If you believe the naysayers, there's no market for horror and there's a limited market for short story anthologies.

Why then would a new publisher launch with two dark fiction anthologies — Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror 2006 edition and Book of Shadows Volume One? Articulate spoke to Brimstone Press co-founder Shane Jiraiya Cummings to find out. WA-based Cummings and co-founder Angela Challis are no strangers to publishing and the Australian dark fiction scene.

Barry Maher is the author of “Legend,” a book that has attainted cult status in many science fiction circles. “Legend” is the dark urban fantasy’s answer to “Dune.” The novel will electrify readers, challenging their views on such societal concepts as group-think and religion.

After reading “Legend”, I had the opportunity to ask Barry Maher about his novel, his work as a consultant, and whether he’ll consider returning to the world of speculative fiction.

Daniel Nester provides a dispatch from a reading by Lyn Lifshin, who—according to Nester—might be one of the most prolific poets in the universe. Nester Writes:

Since her first poem was published in 1967 in the anti-war mimeo magazine Kauri, work by Lifshin has appeared in more than 300 journals big and small. Now in her late 50s, she is unofficially known as the queen of the small presses. Len Fulton, publisher of Dustbooks’ Directory of Poetry Publishers, takes an informal poll every year in which he asks journal editors to name five representative authors from their pages. He tallies up the names and publishes the results in the directory’s “Popularity Sweepstakes.” Lifshin has won the poll 16 times.

When I heard about Lifshin’s Caffe Lena reading, my curiosity was piqued. I wanted to see if she was for real. She is so prolific; would it be possible for her to take a break from writing her accessible, conversational, mostly short-lined poems? Would she be stuffing envelopes bound for faraway journals at her table? Was she a good reader of her work? Most of all, I think, I wanted some closure after reading so many of her submissions.

Read the rest of Nester's piece at the Poetry Foundation, click here.

Source: Daniel Nester, Poetry Foundation

From Jarret Keene, via the Tucson Weekly, comes a great piece for the holidays:

The holidays are all about friends and family—which means there's very little quiet time. Instead, there's clamor in the kitchen, TV sports blasting in the living room and hopefully a closet crammed with enough so-so gifts to be "re-gifted" by this time next year.

Let's face it, though: What everyone really craves during the holiday is a little bit of (to borrow from '80s metal band Queensryche) silent lucidity. And what better way to enjoy quiet time than with a cool book?

Sure, there are plenty of great new corporate-published novels out there worth buying—from The Godfather's Revenge to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But after a week of eating ham and turkey leftovers, giant hardback books are a real pain to lug from the bathroom to the bedroom and back again.

We would like to wish all of our readers and website visitors a safe and very happy holidays! For those of you who share in the cold northern climate, Ahadada's got something to warm you up courtesy of Bruna Mori from the land of sand, sunshine and swimming: an online chapbook featuring the aforementioned poet's latest!

Thus, we are pleased to present Tergiversation by Bruna Mori. Tergiversation is the twelfth release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series.

Bruna Mori is the author of Dérive (Meritage Press), a book of cityscape poems with sumi-ink paintings by Matthew Kinney, and the chapbooks Tergiversation (Ahadada Books) and The Approximations (2nd Avenue Poetry), homophonic and sensorial translations of the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik.

Her writing has been published in journals Fence, Trepan (California Institute of the Arts), and ZYZZYVA, among others, and presented at venues such as Beyond Baroque, City Lights, and The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

She writes essays—most recently for a Semiotext[e] anthology on Isamu Noguchi's designs for Poston (the internment camp where he was incarcerated). Her articles on artists and writers, such as John Zorn, le thi diem thuy, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, appear in disinfo, Random House Bold Type, and other magazines and anthologies.