Adele from Fox Spirit has sent me a new book for the bookstore. It is Weird Noir, an anthology of noir detective stories, with tentacles. Not to mention all sorts of other fantastical things that go bump in the night and might commit the odd crime along the way. I don’t recognize any of the names on the table of contents, but it sounds like a really fun concept and a lot of you bought Tales of the Nun & Dragon so I’m expecting this one to sell quite well too.

We have a new book, and a new publisher, in the bookstore today. Outlaw Bodies is the first book from Djibril al-Ayad’s Future Fire imprint. It is an anthology, edited by Lori Selke and Djibril himself, and the theme is human modification. There’s been a lot of talk of late about science fiction not being relevant to current concerns, and I can’t think of anything much more relevant than this. Whether it be live-saving modifications like Neil Clarke’s defibrilator, enabling modification such as Oscar Pistorius’s running blades or Zac Vawter with his mind-controlled legs, identity-related modification such as gender surgery, or just the current popularity of tattoos, hair dye, colored contact lenses and tanning pills, body modification is where it is at. Indeed, this issue is so current that the Royal Society has just issued a report on human enhancement and its likely impact on the world of work. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the authors Lori & Djibril have selected have had to say on this issue.

British small press, Fox Spirit, has a new book available this week. Spares is a science fiction novella set in a post-apocalyptic world where the most valuable commodity is the spare parts that the no-longer-quite-human characters need to keep themselves alive. Check out Spares by Alex McQuay.

New in the bookstore this week are two fine themed anthologies from Paul Guran at Prime.

Ghosts: Recent Hauntings should be self-explanatory. It includes many stories by experts in creepy fiction, including Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Tim Powers and Margo Lanagan. The full table of contents is available here.

Rock On ranges more widely through genre, but the stories are united by their musical themes. Contributors include Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick and Charles De Lint. Hand and Kiernan and common to both books. Again for the full contents click here.

I see that Colinthology is now available from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I note that it is a charity book, and the charity does get more money if you buy the book direct from us, but if you want to buy it elsewhere then you can do so. It will be in other stores fairly soon.

The one BristolCon event I need to report on immediately is the launch of the latest book from Wizard’s Tower Press. Colinthology is now available. You can buy it here. All of the proceeds go to charity.

Aqueduct Press have sent us a whole lot of fabulous new books. To start with there are six titles in the Conversation Pieces series of chapbooks:

• Birds and Birthdays by Christopher Barzak
• Naomi Mitchison: a Profile of Her Life and Work by Lesley A. Hall
• The Receptionist and Other Tales by Lesley Wheeler
• The Traveling Tide by Rosaleen Love
• Three Observations and a Dialogue by Sylvia Kelso
• Ordinary People by Eleanor Arnason

In addition there’s a novel from Rebecca ore called The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid. This is all about the (illegal) use of cloning technology to make supposed reincarnations of historical characters. The blurb sounds fascinating:

Simon Boyle, has a sideline making illegal copies: chimeras based on famous criminals, for rent. His Billy the Kid, a creation unable to comprehend or sometimes even recognize the sorts of things that didn’t exist before the 1880s, is quite popular for a night of historically convincing passion with rich women, particularly the part where Boyle (as sheriff Pat Garrett) guns him down. As the story progresses, Billy the Kid starts remembering things from his previous lives. One of Boyle’s clients sets Billy loose into the mean streets of the 21st century, where he struggles to seize control of the myths in his ROM.

Finally I’m delighted to announce that we have for sale the ebook edition of Gwyneth Jones’ excellent novel, Spirit. You can read my review of the book here.

I’m going to be offline quite a bit over the next couple of weeks because Kevin’s coming over for Bristolcon and a vacation. So as you don’t get too bored, I’m prepping a few posts in advance, mostly about what’s happening with the bookstore. This is the first one.

Osier Publishing have sent us Tea with the Demon by Isobel Herring. From the description it sounds like supernatural erotica. It’s the first book we’ve stocked where the publisher asked for an adult content warning.

Those of you who enjoy top quality lesbian-themed SF&F will be pleased to know that the 2012 edition of Heiresses of Russ is now available in the bookstore. This year’s volume is edited by Connie Wilkins and Steve Berman. Contributors include Nalo Hopkinson, Amal El-Mohtar, An Owomoyela, Laird Barron and David D. Levine. Enjoy.

We’ve been sent three new items for the bookstore from Australian writer, Simon Petrie.

First up is The Gordon Mamon Casebook, a short collection of humorous SF mysteries. When the book blurb says, “warning, may contain puns” I think you know pretty much what to expect.

Simon appears to be in a more serious mode with the novella, Flight 404. The blurb says:

To solve the mystery of the vanished passenger craft, Bougainvillaea, investigator/pilot Charmain Mertz must return to the conservative world of her boyhood.

Guess I’d better read that one.

Both of those titles come from Peggy Bright Books. In addition we have issue #54 of the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which Simon edited.

It is new book day at Wizard’s Tower. Well, not exactly new, of course, but a re-issue of a book that is now out of print, which is definitely fulfilling part of our mission statement.

The book in question is The Thief’s Gamble, the first of five volumes in Juliet E. McKenna’s tales of Einarinn series. The other four will follow in the coming months.

Juliet writes about the book, and the process of digitizing her backlist, here. I’d like to add my thanks to Elizabeth Campbell of Antimatter ePress for taking on the onerous task of converting paper books to quality digital books.

We’ve taken a decision to make the book available only through the Wizard’s Tower store for the first week. That’s because Juliet gets more money if you buy the book from us than if you go through those big commercial people. The book will be available on other stores, at the same price (give or take a few cents on exchange rates) as we are offering it next week for those folks who have no idea our store exists. It will be interesting to see how the experiment works.

One of the things I really love about ebooks is that the provide a cheap and effective way to distribute books all over the world. A case in point: I have just added a book from a Filipino publisher to the bookstore.

The book is How to Traverse Terra Incognita by Dean Francis Alfar. Alfar has had a couple of stories published in Western venues. In particular “The Kite of Stars” was in Strange Horizons and went on to be collected in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror #17 (2003), and in The Apex Book of World SF (2009). However, a quick look at his publication history shows that he’s very prolific, and most of his output has been published in the Philippines. So Flipside Publishing has made Alfar’s latest collection available as an ebook, and you can buy it here.

As you might expect, where the Philippines are involved, our friend Charles Tan has had a hand in the process. He has also got some fine blurbs for the book from people like John Grant, Ann VanderMeer, Lynne Thomas, Tansy Rayner Roberts and (in the book only) Rachel Swirsky. If Ann describes someone as a “wondrous storyteller” then we should sit up and take notice.