonesome dream counties introduced in the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection, Bluegrass Symphony.

Trailer parks and graves are only temporary homes for souls in these tales, where gods dwell in churches and parking lot groves. Friday night football stars mingle with sirens; hunters’ wives help their kids not to shoot, but to fly; Chanticleers spar their way into local government; and rash-afflicted men take dryads for lovers. In backwater towns, some witches have the know-how to pin pageant queens pretty, while others relieve girls of highfalutin aspirations. Local crow-boys and bloodthirsty Ursines are the best miners around.

In these thirteen stories, forests are imbued with the deepest, saddest strains of country music, cornfield horizons stretch as long as a lone fiddle’s wail, and distant hills make mandolin promises: sweet and catchy and short-lived.

With an introduction by World Fantasy Award-winning writer Helen Marshall.

Cover by Vince Haig.

Introduction by Jeffrey Ford

The Finest Ass in the Universe collects 26 fantastic and unique visions, 5 stories original to the collection, and an introduction by Jeffrey Ford.

Interzone said of her first collection, “Monterra’s Deliciosa is a delicious collection of often startling and outrageous tales.”

Elation, compulsion, exploration, love and exquisitely timed bullying, a lascivious oyster, a man called Eggplant, the dangers of smelling like honey pudding, the enticement of innocent toadlets, the unending day of deadness. The daughter of a part-time magician and a Las Vegas showgirl turns to science. Destiny points a young man to brassiere design. Suddenly orphaned siblings try to protect their most vulnerable. Fortunes craze in neighbourhoods living cheek-by-jowl. Unintendeds abound, as life cavorts in all its unclassifiable contrariness.

Introduction by Kaaron Warren

Angel Dust is the first story collection by Australian rising star Ian McHugh. McHugh is a Writers of the Future winner, and has a number of significant overseas short fiction sales.

Angel Dust collects 15 incredible fantastic visions. A number of these were first published in Asimov’s and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Four stories are original to this collection.

Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams says of this writer, “Ian McHugh has a remarkable ability to render the alien utterly convincing. His nonhuman lives are so powerfully depicted that we can easily, and sometimes uneasily, immerse ourselves completely into their worlds.”

Introduction by John Harwood

WINNER OF THE AUREALIS AWARD

Over 132,000 words of the best fiction by best-selling writer Sean Williams.

• A Map of the Mines of Barnath
• Ghosts of the Fall
• The Soap Bubble
• The Magic Dirt Experiment
• Night of the Dolls (with Shane Dix)
• Atrax (with Simon Brown)
• End of the World
• The Seventh Letter
• Evermore
• The Butterfly Merchant
• Reluctant Misty & the House on Burden Street
• The Girl-Thing
• Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie (Among the Beautiful Living Dead)
• Passing the Bone
• A View Before Dying
• Team Sharon
• White Christmas
• Masque of Agamemnon (with Simon Brown)

Introduction by Pamela Sargent

Cover illustration by Nick Stathopoulos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 WORLD FANTASY AWARD

Death at the Blue Elephant is the first story collection by the respected and multiple award winning Australian writer and editor Janeen Webb. She is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Peter MacNamara SF Achievement Award, the Australian Aurealis Award, and is a three-time winner of the Ditmar Award.

In her introduction to this book, Pamela Sargent describes these stories as evoking a “combination of suspenseful anticipation, nervous apprehension, and total absorption in something far removed from my own experience”. Death at the Blue Elephant collects 18 incredible globe-spanning visions by the self-confessed “inveterate traveller”. Five stories are original to this collection.

There’s magic here, and illusion, and strange wonders that’ll surprise and delight. — Robert Shearman

Exotic, cunning—often funny—and now and then edges to cut yourself on. — Tanith Lee

Gloriously adult, these stories will transport you—but they’ll never drop you home. — Anna Tambour

Janeen Webb’s assemblage of angels, aliens, devils and assorted revenants bring with them compassion and settings rich and exotic where even the mundanity of our everyday world is imbued with a sparkle rarely glimpsed in the hands of lesser writers. — Peter Crowther

Introduction by Robert Hood

Cover illustration by Jason Paulos

The debut collection of Jason Fischer’s award-winning short fiction. This collection features his post-apocalyptic and zombie related work.

Within these covers, you will find murderous dropbears, zombie kangaroos and undead camels. Poignant endings to the world mash-up with muscle car battles, featuring feral killers that make Mad Max look like the Disney channel. Everything is a Graveyard delves into the fantastic, the horrifying, the sad and the just plain weird.

Introduction by Kate Forsyth

Internal illustrations by James Blake

Five novellas (two original to the collection) by the multiple award-winning writer. All of the works are in some way based on or inspired by medieval literature and history.

Includes

• “The Death of Pamela”
• “Crown of Rowan”
• “Wild Dreams of Blood” (first print publication)
• “The Year of Ancient Ghosts” (original)
• “The Lark and the River” (original)

Introduction by Sean Williams

Cover illustration by Cat Sparks

WINNER OF THE DITMAR AWARD

Cat Sparks first rose to prominence as the founder of the acclaimed Agog! Press, publishing ten titles from 2002 to 2008. As a writer, Sparks is a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South workshop, a Writers of the Future winner, a multiple Ditmar and Aurealis Award winner, and the author of close to 60 published stories.

The 13 stories include the award-winning titles “All the Love in the World”, “Seventeen”, “Hollywood Roadkill”, and the acclaimed “Arctica”.

Introduction by Sophie Masson

Cover illustration by Pia Ravenari

This book collects 14 tales, including Juliet Marillier’s very best stories, and 5 stories written for this collection.

Juliet Marillier is a three-times winner of the Aurealis Award for fantasy novel. Publishers Weekly calls her “a fine folklorist and gifted narrator”.

“Marillier’s fans will be delighted to see that her skills are as applicable to the short form as they are to the novel, and will particularly appreciate ” ‘Twixt Twilight and Water (A Tale of Sevenwaters)”, which ties in to her well-regarded Sevenwaters series.” – Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Kim Wilkins

Cover illustration by Kathleen Jennings

The gods are dead, but will not be forgotten.

When Mymnir flees the devastation of Ragnarok, she hopes to escape all that bound her to Ásgarðr — a heedless pantheon, a domineering brother, and her neglectful father-master, Óðinn. But the white raven, a being of memory and magic, should know that the past is not so easily left behind. No matter how far she flies, she cannot evade her family.

In planting seeds of the old world in the new, Mymnir becomes queen of a land with as many problems as the one she fled. Her long-lived Fae children ignite and fan feuds that span generations; lives are lost and loves won because of their tampering. Told in thirteen parts, Midnight and Moonshine follows the Beaufort and Laveaux families, part-human, part-Fae, as they battle, thrive and survive in Mymnir’s kingdom.

Midnight and Moonshine is a collection of interconnected tales with links between them as light and strong as spider-silk. From fire giants to whispering halls, disappearing children to evening-wolves, fairy hills to bewitched cypress trees, and talking heads to moonshiners of a special sort, Midnight and Moonshine takes readers on a journey from ninth century Vinland to America’s Deep South in the present day. Hannett and Slatter have created a mosaic novel of moments, story-tiles as strange as witchwood and withywindles.

Midnight and Moonshine is a rich tapestry of dark fantasy, fairy tale and speculation.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

In “Seeds”, the opening story of Hannett and Slatter’s innovative dark fantasy collection, Mymnir, Odinn’s white raven, flees the Ragnarok, “an apocalypse for the gods alone,” and comes to the New World. There she creates a Fae kingdom in the image of Asgardr, transforming herself from a thieving, neglected raven into the fearsome, immortal Fae Queen. Though each story in this collection is self-contained and varied in tone and setting (Mymnir’s Fae Court, Prohibition-era Charleston, the present, to name a few), each one builds upon its predecessor, with multiple generations of protagonists and recurring objects, characters (especially Mymnir, whose desires and memories, over the centuries, bring her to the cusp of another Ragnarok), and themes. Marked by imagery both beautiful and grotesque, and unnerving twists that recall the uncanny horror of original fairy tales, this collection contains a unifying, multilayered plot that draws upon Norse mythology to take the reader on a thrilling, unsettling journey.