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Fearful Symmetries Paperback – June 19, 2014
Ellen Datlow (Editor) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Enhance your purchase
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherChiZine Publications
- Publication dateJune 19, 2014
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101771481935
- ISBN-13978-1771481939
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Editorial Reviews
Review
More anthologies like Inferno, and its predecessor of a few years ago, The Dark, should be urgent priorities. It's very clear that horror at short length is poised for a major revival, and the commercial stimulus must, as here, be applied, and on a large scale...
---Nick Gevers, Locus Magazine
"...one of the best recent collections of horror as literature."
-- Carl Hays, Book List
Inferno will undoubtedly stand the test of time to become a classic in the field. ...Inferno is a monument to all that horror fiction is capable of.
--Nicholas Kaufmann for Fearzone
About Fearful Symmetries
"I ...cannot say enough good things about the exceptional talent and overall quality that comes to life within the pages of Fearful Symmetries."
--Jess Landry for Hellnotes
"One of the best horror anthologies I've ever read." --Alan Baxter for
Thirteen O'Clock
"...Datlow has assembled an eclectic mix of horror, fantasy, and quasi-science fiction stories, with a good measure of selections that fall between and just outside of those distinctions. About the only thing the tales have in common are their exceptional quality of storytelling."
Stefan Dziemianowicz for Locus
From the Author
From my introduction: Introduction
Fearful Symmetries was funded by Kickstarter, a crowd funding mechanism that has in the last few years increased in popularity. Why did I do this rather than use a traditional approach to publishing an anthology? I've rarely had problems selling theme anthologies to book publishers. Before a publisher commits to buying a book (novel, single-author collection, or anthology) the publisher must sell the book to its marketing and sales people, who in turn have to sell it to bookstores. But non-theme anthologies have always been a hard sell, and it's even more difficult it today's publishing climate.
Using Kickstarter was an experiment. I've donated to several Kickstarter projects, but had never been involved with one before. I approached Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi, owners of the Canadian ChiZine Publications, to partner with me on the project. I thought they'd be a good match for what I had in mind because I enjoy what they publish and I love their production values and commitment to good-looking books. They also have excellent distribution, which means their books are available in most bookstores. This is important, so that the book is available to the general reading public, not only our several hundred backers. I was delighted (and relieved) when we reached our goal, and shocked when we went above it. The one thing we'd forgotten to factor in to our financial estimates was the percentage paid out to Amazon, who handled our payments, and to Kickstarter itself. So the money that went over our initial requirements went for that.
I solicited some of the writers I've worked with in the past and also a few whose work I've admired but never published before. And in a break from my usual working method, Brett, Sandra, and I decided to hold a month-long open reading period. We promised to keep at least a couple of slots open for unsolicited stories submitted during that period. We received 1,080 submissions. There were several readers, including Sandra and a prominent Australian publisher/editor. Of those 1080 submissions, 119 were passed on to me. I ended up buying four.
Every anthology is a balancing act, be it reprint or original, theme or unthemed. While I love editing themed anthologies, there's something especially challenging and fun molding an anthology with fewer boundaries. The editor has to be even more aware of varying tones, themes, voice, and locale in the stories she acquires.
So what can you look forward to in Fearful Symmetries? There are monsters--human and non-human. There are children -those who victimize, and those who are victims. There are supernatural horrors, psychological terrors, nourish dark fantasies, and downright weird fictions.
Come on in, and make yourself a cozy little nook in the dark, and enjoy.
About the Author
Forthcoming are The Doll Collection and The Monstrous.
She's won nine World Fantasy Awards, and has also won multiple Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for "outstanding contribution to the genre" and was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career. She has also won the Life Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention.
She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at datlow.com, on Facebook, and on twitter as @EllenDatlow.
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Product details
- Publisher : ChiZine Publications; 1st Edition (June 19, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1771481935
- ISBN-13 : 978-1771481939
- Item Weight : 14 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #695,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,768 in Erotic Horror (Books)
- #1,808 in Science Fiction Erotica
- #78,353 in American Literature (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the winner of the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and his work has been named in Time Out New York’s top books.
I've been a short story editor for almost forty years, starting with OMNI Magazine and webzine for 17 years, then EVENT HORIZON, a webzine, and SCIFICTION, the fiction area of SCIFI.COM. I currently acquire and edit short fiction and novellas for Tor.com and I edit original and reprint anthologies. I've lived in NYC most of my life, although I travel a lot.
Scottish writer Carole Johnstone's debut novel, Mirrorland, will be published in spring 2021 by Borough Press/HarperCollins in the UK and Commonwealth and by Scribner/Simon & Schuster in North America.
Her award-winning short fiction has been reprinted in many annual 'Best Of' anthologies in the UK and the US. She has been published by Titan Books, Tor Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and PS Publishing, and has written Sherlock Holmes stories for Constable & Robinson and Running Press.
Carole is represented by Hellie Ogden at Janklow & Nesbit UK and Allison Hunter at Janklow & Nesbit (US).
More information on the author can be found at carolejohnstone.com.
Born and raised in Texas. In Boulder, Colorado now. Forty-nine. Blackfeet. Into werewolves and slashers, zombies and vampires, haunted houses and good stories. Would wear pirate shirts a lot if I could find them. And probably carry some kind of sword. More over at http://demontheory.net or http://twitter.com/@SGJ72
“I swear they told me it was terminal...but that was back in December 2014. What can I say? Heaven doesn’t want me and Hell’s afraid I’ll take over.”
Pat Cadigan won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels Synners and Fools, and most recently, the Scribe Award for Best Novelisation for Alita Battle Angel. She has also won three Locus Awards––best short story for "Angel," best collection for Patterns, and best novelette for "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,", which also won the Hugo Award and Japan's Seiun Award; it can be found in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Most often identified as one of the original cyberpunk writers––the Guardian called her The Queen of Cyberpunk––her work includes fantasy, horror, young adult, and nonfiction.
Born in New York, she grew up in Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, where she worked for ten years at Hallmark Cards, Inc., writing greeting cards, often in perfect iambic pentameter. She now lives in gritty, urban north London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, and takes pride in the accomplishments of her son, musician, composer, and nonfiction writer Robert Fenner.
Along with her media tie-in writing, Cadigan is working on two new original novels––working titles: See You When You Get There and Truth & Bone––while she makes terminal cancer her bitch. Diagnosed in late 2014 with an inoperable and incurable form of reccurrent endometrial cancer, she was given at most two years to live. After she underwent what was supposed to have been strictly palliative chemotherapy in early 2015, however, doctors were forced to revise their estimates from 'two years or less' to 'Someday, maybe––hey, we just work here'.
When asked for comment, Cadigan, who has already returned from the dead after a severe case of anaphylactic shock, said, “Each of us was put on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. I’m now so far behind that I can never die.”
She has been keeping a blog called 'Ceci N'est Pas Une Blog––Dispatches From Cancerland' at patcadigan.wordpress.com about her adventures as a cancer patient; she promises that it's not a bummer. In fact, some of it is even funny. She can also be found on Facebook and tweets as @cadigan and just about everything there is funny, too.
Cadigan’s latest work is the novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for what would have been the third Aliens movie, published 31 August 2021. (Spoiler Alert: it’s not the third Aliens movie that you saw in the theatre, on video, or in your nightmares.). In fact, Gibson did two drafts of the screenplay; this novelisation is his first draft. The second draft was very different and was adapted as a graphic novel by Dark Horse, starring the fabulous artwork of Johnny Christmas. Cadigan thinks you should own both, because.
Thanks to Gollancz’s high successful Gateway eBook program, all of Cadigan’s original novels are available electronically. Other books, such the two making-of movie books she was commissioned to write—The Making of Lost in Space and The Resurrection of the Mummy—are available through third-party sellers. Support independent and second-hand book-dealers whenever possible. You can’t get everything in electronic format. Also, before eBooks came along, second-hand book dealers prevented many good writers from disappearing altogether. Ebooks are great because you can take hundreds of them with you on an airplane without worrying about the weight allowance but it’s still great to have a book signed by your favourite author.)
As a cancer patient (no, she’s not in remission, just stubborn), Cadigan spent 2020 at home, thanks to the inconvenience of a global pandemic. She got a lot of writing done, but not a lot of housework, because seriously? Are you kidding? Sightings continued to be scarce during 2021. Cadigan hopes to get around more in 2022, depending on the slings and arrows of absurd and outrageous fortune.
She was delighted to hear she was nominated for the 2020 Scribe Award for Alita Battle Angel. The award winners in all categories were announced on 15 July 2020 and Cadigan was even more delighted to find out that Alita Battle Angel was the winner in the novelisation category. She says that her editor, Ella J Chappell was crucial in helping her produce her best work possible. Like Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, Ms Chappell has become a lasting influence on Cadigan’s work in general.
(The complete list of Scribe Award nominees and winners is available at: https://iamtw.org/2020-scribe-award-nominees/?fbclid=IwAR3hUExVxUwUFaJVE74FEYQRG1viE-i0m6ypT73AgIivA0h6EGuRmsXVxOw)
Garth Nix has worked as a bookseller, book sales representative, publicist, editor, marketing consultant and literary agent. He also spent five years as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. A full-time writer since 2001, more than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world and his work has been translated into 40 languages. Garth's books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly (US), The Bookseller(UK), The Australian and The Sunday Times (UK). He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and two children.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
I'm Nathan Ballingrud. I live in Asheville, NC, with my daughter. I write literary dark fantasy and horror. I'm a big fan of writers like Richard Ford, Annie Proulx, Lucius Shepard, and Clive Barker. I think the world is a pretty dark and unforgiving place, but a beautiful place, too. That's what I like to write about.
Novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, writing under the names Michael Marshall Smith and Michael Marshall. As the former, author of ONLY FORWARD, SPARES, ONE OF US, THE SERVANTS and the upcoming HANNAH GREEN AND HER UNFEASIBLY MUNDANE EXISTENCE. Also winner of the August Derleth, International Horror Guild and Philip K Dick Award — in addition to winning the British Fantasy Award for best short story more times than any other author in history.
As Michael Marshall, an internationally-bestselling writer of thrillers including the STRAW MEN trilogy and THE INTRUDERS — recently televised starring John Simm, Mira Sorvino and Millie Bobby Brown.
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
Twitter @ememess
Insta @ememess
Bruce McAllister is a writer of literary fiction and of fantasy, science fiction and thriller fiction, which he's been publishing professionally since he was sixteen. He was born in 1946 in Baltimore, MD, to a peripatetic Navy family with an Annapolis-graduate father who served with NATO during the Cold War and an underdog-championing anthropologist/archaeologist mother whose specialties were Early Man and Native American studies. As children, he and his brother Jack lived in Florida, Washington D.C., California and Italy. From l974 to l997 he taught at the University of Redlands in southern California, where he helped establish and direct writing programs. Since l998 he has worked as a writing coach and book and screenplay consultant. His short fiction has appeared in literary quarterlies, national magazines, original anthologies, "year's best" anthologies and college readers; won awards from Glimmer Train magazine and the National Endowment for the Arts; and been a finalist for Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, New Letters, and Narrative magazine awards. His non-fiction articles on sports, popular science and writing have appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers. A number of his short stories have been optioned for film, and his fans over the years have included Stephen King, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch (PSYCHO) and Philip K. Dick. He has three wonderful grown children--Annie, Ben and Elizabeth--and lives in Orange, California, with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter.
Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild's 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). They have one son.
Helen Marshall is an author, editor, and self-confessed bibliophile.
Marshall completed an Bachelor's Degree in English at the University of Guelph, followed by a Masters in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current research as a Doctoral Candidate in Medieval Studies investigates the scrappy fragments of medieval books that survive from the early fourteenth century when scribes were just beginning to experiment with composing in English after the Norman Conquest obliterated the native writing culture in 1066.
In 2011, Marshall published a collection of poetry, Skeleton Leaves, that "[took] the children's classic, [stripped] away the flesh, and [revealed] the dark heart of Peter Pan beating beneath." The collection was jury-selected for the Preliminary Ballot of the Bram Stoker Award for excellence in Horror, nominated for a Rhysling Award for Science Fiction Poetry and won an Aurora Award for best Canadian speculative poem. Her poetry and fiction have been published a range of magazines including Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, The Chiaroscuro, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex, and Tor.com.
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, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, Or The Last Voyage, and Out of Body. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, and The Best of Jeffrey Ford from PS, Big Dark Hole, 2021, from Small Beer Press. Ford has published well over 100 short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), Hayakawa Award (Japan). His fiction has been translated into about 20 languages. In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for 30 years and has been a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, The Stone Coast MFA Program, The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Link to Ford's homepage -- http://www.well-builtcity.com/
Laird Barron is an expat Alaskan. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.
(photo courtesy Ardi Alspach)
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I purchased Fearful Symmetries in both the Kindle eBook & Audible/Audiobook formats back in 2018, and it’s been one of the few anthologies that I’ve revisited a number of times due to the strength of these particular stories that Ellen Datlow was able to collect. If you read the introduction she wrote for this book, you’ll see how this anthology was different from others in terms of how it was funded, how the stories were selected, and how it was initially published.
The product you see on the page before now is the exact same one that myself and several others bought a few years ago, with the minor difference of new cover artwork. (As far as I know, but I believe this to be the case).
A few months ago, the title that I’d purchased previously was no longer available here on Amazon. So when I clicked on the page for this book I’d already purchased, it didn’t say, “You’ve already purchased this item; go to your library” but rather it appeared as thought it was a new release and says “click to purchase,” (note: this is not the case for the Audible version for whatever reason). Because of this, I originally wrote a rather childish, scathing review for the title because I wasn’t aware of the circumstances surrounding the book’s reissue – and I would like to personally apologize to the editor, publisher(s), authors, and artists – whose hard work went into creating this collection of stories that I’ve enjoyed reading a number of times over the last few years.
It was recently brought to my attention that the original publisher went out of business for reasons that I do not know, (but also don’t believe to be entirely relevant to this updated review), and that the authors were able to regain the rights to their work in order to have this collection reissued thanks to the publishing company Open Road. There are a few comments below this review that clarified all of these things for me. If you also purchased this title already, just as I did some years ago, and are confused regarding why it’s being listed as a new item, I urge you not to make the same mistake I did – which was to become frustrated & write an angry review.
My real concern is not with the editor or publisher(s) AT ALL, but rather with the fact that an online book store as large as Amazon is somehow incapable of handling these situations such that people who’ve purchased the book under the original publisher are not suggested to re-purchase the same content when it’s a reissued title, not an updated edition with updated/expanded content. Thank you for reading – I know this is hardly a review, but the names of the authors & editor next to the book’s title should assure you of this product’s quality. Cheers.
I take great pleasure in losing myself in the ebb and flow, the subject variety and emotional ferocity, and the ever-changing tone, voice, and conceptualization from a variety of authors or authors' works.
I've read many anthologies that Ellen Datlow has helped to midwife into existence. Every one is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts, as they should be. Every one has also lead me to finding at least one new author whose works I happily and voraciously consume upon finishing the anthology in which they featured. Hope anyone considering finds as much joy here as I did.
Others- well, I am not usually a horror reader, and I am probably missing something of modern horror conventions- but several of the stories struck me as being so oblique that they did not actually make sense to me.
Most, though, were very good, and some were excellent.
Generally recommended, even for non-horror fans.
I started the second story, and it nearly as much profanity on the first page as the previous story had in its entirety.
At that point I contacted Amazon to get my money back. I read books like this for imaginative stories, and peppering one's tale with profanity is not in the least imaginative.
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