Search Worlds Without End

Discover the haunting stories of Crawford Award-winning author Christopher Barzak in his new collection Before and Afterlives. These are tales of relationships with unearthly domesticity and eeriness: a woman falls in love with a haunted house; a beached mermaid is substituted for a disappeared daughter; the imaginary friend of a murdered young woman stalks the streets of her small town; a mother's teenage son is afflicted with a disease that causes him to vanish; a father exploits his daughter's talent for calling ghosts to her; and a wife leaves her husband and children to fulfill her obligations in the world from which she escaped.

Table of Contents:

• What We Know About the Lost Families of -- -- House - (2007)
• The Drowned Mermaid - (2003)
• Dead Boy Found - (2003)
• A Mad Tea Party - (1999)
• Born on the Edge of an Adjective - (2002)
• The Other Angelas - (2004)
• A Resurrection Artist - (2004)
• The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire - (2005)
• Map of Seventeen - (2010)
• Dead Letters - (2006)
• Plenty - (2001)
• The Ghost Hunter's Beautiful Daughter - (2009)
• Caryatids - (2001)
• A Beginner's Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse - (2013)
• Smoke City - (2011)
• Vanishing Point - (2003)
• The Language of Moths - (2005)

This short story originally appeared on Eclipse Online, December 10, 2012. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013).

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2011), edited by Steve Berman, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. The story is included in the collection Before and Afterlives (2013).

Adam McCormick had just turned fifteen when the body was found in the woods. It is the beginning of an autumn that will change his life forever. Jamie Marks was a boy a lot like Adam, a boy no one paid much attention to-a boy almost no one would truly miss. And for the first time, Adam feels he has a purpose. Now, more than ever, Jamie needs a friend.

But the longer Adam holds on to Jamie’s ghost, the longer he keeps his friend tethered to a world where he no longer belongs…and the weaker Adam’s own ties to the living become. Now, to find his way back, Adam must learn for himself what it truly means to be alive.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was Originally published in Lightspeed, June 2013. It can aslo be found in the anthologies Magic City: Recent Spells (2014), edited by Paula Guran, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, edited by Greg Bear.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2011, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (2012), edited by Ann VanderMeer, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures (2014), edited by Sean Wallace. It is included in the collection Before and Afterlives (2013).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue One, November-December 2014. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014 (2016), edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 8, January-February 2016.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Ellie heads up her high school yearbook, and until the tornadoes come, her biggest worry is how to raise enough money to print them. But since the day when a rash of powerful tornadoes touched down in Newfoundland, Ohio--killing more than half of the students in her school, not to mention dozens more people throughout the town--she's been haunted: by the ghosts of her best friends, by the boy next door, even by her boyfriend. And the living are haunting her too, all those left behind in the storm's wake to cope with the "gone away" pieces in their lives. A chance encounter with one ghost leads Ellie to discover a way to free the spirits that have been lingering since the storm, and she learns that she's not the only one seeing the ghosts--it's a town-wide epidemic.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeaerd in Realms of Fantasy, April 2005. The story can also be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005 (2006) ed edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Best New Fantasy (2006) edited by Sean Wallace. It is included in the collection Before and Afterlives (2013).

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man's life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives-and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection-uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak's artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find-or lose-themselves in an often incomprehensible world.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (2007), edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2016. It is included in the collection Before and Afterlives (2013).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Seventeen-year-old Aidan Lockwood lives in the sleepy farming community of Temperance, Ohio--known for its cattle ranches and not much else. That is, until Jarrod, a friend he hasn't seen in five years, moves back to town and opens Aidan's eyes in startling ways: to Aidan's ability to see the spirit world; to the red-bearded specter of Death; to a family curse that has claimed the lives of the Lockwood men one by one... and to the new feelings he has developed for Jarrod.

Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated Surrealism. This is Christopher Barzak's tribute to them, three stories and an essay that enter into a humane surrealism which turns away from the unconscious and toward magic. Sometimes the stories themselves seem to be paintings. Sometimes painter and writer may be characters, regarding each other through a painful otherness, talking in shared secrets.

Barzak's stories are huge with the spacious strangeness of worlds where there is always more room for a woman to escape her tormentors, or outgrow an older self. Here we find a bird-maker and a star-catcher whose shared history spills over into the birds and the stars themselves; a girl who outgrows her clothes, her house, and finally her town--and leaves to find her body a new home; a landlord, whose marriage, motherhood, separation, sexual exploration, and excursions into self-portraiture all take place within a single apartment building. In "Remembering the body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism," Barzak comments on the images that inspired these stories and discusses his own position as a writer among painters.

Table of Contents:

• The Creation of Birds - (2006) - novelette
• The Guardian of the Egg - (2006) - short story
• Birthday - (2012) - short fiction
• Remembering the Body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism - (2012) - essay

Delving deeper into the genre-spanning territory explored in Interfictions, the Interstitial Arts Foundation's first groundbreaking anthology, Interfictions 2 showcases twenty-one original and innovative writers. It includes contributions from authors from six countries, including the United States, Poland, Norway, Australia, France, and Great Britain.

Newcomers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson, Theodora Goss, and Alan DeNiro rub shoulders with established visionaries such as Jeffrey Ford (The Drowned Life), Brian Francis Slattery (Liberation),Nin Andrews (The Book of Orgasms), and M. Rickert (Map of Dreams). Also featured are works byWill Ludwigsen, Cecil Castellucci, Ray Vukcevich, Carlos Hernandez, Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Ziemska, Peter M. Ball, Camilla Bruce, Amelia Beamer, William Alexander, Shira Lipkin, Lionel Davoust, Stephanie Shaw, and David J. Schwartz.

Colleen Mondor, of the well-known blog Chasing Ray, interviews the editors for the afterword.

Henry Jenkins, ex-director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and now a member of USC's Annenberg School for Communication and School of Cinematic Arts, provides a fantastic introduction sure to set readers' imaginations alight.

Interfictions 2 is here and ready to be read, discussed, taught, blogged, taken apart, and re-interpreted.

Contents

• Introduction: On the Pleasures of Not Belonging - essay by Henry Jenkins
• The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper - shortstory by Jeffrey Ford
• Remembrance Is Something Like a House - shortstory by Will Ludwigsen
• The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory - shortstory by Cecil Castellucci
• The Score - novelette by Alaya Dawn Johnson
• The Two of Me - shortstory by Ray Vukcevich
• The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria - novelette by Carlos Hernandez
• Shoes - shortstory by Lavie Tidhar
• Interviews After the Revolution - shortstory by Brian Francis Slattery
• Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken - shortstory by Elizabeth Ziemska
• Black Dog: A Biography - shortstory by Peter M. Ball
• Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse - shortstory by Camilla Bruce
• Morton Goes to the Hospital - shortstory by Amelia Beamer
• After Verona - shortstory by William Alexander
• Valentines - shortstory by Shira Lipkin
• (*_*?) ~ ~ ~ ~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof - novelette by Alan DeNiro
• The Marriage - shortstory by Nin Andrews
• Child-Empress of Mars - shortstory by Theodora Goss
• L'Isle Close - shortstory by Lionel Davoust
• Afterbirth - novelette by Stephanie Shaw
• The 121 - shortstory by David J. Schwartz
• Afterwords: An Interstitial Interview - essay by Colleen Mondor and Christopher Barzak and Delia Sherman