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Hardback Crandolin and April issue of Schlock

Today marks the occasion of the release of the first Chômu hardback.

Crandolin, by Anna Tambour, shortlisted for the 2013 World Fantasy Award in the novel category, has been described by Paul Di Filippo thus:

Tambour deftly deploys a variety of tones and strategies in this book, which she manages to unite gracefully into an organic wholeness and distinctive voice. We have bits of erudite lost history, in the manner of Umberto Eco. We have surreal and absurdist moments such as we might find in the work of Stepan Chapman or Rhys Hughes. Haruki Murakami’s melancholy aloneness and perverseness of existence figure into Tambour’s style, as does Rikki Ducornet’s jeweled oneiric prose. Of course there’s a heavy dose of the Arabian Nights in the tale. And when the Muse and the Omniscient assume human form and interact with the Russians, I was reminded of nothing so much as Thorne Smith’s The Night Life of the Gods.

The hardback edition might take a couple of weeks (from the time of writing this) to arrive at Amazon at a reasonable price, but is already available at The Book Depository, with free delivery worldwide. Please also look out for new fiction from Anna Tambour at Tor.com this month. [Note: The story, 'The Walking-Stick Forest', is, in fact, to appear at Tor.com on the 4th of June.]

Yesterday saw the end of the month-long collaboration between Chômu and Schlock Magazine, featuring not only an interview with Chômu, but reviews of the debut collections of Justin Isis and Luke Geddes in the Pop Culture Destruction section, and new fiction from both the above-named authors in the April Issue, which also includes fiction from T.R. Healy, Elsa Fiott and Ken Liu.

Finally, we are beginning to see reviews of our February release, The Galaxy Club, by Brendan Connell, appearing here and there online.

First Chômu hardback, Schlock interview, prize draw results, and so on

Spring has arrived and Chômu Press has, for the month of April, entered into a temporary partnership with Schlock Magazine. An interview with Chômu is already up on their website, and may be read here. Please also look out, on the Schlock website, for new fiction from Luke Geddes and Justin Isis and for reviews of books by the two authors, forthcoming at the time of writing.

In further news, we are very pleased to announce the imminent release of Chômu’s first hardback, the World Fantasy Award finalist Crandolin, by Anna Tambour. This hardback edition is due for publication on the 1st of May.

Finally, the winner of February’s prize draw, for a personalised copy of The Galaxy Club, is Martin Hayes, of County Wicklow, Ireland. The customised copy of The Galaxy Club is now winging its way across the Atlantic.

Please watch this space (and/or sign up here to our mailing list) for further Chômu updates.

Dragon Fishing in New Mexico

2014 has begun, and after the come-down and hangover of the New Year, a tonic is necessary to fortify us for the year ahead – maybe even hair of the cynosure. And so we continue the astronomical theme with which we brought 2013 to a close, and start 2014 with the release of The Galaxy Club, by Brendan Connell. Set in seventies New Mexico, this is a booze-soaked stranger-comes-to-town tale with the cosmic picaresque vision of Wu Cheng’en and the grit of Jim Thompson. Buried treasure, dragons, and naturally plenty of car chases, are leavened with beat poetry and hard-boiled in a bed of noir, to bring the reading world the Great New Mexican Novel it never knew it was waiting for. Join the club by picking up a copy here.

Details of the prize draw may be found at the bottom of the announcement. Readers in London, please also remember that Jeremy Reed, author of Chômu books, Nothing But a Star and Here Comes the Nice, will be performing live with The Ginger Light at The National Portrait Gallery in two days time (on Valentine’s Day) at 18.30, admission free.

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of The Galaxy Club

The results of the Nothing But a Star prize draw are as follows: ADW, of Lancashire, England, is the winner of a specially inscribed copy of Jeremy Reed’s Nothing But a Star, which should be on its way to him soon.

For this month’s prize draw, we are offering a specially inscribed copy of Brendan Connell’s The Galaxy Club. For all those unfamiliar with them, here are the rules: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘We are stardust’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘We are stardust’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 28th of February, 2014.

Please remember also to sign up to our e-mail list for Chômu news and exclusive author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sequins in your eyes

The year 2013 draws moodily and mistily to its close, but if there is one bright spot in the nighted firmament, it is the advent of our 25th book. That’s right, with Nothing But a Star, by Jeremy Reed (cover photo by Gregory Hesse-Wagner), we have reached the quarter century in the number of volumes we have published. Jeremy Reed’s stellar novel, Here Comes the Nice, received a starred review at Publishers Weekly when we released it in November 2011. This time we are releasing an eclectic collection of his poetry, essays, lyrics and more besides. We may be shivering at the foggy fag-end of the year and of civilisation, but let us warm our hearts by the starlight of poetry.

Glamorous, autumnal, visionary, distilling the future from the present moment, glittering with pop spontaneity and smooth with velvet melancholy, capturing the dread and tingle of the moods of London, and spinning out from the light-polluted urban night across the universe, Nothing But a Star is the perfect book to bring a decadent, empurpled twinkle to the long, cold nights of December. Part intimate scrapbook, part jeweller’s tray, Nothing But a Star contains, as well as poetry, an essay on the suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby, a playscript for a version of The Picture of Dorian Gray set in the 21st century, a pop libretto written for Marc Almond and based on J-K Huysmans’ À rebours, and other specimens of dopamine in literary form. Catch a falling star by picking up a copy here. There now follows the testimony of other stargazers:

Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance. He is Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised.

- J.G. Ballard

The most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.

- Björk

The man is light worlds apart from his contemporaries in poetry.

- Andrew Loog Oldham

Jeremy Reed may be heard reciting one of his poems as part of the act The Ginger Light in the inset clip below:

As usual, there is a prize draw, details of which may be found at the bottom of the announcement. Please also remember, if you require books for Christmas, and they appear to be temporarily out of stock at Amazon, that The Book Depository delivers worldwide at no extra cost. And for those anticipating the coming year, please look out for Brendan Connell’s The Galaxy Club, which continues our astronomical theme. And finally, in other news, the collaborative novel by Chômu authors Brendan Connell, Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp, The Cutest Girl in Class, a less-than-simple tale of “boy meets inanimate object” (Joe Simpson Walker) was released last month from Snuggly Books.

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of Nothing But a Star

The results of the Member prize draw are as follows: Caleb Wilson, of Illinois, was the winner of a specially inscribed copy of Michael Cisco’s Member, which should be on its way to him, or has perhaps already arrived.

This month’s prize draw, of course, is for a specially inscribed copy of Jeremy Reed’s Nothing But a Star. For anyone unfamiliar with them, please allow me to repeat the unchanging rules: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘But some of us are looking at the stars’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘But some of us are looking at the stars’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 3rd of January, 2014.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview is still to be with P.F. Jeffery.

The Human Game

After our summer hiatus, we return triumphantly with Member, our third novel from the incomparable Michael Cisco, the first writer to have a Chômu publishing hat-trick. (Incidentally, Cisco is interviewed at Weird Fiction Review at this link, where he talks about Member, Franz Kafka and other things.) Officially released today, and with alluring cover artwork from Sergio Membrillas, Member is a sustained tracking shot, from the inside, following one person’s exploration of the cosmic stitching behind the tapestry of the everyday. It is the tale of the hapless spiritual seeker, Thanks, determined to go beyond the human by constant application of his ‘practice’, but who nonetheless accidentally recruits himself into:

Chorncendantra — the current phase of the cosmic game originating on the artificial planetary system; the game is played by two arbitrarily determined teams across many planets. Chorncendantra is the universal systemmechanism. It is the human game.

You may non-accidentally recruit yourself by picking up a copy here.

No less a literary light than Brian Evenson describes Member as:

A rivetingly strange novel in which Cisco mixes game theory, serious philosophy, SF, and dark fantasy into something at once unreal and really entrancing. Kind of like what might happen if Wyndham Lewis decided to write like M. John Harrison and had Martin Heidegger as his editor.

Below, you will find details on how to enter the Member prize draw, to win a copy of the book specially inscribed by the author. Before that, some general news. November 2012’s Chômu release, Crandolin, by Anna Tambour, has been shortlisted in the Novel category of the World Fantasy Awards. Read a sample of the novel at this link. If you are attending the World Fantasy Convention this year, please look out for us in the dealers’ room, as we expect to be there. The Cutest Girl in Class, a collaboration by Chômu authors Justin Isis, Brendan Connell and Quentin S. Crisp, details of which can be found in the post at this link, is now at the printers and set for a November release. It is still, of course, available for pre-order by writing to evans_lichamleas[at]yahoo[dot]com, though please note that health problems at Snuggly Books might cause delayed responses to e-mails. Finally, if you enjoyed the Chômu Radio Archive interview with John Elliott, then you may enjoy Joe Campbell and Quentin S. Crisp’s audio diary of their Hythe Adventure.

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of Member

And now for the details, as promised above, of this month’s prize draw. For the October prize draw we are, of course, giving away a uniquely inscribed copy of Member. For anyone unfamiliar with them, here are the oft-repeated rules : To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘The game is called “Find Your Adversary”’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘The game is called “Find Your Adversary”’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 31st of October, 2013.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview is still to be with P.F. Jeffery.

Book launch, Jane prize draw results, Snuggly Books, and so on

We now come to a hiatus in our schedule of releases, with our next publication being Michael Cisco’s enigmatic and he-just-keeps-getting-better, Member. In the meantime, we would like to update you with some general news and information.

Below you will find the results of the prize draw for P.F. Jeffery’s Jane, but before that let us announce two exciting Chômu-related events. The first of these is the launch, on the 4th of July, and at the Review Bookshop, Peckham, of a whole flotilla of books. Just to mix metaphors hopelessly, the flag-train of this particular flotilla is Eibonvale Press’s Rustblind and Silverbright, an anthology of tales related to trains and travel by rail. The other books to be launched at this event will be the aforementioned Jane, by P.F. Jeffery, Stardust by Nina Allan, Defeated Dogs, the latest collection of short fiction by Quentin S. Crisp, and Helen’s Story, by Rosanne Rabinowitz. The event will begin at 7.00 p.m., and there will be readings and wine.

The second event/phenomenon to which we would like to draw your attention is the existence of Snuggly Books (an imprint of the much-needed-for-this-world Hieroglyphic Press) and the availability for pre-order of their first publication, “The Cutest Girl in Class…”. The novel, a collaboration between Chômu authors Justin Isis, Brendan Connell and Quentin S. Crisp, is described as:

…a lunatic three-headed dragon, equal parts rollicking caper, ribald farce and embittered love story. Fraught with double crosses and missing mannequins, this is Waiting for Godot meets Beach Blanket Bingo, the two of them falling in love and getting married in a church where the priest is John Waters.

The project is further explained thus:

Quentin S. Crisp needs to go to Japan. In order to facilitate this (finance it), he has joined forces with Justin Isis and Brendan Connell and together they have written a novel titled The Cutest Girl in Class. The book is slated to be published in Fall, 2013, in a limited edition of 150 hardbound copies. Though the exact page count has yet to be determined, the novel is approximately 75,000 words in length. A few details have yet to be determined, such as the exact paper, whether copies will be signed and/or numbered, etc. but expect the book to be of a high quality.

One such detail that has now been confirmed is the inclusion of a free personalised purikura sticker for any who pre-order before August, the sticker to be stuck in the book or elsewhere at the discretion of the buyer (a digital file of the sticker image will also be included). (Please include the form of your name to be used in the sticker when you e-mail.) Those of you who follow Chômu’s Facebook page will probably already have an idea of what these purikura are. For a sample of what your personalised purikura could look like, please click on this link (courtesy of CHOMU Style Photoblog).

As the Snuggly Books website requests, please address all questions regarding pre-orders to: evans_lichamleas[at]yahoo[dot]com.

And finally we come to the Jane prize draw results.

A signed copy of Jane, together with such extras as a printout from an earlier draft, a page from the novel Odalisque (now to be cannibalised for the Warriors of Love series), and some correspondence to legendary weirdmonger D.F. Lewis, concerning Russian pop duo t.A.T.u and other matters, has now been sent to Jeremy Bartels in Germany.

Remember, for subscribers to our e-mail list, the next e-mail interview will be with P.F. Jeffery.

The Surrey girls came marching in

The goddess smiles upon us today and allows us to release Jane, by P.F. Jeffery, the first in a projected twelve novels in the Warriors of Love series. We are also most blessed in the wraparound art from Nimit Malavia, which forms Jane’s magnificent cover. As a standalone coming-of-age tale in a future world of Sapphic romance, or as the first unrolling of a panoramic tapestry of picturesque intrigue, adventure and frolic, Jane is a lyrical and a rollicking read with a plenitude of fine and life-affirming detail. Details of the prize draw are below, but for those who don’t want to take a chance, you may embark immediately upon the journey of discovery by picking up a copy here.

Legendary weirdmonger D.F. Lewis describes the novel thus:

…a bombardment of incidents and names, evocatively conveyed through passages of honed prose and dialogue. After a tearful farewell to Modesty, I could actually sense with many senses the sea trip, the sea battle, the sea-sickness, the subsequent ceremony. I wallowed in the emerging Imperial politics, the description of the Empress who takes more than just a simple fancy to our fiscal inspector heroine.

Meanwhile, our own Quentin S. Crisp says of Jane:

A breathless adventure, full of the gentle poetry of place and time, it manages somehow to combine pagan fertility comedy with Sapphic science fiction. Not a combination you come across every day.

In other news, the winner of our March prize draw is Ben Hostmark. A specially inscribed copy of Steve Rasnic Tem’s Onion Songs has already been sent to him, along with a limited-edition-of-one story, specially written by the author, ‘Benjamin’:

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of Jane

And now for the promised details of this month’s prize draw. For the May prize draw we are, of course, giving away a uniquely inscribed copy of Jane. For anyone unfamiliar with them, here are the oft-repe