Posts tagged ‘Joyce Chng’

Sharp & Sugar Tooth

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Released 26 March 2019.

About

Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good is a horror anthology of dark fiction and darker appetites, edited by Octavia Cade. Containing 22 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features 22 fearless writers who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity. It’s the third in the Women Up To No Good series, which can be read in any order. It’s forthcoming on 26 March 2019.

Our contributors are based in or hailing from Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, Singapore, the UK, and all over the United States. Between them, they have won the Andre Norton, Eugie Foster Memorial, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Mythopoeic, Nebula, Prix Imaginales, Rhysling, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, This Is Horror, James Tiptree Jr., and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, John W. Campbell, and Shirley Jackson Awards!

Table of Contents

  • Kathleen Alcalá, “The Doll’s Eye”
  • Betsy Aoki, “And When We Die They Will Consume Us”
  • Joyce Chng, “Dear Son”
  • Katharine Duckett, “Gimme Sugar”
  • Anahita Eftekhari, “The Fool’s Feast”
  • Chikodili Emelumadu, “Candy Girl” (first published in Apex Magazine, issue 66, November 2014)
  • Amelia Gorman, “She Makes the Deep Boil”
  • Jasmyne J. Harris, “What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs”
  • A. R. Henle, “Strong Meat”
  • Crystal Lynn Hilbert, “Soul of Soup Bones” (first published in Apex Magazine, issue 61, June 2014)
  • Erin Horáková, “A Year Without the Taste of Meat”
  • Kathryn McMahon, “The Honey Witch”
  • H. Pueyo, “I Eat”
  • D. A. Xiaolin Spires, “Bristling Skim”
  • Rachael Sterling, “Alice Underground”
  • Penny Stirling, “Red, From the Heartwood”
  • Catherynne M. Valente, “The Lily and the Horn” (first published in Fantasy Magazine, issue 59, Queers Destroy Fantasy!, 2015)
  • Sabrina Vourvoulias, “A Fish Tale”
  • Damien Angelica Walters, “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” (first published in Lightspeed, issue 55, December 2014)
  • Rem Wigmore, “Who Watches”
  • Alyssa Wong, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” (first published in Nightmare, issue 37, Queers Destroy Horror!, 2015)
  • Caroline M. Yoachim, “The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown” (first published in Electric Velocipede, issue 27, 2013 and republished at Drabblecast)

Contributors

“The Doll’s Eye” (original) is by Kathleen Alcalá, the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, from a collection of magical realism called Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, to The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island.

“And When We Die They Will Consume Us” (original) is by Betsy Aoki. This is her first speculative fiction publication, though her poems have appeared in Uncanny, Southern Humanities Review, Hunger Mountain, and Calyx, among others.

“Dear Son” (original) is by Singaporean Joyce Chng. Her fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Her alter-ego is J. Damask.

“Gimme Sugar” (original) by Katharine Duckett, whose stories have appeared in Apex and Interzone, and been reprinted in Wilde Stories 2015 and The Best of Apex: Volume I. She works in publishing and lives in Brooklyn with her wife.

“The Fool’s Feast” (original) is by Iranian-Canadian Anahita Eftekhari. She has a background in genetics and half a decade of experience teaching ESL in Asia and Europe.

Chikodili Emelumadu is a Nigerian writer currently residing in Cambridge, MA. Her work has been published in Eclectica, One Throne, Omenana, and various other magazines and anthologies. Her “Candy Girl” first appeared in Apex Magazine and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson prize.

“She Makes the Deep Boil” (original) is by Minnesotan Amelia Gorman. Her other monstrous-themed writing appears in the Lovecraftian anthology She Walks in Shadows, and her poetry in Liminality Magazine, Star*Line, and Eternal Haunted Summer.

“What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs” (original) is by Jasmyne J. Harris, who lives in Washington, DC. Her work is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine.

“Strong Meat” (original) is by archivist, historian, and librarian A. R. Henle.

Crystal Lynn Hilbert lives in the forgotten backwaters of Western Pennsylvania. Her latest stories appear in Betwixt Magazine. Her “Soul of Soup Bones” was first published in Apex Magazine in June 2014.

“A Year Without the Taste of Meat” (original) is by Erin Horáková, a southern American writer who lives in London. She’s working towards her literature PhD, which focuses on how charm evolves over time.

“The Honey Witch” (original) is by Kathryn McMahon, an American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Crack the Spine, and Necessary Fiction, among others.

“I Eat” (original) is by H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter), an Argentine-Brazilian writer of comics and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in print and online venues like Clarkesworld, The Dark, and Broken Metropolis, among others. She currently lives in Brazil with her boyfriend and their interminable piles of work to do.

“Bristling Skim” (original) is by D.A. Xiaolin Spires who stares at skies and wonders what there is to eat out there in the cosmos.

“Alice Underground” (original) is by Rachael Sterling, who lives in sunny Santa Monica, California, teaching music to preschoolers most mornings and writing most afternoons. You can find her talking about books on YouTube under the name Rae Sterling.

“Red, From the Heartwood” (original) is by Penny Stirling, who edits and embroiders in Western Australia. Their speculative fiction and poetry can be found in Lackington’s, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, and other venues.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, the Orphan’s Tales series, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Eugie Foster Memorial, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Mythopoeic, Prix Imaginales, Rhysling, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Tiptree awards. Her “The Lily and the Horn” was first published in Fantasy Magazine‘s 2015 Queers Destroy Fantasy! issue.

“A Fish Tale” (original) is by Sabrina Vourvoulias, the author of Ink, which was named to Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. Her fiction can be found in Uncanny, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres.

Damien Angelica Walters wrote Sing Me Your Scars, Paper Tigers, and Cry Your Way Home. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award and reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls. Her “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” was first published in Lightspeed in December 2014.

“Who Watches” (original) is by Wellington-based Rem Wigmore, who also published under Summer Wigmore. Their first novel The Wind City was published in 2013 by Steam Press and they had a short story in the 2016 At the Edge anthology.

Alyssa Wong was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” was first published in the 2015 Queers Destroy Horror! issue of Nightmare, and won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction.

Caroline M. Yoachim has written dozens of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and her short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories. Her “The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown” was first published in Electric Velocipede in 2013 and was featured in The Drabblecast.

Editor Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication and a particular interest in science history and marine studies. She has most recently been researching the reproductive strategies of Zostera muelleri seagrass. She has had around 30 short stories published, in places like Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. Her poetry collection on the periodic table, Chemical Letters, was published by Popcorn Press and her novellas have been published by Masque Books, Paper Road Press, and The Book Smugglers. She has been nominated for BSFA and Elgin awards, and has won three Sir Julius Vogels, twice for best novella (The Ghost of Matter and The Convergence of Fairy Tales) and once for best fan writing, for a series of columns on food and horror, which became Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings (Book Smugglers, 2017).

Reviews & Mentions

Mentioned in:

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There are fairy tales, horrible murders, and romances, straight, lesbian and …complicated. Some are sexy, some are disturbing, and some are both. I devoured this collection quickly and eagerly.

—”Sharp and Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good – Book Review,” Jennifer Muirhead, Weekend Notes, 16 June 2019.

I found that after each story I had to put the book aside so that I could process and ponder what I had just read. Even after a few weeks, I find my mind wandering back to an idea, a character, a situation from the stories and I just sit and think. Sometimes its because it was shocking, sometimes because the situation was heart-breaking, other times its the particular twist of a well-known idea or theme that strikes me. There wasn’t a single story that I hated — and most I really liked. Sharp & Sugar Tooth is definitely a book that I am recommending to my friends – it is a very worthwhile read.

—”Review: Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good,” A Book Geek, 11 July 2018.

~~~

Our Kickstarter was mentioned, promoted, or reviewed in:

26 March 2019

Horror as the stock which flavors the whole

Today we feature three stories of mothers and children.

In Autumn Christian’s “Flowers for Dogman,” the protagonist, Effy, a senior in high school, believes herself to have ceased to be human because of her father’s emotional absence and her mother’s obsession with the dogman, a mysterious creature who lives in the woods near their house. Her relationship with her mother (“A ghost of a woman, her body gone to make more room for her shadow.”) is at the heart of this brutal tale of family dysfunction.

In sharp contrast to Christian’s story, Joyce Chng’s “Dear Son” is a short letter from a loving and generous mother to her morally upstanding son, who must let go of her after death. In her introduction to Sharp & Sugar Tooth, editor Octavia Cade writes:

In “Dear Son” by Joyce Chng [ritual and recipe are] used to pass on generosity. . . . This is worldbuilding with horror as the stock which flavors the whole, and it’s a genuine shift from the horror of consumption and control, or of consumption and addiction, or starvation, because there’s communication in it and even (especially in Chng and Horáková) a genuine underpinning of healthy love.

In Julie Nováková’s “Frankenstein Sonata,” it’s the mother who must let go of her song after death—but she can’t, with horrifying consequences.

Julie Nováková writes:

What happened in the world of Frankenstein after Dr. Frankenstein, and to what lengths could a mother go to save her child? These were the tantalizing questions at the start of “The Frankenstein Sonata”. As to the use of music in the story, I’m frankly not sure where it came from – it was just there. I use music in my stories a lot (and it shows: The Symphony of Ice and Dust, Étude for An Extraordinary Mind…), and especially classical music and opera are a great source of inspiration to me. I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it! I don’t mind if you listen to a little Fauré or Schumann alongside it. . . .

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About the Authors

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Her fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Her alter-ego is J. Damask.

Autumn Christian is a fiction writer who lives in the dark woods with poisonous blue flowers in her backyard and a black deer skull on her wall. She is waiting for the day when she hits her head on the cabinet searching for the popcorn bowl and all consensus reality dissolves. She’s been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.

Julie Nováková is a Czech author and translator of SF, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian and Estonian. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, and the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Read more at www.julienovakova.com and follow her on Twitter @Julianne_SF.

6 June 2018

Kickstarting Women Up To No Good!

 

Projects like the VIDA Count have demonstrated that women account for startlingly less than half of those published, and writers of marginalized sex and gender identities account for much less than their presence in the general population.

To help counteract that—and also because we thought it would be fun—we started the Women Up To No Good series, which focuses on “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet.

There are other imbalances too, most notably race, and while we have no formal requirement for inclusion of writers of color, we strive for diversity in all of our anthologies.

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good are anthologies of writing by women and authors of marginalized sex and gender identities, about female protagonists whose knowledge or appetites are critical to their stories.

We’re raising money to be able to pay our authors professional rates, and to properly promote the anthologies so they get the attention they deserve. Our hope is to get the Women Up To No Good series on a solid enough footing that sales of the books will support all future anthologies.

 

Broad Knowledge authors

Sharp & Sugar Tooth authors

Check out our Kickstarter here.

1 April 2018

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