Celebrating our 13th year in publication! Welcome to The Bards and Sages Quarterly, a journal of speculative fiction. With each issue, we strive to bring readers a wide range of character-driven fiction from established and emerging authors in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction fields. The Bards and Sages Quarterly is the perfect sampler to explore the incredible range of storytelling found in the speculative genres. Here is a sample of what you will find in this issue: A young boy discovers that a mathematical miscalculation can result in more than poor marks in Solving for X. The Big Bad Wolf and Grandmother share more than just an annoyance with a certain girl in red in Grandmother’s Shoes. A peculiar phone call from her husband is only the first in a strange series of events that upends a woman’s well-manicured life in She Could Be Me.
For over a decade, the Bards and Sages Quarterly has been a showcase for both new and established authors to share their speculative works. The short stories presented in each issue serve as a delightful sampler of the speculative genres. Whether your preference is sword and sorcery, time-travel, space exploration, gothic horror, urban fantasy, or any of the speculative genres, you are sure to find something to love in the pages of this magazine. Stories in this issue by Andrew Jensen, Antony Paschos, Jason Mills, Kelly Toughill, Lorna McGinnis, Luke Foster, Nestor Defino, Nicole Walsh, Patrick Honovich, Ray Daley, and Taija Morgan. A Sample of what you will find: An aspiring author visits a bookshop for inspiration and finds surprising news when browsing the bookseller's special collection of magical books in That First Page. Snow White’s evil stepmother attends a self-help meeting of recovering evil witches in Witches Anonymous. Murderous desperadoes attempting a train robbery get a bit more than they bargained for in The Santa Fe Five. Special notice: For information on potential trigger warnings in our titles, please visit our trigger warnings page at bardsandsages.com
Now in our 14th year of publication, the Bards and Sages Quarterly strives to bring fans of speculative fiction a variety of new and established voices to enjoy. Each issue features an eclectic range of styles and voices to delight audiences. This issue features works by Alice Hathaway, Xan van Rooyen, Naomi Libicki & Alter S. Reiss, Julie Reeser, Jeff Rona, Jeff Dosser, Craig Fishbane, and Dylan King. A selkie on a quest for revenge against the one responsible for her sister's death undercovers more than she bargained for in "Hallfrid." A passenger at a Tokyo train station transforms into a miniature version of a Japanese movie monster...then things really start to get weird in "The Subterranean Beasts of Electric Town." In the competition for souls, the Devil turns to a digital platform in "Patron of the Dark Arts." These and other tales in this issue.
Celebrating our 13th year in publication! Welcome to The Bards and Sages Quarterly, a journal of speculative fiction. With each issue, we strive to bring readers a wide range of character-driven fiction from established and emerging authors in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction fields. The Bards and Sages Quarterly is the perfect sampler to explore the incredible range of storytelling found in the speculative genres. Here is a sample of what you will find in this issue: A young boy discovers that a mathematical miscalculation can result in more than poor marks in Solving for X. The Big Bad Wolf and Grandmother share more than just an annoyance with a certain girl in red in Grandmother's Shoes. A peculiar phone call from her husband is only the first in a strange series of events that upends a woman's well-manicured life in She Could Be Me.
The Society of Misfit Stories is a home for those wonderful stories that are too long for most magazines but too short for stand-alone print books. Whether you call them short stories, novelettes, or novellas, these stories are all of a length that often struggles to find publication traditionally. Each issue offers a substantial volume of amazing speculative fiction for readers who enjoy spending time with a good tale. A sample of what you'll find in this issue: A community living on the back of a giant tortoise-like creature faces a threat when the creature stops following their commands in Raise Me Up an Eastern Mountain. A guitarist believes an imposter has assumed his identity, but as he tries to unravel the truth, he discovers the imposter is ever more dangerous that he realized in Broken Strings. A bookshop owner’s obsession with a female customer who has a disturbing interest in books about pain is forced to confront his own buried demons in Black Leather Gloves.
Community Engagement Through Collaborative Writing: Storytelling Together is designed to support scholars and communities storytelling together to reach multiple audiences and facilitate social change. Social scientists, public health practitioners, community leaders, and others recognize that there can be no forward movement in addressing the problems and inequalities facing the world today without collaboration across interdisciplinary, multisectoral, geographic, and socioeconomic divides. The book uses real-world experiences to guide individuals and groups through a process of identifying the knowledge they have and sharing that knowledge through various genres. This process includes identifying and honoring different forms of knowledge, not just academic research and training. Combining the principles of trust and collaboration with practical tools, the chapters contain discussions, examples, and instruments for working together across divides toward a common goal of telling stories together. Community Engagement Through Collaborative Writing: Storytelling Together is a valuable resource for applied anthropologists and other social scientists doing community-engaged work for research methods courses and for fields such as public health and education.
In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays. Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more. Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms. The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.
Book 1 of the WINGS RISING series To end a civil war, Lansera's King Turyn relinquished a quarter of his kingdom to create Medua, exiling all who would honor greed over valor to this new realm on the other side of the mountains. The Meduans and Lanserim have maintained an uneasy truce for two generations, but their ways of life are as compatible as oil and water. When Vesperi, a Meduan noblewoman, kills a Lanserim spy with a lick of her silver flame, she hopes the powerful display of magic will convince her father to name her as his heir. She doesn't know the act will draw the eye of the tyrannical Guj, Medua's leader, or that the spy was the brother of Serrafina Gavenstone, the fiancèe of Turyn's grandson, Prince Janto. As Janto sets out for an annual competition on the mysterious island of Braven, Serra accepts an invitation to study with the religious Brotherhood, hoping for somewhere to grieve her brother's murder in peace. What she finds instead is a horror that threatens both countries, devouring all living things and leaving husks of skin in its wake. To defeat it, Janto and Serra must learn to work together with the only person who possesses the magic that can: the beautiful Vesperi, whom no one knows murdered Serra's brother. An ultimate rejection plunges Vesperi forward toward their shared destiny, with the powerful Guj on her heels and the menacing beating of unseen wings all about.
Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award: “Beautiful and brutal nightmares . . . made all the more terrifying by the history in which they’re grounded.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Three neighboring villages on the Ukrainian/Romanian border are the final refuge for the last of the mythical creatures of Eastern Europe. Now, on the eve of the war that may eradicate their kind—and with the ruthless Night Police descending upon their sanctuary—they tell their stories and confront their destinies. The Rusalka, the beautiful, vengeful water spirit who lives in lakes and ponds and lures men and children to their deaths. The Vovkulaka, who changes from her human form into that of a wolf and hides with her kind deep in the densest forests. The Strigoi, a revenant who feasts on blood and twists the minds of those who love, serve, and shelter him. The Drevniye, an apparition that impersonates its victim and draws him into a web of evil in order to free itself. And the Bone Mother, a skeletal crone with iron teeth who lurks in her house in the heart of the woods, and cooks and eats those who fail her vexing challenges. Eerie and unsettling like the best fairy tales, these incisor-sharp portraits of ghosts, witches, sirens, and seers—and the mortals who live at their side and in their thrall—will chill your marrow and tear at your heart. “A fable filled with mythical creatures ranging from werewolves to witches . . . set, in part, among the villages of eastern Europe on the eve of the Second World War.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “Extraordinary . . . A dark and shining mosaic of a story with unforgettable imagery and elegant, evocative prose.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award Longlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards
A ship has vanished in the dark, in the very outer reaches of Earth's solar system. Alien invaders sweep through the void, destroying outposts and threatening humanity. The truth is known only to a few: We fired first. We fired on aliens whose very appearance and body language sent all humans into a flying rage. All but a few. Now an autistic savant from Mars and an alien diplomat seek peace...while some on both sides desire only conflict. Suza McRae and Haniyar must bridge the gap between their species, or risk a war that will destroy everything and everyone in its path.
