I promised myself I would get to this one eventually. I had read most of the individual stories before the release of this, Deborah Biancotti’s first short story collection, and I read all of the new stories last year, as I read most original short stories, in electronic form and in a rush, in order to sift out the best ones for Last Short Story blogging.

But that’s the whole point of a short story collection. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the stories before. They are being presented anew, forming part of something else, and you haven’t actually read it as a collection unless you have sat down and read it, in order, turning all the pages.

I promised myself that one day I would lounge on a couch, with a box of chocolates or a tall jug of iced tea, and spend a whole afternoon taking in this particular book properly, instead of just waving my hands and telling other people to read it. Of course, my life doesn’t work that way. I consumed it in three parts – one part lying on the bed in my library, glaring at the various members of my family attempting to visit me in there and loudly announcing THIS IS MUMMY’S QUIET TIME, one part perched on my couch while the baby ran ever so slightly amok at my feet, and one part in an armchair today, while eyeing the workmen busily digging holes and swapping power poles outside my window.

Each time, despite my surroundings, I dipped into a source of calm while reading these stories. It’s hard to explain, if you haven’t read Deb’s work. She does creepy and weird and murderous and horrific (and someone *really* has to do a study one day on how many excellent Australian writers also do creepy, weird, murderous tales so very well, a Biancotti-Warren-Lanagan triptych anyone?) and very few of her stories make a complete amount of sense if you stare at them too hard (sometimes it’s better to sneak up on them from the side) but the language is so fluid and lovely, the characters regularly grab you by the throat and make you feel their pain/angst/confusion, and the overall reading experience is simply… well. Calming.

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While we’re talking awards news, the winners of the Australian Shadows Award have been announced, and I was very pleased to see Kaaron Warren win Best Long Fiction for Slights, which I still think was the best novel of the year despite being a deeply unpleasant reading experience (in, you know, a good way). Deborah Biancotti also took out Best Short Fiction for “Six Suicides” from A Book of Endings (Twelfth Planet Press), which is exciting – while the reader feedback for this book as a whole was very positive, the individual stories didn’t receive much attention in the early days so it’s lovely to see a bit of happy awardness going to it now.

Grants Pass edited by Jennifer Brozek & Amanda Pillar (Morrigan Books) took the third Shadows Award for Best Edited Publication which means 100% female recipients this year.

The words “no women in horror my arse” come to mind, somehow.

Congratulations to all the winners. I’d add my hope that the winner statues this year are less offensively sexist than in previous years, but I suspect this won’t be the case. I suppose someone could always knit a few sensible jumpers for the poor lasses, though trenchcoats might be more appropriate, somehow.

Shiny #6 is out! With, among other things, the latest Dirk Flinthart short story within.

This is sadly the final issue of Shiny, a labour of love for those of us involved. I was very pleased with the issues I had editorial input in (1-3), enjoyed reading issue 4 as a civilian, and was very proud to be published in issue 5 with “Like Us,” one of the two Shiny stories that scored an Aurealis Award nomination last year.

Back issues of the ezine are available here.

Elsewhere on the internet, Connie Willis talks about Blackout and All Clear.

The always smart and eloquent Kate Harding talks about the problematic aspects of Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.

Jim C Hines, who impresses me more and more each time I read his blog, has some valuable thoughts on the representation of masculinity and men in our society.

Charles Tan did a great post about some of the misconceptions about the Amazon v. Macmillan situation.

Deb Biancotti’s A Book of Endings received an awesome review at Strange Horizons.

Ticonderoga will be publishing collections by two great Australian writers in time for Aussiecon 4: Kaaron Warren and Angela Slatter.

Oh, and that reminds me that we are hosting the Australian Speculative Carnival at Ripping Ozzie Reads on the 15th – drop me a line or a comment if you have any blog posts to rec!

Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you’d like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

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