Search Worlds Without End

Nominated for a World Fantasy Award, Bluegrass Symphony is Lisa L. Hannett's debut collection. In these twelve stories, shapeshifting is both a bootlegger's skill and a twig-wife's cruel punishment. Desperate deals are brokered between woodsmen and minotaurs, fae creatures and midwives, soul-smoking mayors and pegasus-riding delivery girls--for safety, as well as selfishness. These are tales of the superstitions, dreams, nightmares and realities of life in harsh prairie country, trailer parks, and deep woods teeming with wolves. They tell of revenants and cowboys, pageant queens and rednecks, soothsaying fowl and talking squirrels--and the magic that draws such strange folk together.

Table of Contents:

• 11 - Introduction (Bluegrass Symphony) - essay by Ann VanderMeer
• 19 - Carousel - short story
• 33 - Down the Hollow - short story
• 51 - Them Little Shinin Things - short story
• 69 - Fur and Feathers - short story
• 91 - From the Teeth of Strange Children - novelette
• 131 - The Wager and the Hourglass - short story
• 149 - The Short Go: A Future in Eight Seconds - short story
• 163 - To Snuff a Flame - novelette
• 197 - Depot to Depot - short story
• 211 - Commonplace Sacrifices - (2009) - short story
• 229 - Wires Uncrossed - novelette
• 255 - Forever, Miss Tapekwa County - short story
• 267 - Afterword (Bluegrass Symphony) - essay

No one knows when the war against the greys began.

There are theories, speculations, but the only certainties are air-raids, abductions, and inner city explosions. Assaults are endless, swift and lethal; the enemy's stealth unsurpassed. Whispers have circulated for centuries, thoughts spinning from minds in visible wordwinds, clear for all to read, to wield, to steal. Where are the greys? When will they next strike? How can you attack something you can't see? And secretly, fearfully: Are the greys even real? Spanning decades, Lament for the Afterlife follows one man as he negotiates the hostile territory of life after combat.

Peytr Borysson comes from a long line of soldiers, but isn't born for fighting. His 'wind is better shaped for poetry than bullets. Even so, at sixteen he follows the local boys into battle - and never quite leaves. Interweaving Peytr's struggles with those of his family, Lament for the Afterlife takes readers to the frontlines and far beyond, telling a story of ordinary people persisting in extraordinary circumstances.

A novel of human survival, guilt, and the devastating power of memory, Lament for the Afterlife examines the physical and psychological distances we travel when beliefs are threatened - or held too tightly.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, July 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Three (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures (2014), edited by Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

With a twang in its heart and a song for luck on its tongue, Songs for Dark Seasons takes readers back to the lonesome dream counties introduced in the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection, Bluegrass Symphony.

Trailer parks and graves are only temporary homes for souls in these tales, where gods dwell in churches and parking lot groves. Friday night football stars mingle with sirens; hunters' wives help their kids not to shoot, but to fly; Chanticleers spar their way into local government; and rash-afflicted men take dryads for lovers. In backwater towns, some witches have the know-how to pin pageant queens pretty, while others relieve girls of highfalutin aspirations. Local crow-boys and bloodthirsty Ursines are the best miners around.

In these thirteen stories, forests are imbued with the deepest, saddest strains of country music, cornfield horizons stretch as long as a lone fiddle's wail, and distant hills make mandolin promises: sweet and catchy and short-lived.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #75 December 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2012, edtied by Talie Helene and Liz Grzyb, and Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In The Female Factory, procreation is big business. Children are a commodity few women can afford.

Hopeful mothers-to-be try everything. Fertility clinics. Pills. Wombs for hire. Babies are no longer made in bedrooms, but engineered in boardrooms. A quirk of genetics allows lucky surrogates to carry multiple eggs, to control when they are fertilised, and by whom--but corporations market and sell the offspring. The souls of lost embryos are never wasted; captured in software, they give electronics their voice. Spirits born into the wrong bodies can brave the charged waters of a hidden billabong, and change their fate. Industrious orphans learn to manipulate scientific advances, creating mothers of their own choosing.

From Australia's near-future all the way back in time to its convict past, these stories spin and sever the ties between parents and children.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
• Vox
• Baggage
• All the Other Revivals
• The Female Factory