C.S.E. Cooney

BONUS MATERIAL! Now includes exceprts from C. S. E. Cooney's new short novel The Twice-Drowned Saint from the anthology A Sinister Quartet! Winner of the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection Contains "The Bone Swans of Amandale," 2015 Nebula Award finalist for Best Novella "C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket." —Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of the Fairyland novels "These stories are a pure joy. C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language—O! her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable." —Delia Sherman, author of Young Woman in a Garden: Stories "Bone Swans is a joy of feathery bones & ghoulish clowns. I adored every word. Like an eyas cries for meat, I cry for more. C.S.E. Cooney's a major talent and these are major talent stories. Who can resist hero rats, pouting swans, feral children, flying carpets and the Flabberghast? So tongue-tied am I with delight I fall back on the usual cliches: gripping, delightful, insightful, rollicking & lyrical—and yet not one cliche is to be found in Bone Swans, only stories of surpassing delicacy and wit, told by a lady of rare talent. Please, ma'am, might I have some more?" —Ysabeau S. Wilce, Andre Norton Award wining author of Flora's Dare A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect. World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney's writing "stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible." Bone Swans, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are "bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time." Cooney's mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as "pure Cooney," and he offers readers a challenge: "Try to define that when you've finished the stories in this book." More praise for Bone Swans "Cooney's brilliantly executed collection of five stories is a delicious stew of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, marked by unforgettable characters who plumb the depths of pathos and triumph. ... All of these stories could easily serve as the foundation for novels while also working beautifully at their current length. These well-crafted narratives defiantly refuse to fade from memory long after the last word has been read." —Publishers Weekly, starred review "In five beautifully crafted stories, Cooney builds imaginary worlds full of flying carpets, fairy-tale characters, and children confronted with a postapocalyptic Earth ... Each tale packs in enough plot for a novel, with adventurous characters who brim with wit." —Library Journal, starred review "Writing without ostentation and featuring characters who may be flippant, terse, or even tongue-tied, Cooney produces memorable prose propelled by extraordinary ideas ... Faced with such twisted genius, I'll say no more!" —Locus "A fascinating mashup between the tropes and resonances of the mythic tale with the sensibilities of contemporary action-oriented fantasy: simultaneously lighthearted and serious, full of consequences but also ubiquitous happy endings." —Tor.com

Stories

Bone Swans

The Breaker Queen

Kameron Hurley

Essays on Subversion, Tactical Profanity, and the Power of the Media

Geek Feminist Revolution

The Two Paupers

The Witch in the Almond Tree

Tochi Onyebuchi

Yoon Ha Lee

Tananarive Due

Ellen Kushner

Eleanor Arnason

Shaoni C. White

Chimedum Ohaegbu

The July/August 2021 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine. Featuring new fiction by Tananarive Due, Eleanor Arnason, Shaoni C. White, Tochi Onyebuchi, Ellen Kushner, and C.S.E Cooney. Reprint fiction by Yoon Ha Lee. Essays by Nisi Shawl, Troy L. Wiggins, Nino Cipri, and C.L. Clark, poetry by Minal Hajratwala, Betsy Aoki, Ali Trotta and Octavia Cade, interviews with Eleanor Arnason and C.S.E. Cooney by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Alexa Sharpe, and editorials by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Elsa Sjunneson. About Uncanny Magazine Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 & 2020 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Chimedum Ohaegbu and Elsa Sjunneson, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.

July/August 2021

Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

Marie Brennan

John Grant

Tanith Lee

Nicole Kornher-Stace

John C. Wright

Gemma Files

Cat Rambo

Gregory Frost

Georgina Bruce

Tori Truslow

Michael M. Jones

Shweta Narayan

S.J. Hirons

Kenneth Schneyer

The third volume in the ground-breaking, genre-bending, boundary-pushing CLOCKWORK PHOENIX anthology series, now available in digital format. Includes critically-acclaimed and award-nominated stories by Marie Brennan, Tori Truslow, Georgina Bruce, Michael M. Jones, Gemma Files, C.S.E. Cooney, Cat Rambo, Gregory Frost, Shweta Narayan, S.J. Hirons, John Grant, Kenneth Schneyer, John C. Wright, Nicole Kornher-Stace and Tanith Lee. With a whimsical introduction and new afterword by Nebula Award-nominated editor Mike Allen. CONTENTS The Gospel of Nachash • Marie Brennan Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine's Day • Tori Truslow Crow Voodoo • Georgina Bruce Your Name Is Eve • Michael M. Jones Hell Friend • Gemma Files Braiding the Ghosts • C.S.E. Cooney Surrogates • Cat Rambo Lucyna's Gaze • Gregory Frost Eyes of Carven Emerald • Shweta Narayan Dragons of America • S.J. Hirons Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight • John Grant Lineage • Kenneth Schneyer Murder in Metachronopolis • John C. Wright To Seek Her Fortune • Nicole Kornher-Stace Fold • Tanith Lee Praise for CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3 . . . . Allen’s third volume of extraordinary short stories reaches new heights of rarity and wonder. Marie Brennan sets the bar high with “The Gospel of Nachash,” a fine reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve legend from a fresh perspective. Tori Truslow’s scholarly “Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day” tells the story of the Great Ice Train and its encounter with the merfolk on the Moon. Gemma Files’s “Hell Friend” and C.S.E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts” are sinister, spine-tingling ghost stories. Cat Rambo deals with realism and escapism in her futuristic “Surrogates,” where appearances and reality are mutable. Shweta Narayan’s “Eyes of Carven Emerald” eloquently rewrites the history of Alexander the Great to include mechanical entities. Without a wrong note, all the stories in this anthology admirably fulfill Allen’s promise of “beauty and strangeness.” — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review With a balance of new names and established authors, the third Clockwork Phoenix installment collects some magnificent interpretations of fantastic ideas. “The Gospel of Nachash” opens, Marie Brennan’s haunting tale of the beginning of time, and a very interesting reinterpretation of a gospel it is, too. Tanith Lee’s “Fold” is a story of a man who wrote love letters to the people he saw passing beneath his window, and only left his apartment once. Gemma Files’ “Hell Friend” is really a heart-warming ghost story; Georgina Bruce’s “Crow Voodoo” is an unnerving take on something common to fairy tales; and Gregory Frost’s “Lucyna’s Gaze” starts off sweet, and grows more awful with every revealed detail. Clockwork Phoenix delivers on its promise of both beauty and strangeness, and adds in some fright and a few new ways of looking at old tropes. All in all, it’s a very successful collection of thematically similar, but wildly varied in subject, works. — Booklist CLOCKWORK PHOENIX is a series of anthologies from Norilana Books, edited by Mike Allen, that bears the subtitle “New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness”. This seems a quite appropriate subtitle — the stories really do seem attempts at evoking both beauty and the strange. This makes them consistently interesting . . . There is a mixture of wild science fiction (as with John C. Wright’s “Murder in Metachronopolis”, a convoluted time travel mystery) with what seems best called slipstream (say, Tanith Lee’s curious “Fold”, about a man who sends people paper airplane love letters) with out and out fantasy. One of the latter is my favorite here: C. S. E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts”, in which a girl goes to her grandmother after her mother’s death, and learns from the older woman the secret of “braiding” ghosts — which is to say enslaving them. So ghosts are the servants of the older woman. But the girl is not so happy with this . . . especially when she falls for the ghost she is forced to braid. And the ghosts — are they happy? Read the story and find out . . . lovely stuff. — Locus For the past three years editor Mike Allen has been publishing his unique CLOCKWORK PHOENIX anthologies, inviting authors like Tanith Lee and Catherynne M. Valente to give us their take on the concepts of, as the title has it, “beauty and strangeness.” The result has been a critical and artistic success and, if volume three is any indication, the spell won’t be lifting any time soon. Allen continues to assemble some of the most adventurous, beauteous, and just plain weird stuff our current crop of speculative authors are capable of producing. Adventurous minds are invited to attend. — Strange Horizons

New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

Clockwork Phoenix 3

Beth Cato

Jason Kimble

Rachael K. Jones 

Patricia Russo 

Marie Brennan 

Benjanun Sriduangkaew 

Rob Cameron 

A.C. Wise 

Gray Rinehart 

Sam Fleming 

Sunil Patel 

Carlos Hernandez 

Holly Heisey 

Barbara Krasnoff 

Sonya Taaffe 

Alex Dally MacFarlane 

Shveta Thakrar 

Cassandra Khaw 

Keffy R.M. Kehrli 

Rich Larson 

2016 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Anthology Contains “Sabbath Wine” by Barbara Krasnoff, 2016 Nebula Award finalist for Best Short Story “Allen’s strange and lovely fifth genre-melding fantasy anthology selects 20 new short stories of unusual variety, texture, compassion, and perception. . . . All the stories afford thought-provoking glimpses into alternative realities that linger, sparking unconventional thoughts, long after they are first encountered.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “The arrangement is superb. This anthology of 20 stories can resemble a symphony of themes and variations in a wide range of keys, or a tapestry whose elements form patterns of imagery and meaning that shift and offer new insights throughout the book.” —Locus The Clockwork Phoenix anthologies offer homes to “well-written stories occupying multiple subgenres, usually in the same story, often ambiguously,” as Locus Magazine once put it. The ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, award-nominated series has returned for a fifth incarnation, triumphantly risen from the ashes after another successful Kickstarter campaign. This is the largest installment yet, holding twenty new tales of beauty and strangeness. With original fiction from Jason Kimble, Rachael K. Jones, Patricia Russo, Marie Brennan, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Rob Cameron, A. C. Wise, Gray Rinehart, Sam Fleming, Sunil Patel, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, Holly Heisey, Barbara Krasnoff, Sonya Taaffe, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Shveta Thakrar, Cassandra Khaw, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Rich Larson, and Beth Cato. Cover art by Paula Arwen Owen. “And then there is that secret restaurant . . . It is perfection on a plate! And you feel better about yourself and your life and the world every time you go there. Clockwork Phoenix is the name of this restaurant, and Mike Allen is the restaurateur. One sublime dish after another, and yet I still have my favorites that I keep coming back to.” —Little Red Reviewer Table of contents: “The Wind at His Back” by Jason Kimble “The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me” by Rachael K. Jones “The Perfect Happy Family” by Patricia Russo “The Mirror-City” by Marie Brennan “The Finch’s Wedding and the Hive That Sings” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew “Squeeze” by Rob Cameron “A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)” by A.C. Wise “The Sorcerer of Etah” by Gray Rinehart “The Prime Importance of a Happy Number” by Sam Fleming “Social Visiting” by Sunil Patel “The Book of May” by C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez “The Tiger’s Silent Roar” by Holly Heisey “Sabbath Wine” by Barbara Krasnoff “The Trinitite Golem” by Sonya Taaffe “Two Bright Venuses” by Alex Dally MacFarlane “By Thread of Night and Starlight Needle” by Shveta Thakrar “The Games We Play” by Cassandra Khaw “The Road, and the Valley, and the Beasts” by Keffy R.M. Kehrli “Innumerable Glimmering Lights” by Rich Larson “The Souls of Horses” by Beth Cato

Clockwork Phoenix 5

C.S.E. Cooney

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