Ann VanderMeer's award-winning tenure at Weird Tales was cut short when the magazine was bought by a new crew — but the print world's loss is the internet's gain. VanderMeer and her husband, Jeff VanderMeer, have started a new online magazine, the Weird Fiction Review, which just launched today.
Top image: Detail of "Rat House" by Myrtle von Damitz III.
They're using it to tie in with their new 750,000-word anthology of all types of weird fiction, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories. But they're also going to be publishing original essays, art, and some fiction on the site, and they've launched with an interview with Neil Gaiman.
They write:
This site is also meant to be an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird, in all of its many forms - a kind of non-denominational approach that appreciates Lovecraft but also Kafka, Angela Carter and Clark Ashton Smith, Shirley Jackson and Fritz Leiber - along with the next generation of weird writers and international weird. The emphasis will be on nonfiction on writers and particular books, but we will also run features on weird art, music, and film, as well as occasional fiction.
There's already some fiction, some comics, some essays, and the aforementioned Gaiman interview on the site now. Check it out! [Weird Fiction Review]
DISCUSSION
Despite my past, abbreviated, comments about the crazy, false, yet $ imposed, dichotomy between the printed word and the proverbial ‘e’ word I think that the ‘e’ world is perfect for ‘ephemera’. I applaud and look forward to this venture. It’s the new pulp. Oh, but I love the pulp! Just today I stumbled upon an old paperback by Fritz Leiber, "The Mind Spiders and Other Stories", not quite pulp, but close. Anyway, the foreword itself reminded me that really, it’s about the word. I’ll deal with it, but I LOVE this actual book. Makes sense to me...
But I'm going to check out this Weird Fiction Review.