The following article originally appeared on Scott Nicolay’s blog as the 8th entry in his Stories from the Borderland series which features original artwork by Michael Bukowski. Margaret St. Clair seems poised on the edge of rediscovery. Certainly few writers in speculative fiction are more deserving of a revival — or more undeservedly neglected. I know I am not alone in thinking […]
“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another — writers who could not have read each other — still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the […]
Swim into my mouth and straighten the needle, for I have lost the thread. Ridley DeLeure, I will never know you now, for the shade I pursue has folded his wings around the images and words. My digestive juices have eaten through the parts that might tell me why you came here and not some kinder place. Did […]
Midway through my month of guest editorship here at WFR, with the summer solstice on the horizon, I thought I’d do a quick stock-taking. We’ve seen a mix of translations, original fiction, and nonfiction articles so far. I’ve been posting every other day, but this last week the content has ramped up in frequency and will stay at fever […]
Swim into my mouth and I will tell you who you are. Have I said this part before? It’s impossible for either of us to know for sure; I can’t recall, and you’re certainly in no position to answer. The same forgetful straits that washed you down here confine utterance to the randomly spurting intervals between your death […]
They were just finishing up their second case of Bud when the Vampire King showed up. Hinckley’s wife wanted to get pregnant again, so he was putting away two for every one of Chad’s. Gerrold was pissed off because he’d gotten screwed by yet another investment opportunity. Also, his wife had left him, backing up […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: We are thrilled to present Kelly Link’s weird and wonderful short story “Lull,” with special permission by the author. “Lull” copyright ©2002 was first published in Conjunctions 39 and reprinted in Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners (Random House, 2014). There was a lull in the conversation. We were down in the basement, sitting […]
To Maurice Spronck Spadones! They were crouching on slabs of rock, with knees held together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes. Their saffron colored robes spread out around them, and an odor of cinnamon wafted from their skin. They reclined like this, sweating among the sauna boys, men dressed […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’ll be featuring two stories from Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press in a new translation by Kit Schluter: “The Plague” and “The Eunuchs.” The King in the Golden Mask has never been translated in its entirety, though a book of selected writings by Schwob was published […]
Marcel Schwob (1867−1905) was a French symbolist author, remembered for his numerous and varied short stories, literary monographs, newspaper chronicles of fin-de-siècle Paris, and linguistic tracts on medieval slang, much of which sprang from his fabled devotion to archival research. While his work has fallen into relative obscurity, it was hailed in his day by writers […]