Anyone interested in reviewing books for Kaleidotrope? Obviously we'd have to discuss the specifics, and I'd likely have some specific books in mind, but any interest?

This is very cool. Small Beer Press has announced that what was easily one of my favorite short story collections of recent years, Maureen F. McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters, is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license. So if you've never read any of McHugh's stories -- Ursula K. Le Guin rightly calls her "one of our best and bravest imaginative writers" -- now is your chance. As SBP notes, "The paper edition is much nicer, although not free."

They have also made available Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link's wonderful first collection and John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which I regret I've not yet read.

I'm starting to get some feedback on the most recent issue of Kaleidotrope, and I think contributor Bill Ward's comments might be my favorite so far:

I’ve just read through my contributor’s copy of the fourth issue of Kaleidotrope and the magazine continues to impress. There’s a healthy dose of surreal scifi and cross-genre slipstream shorts between the covers, and a variety of poetry and prose poems. But it’s the quirky humor of Fred Coppersmith that really comes through in his magazine and makes it different than a lot of other small press cross-genre ‘zines, which take themselves far too seriously. Kaleidotrope, with its eclectic stories and articles (the standout here is a history of the ‘fembot’ in popular culture) and weird little vignettes like faux horoscopes and ironic photography, is a magazine that isn’t scared to have some fun.

Bill's fun short story, "The Three Wishes of Miles Vander," appears in the issue, on sale now.

The fourth issue of Kaleidotrope is finally at the printer, and with luck copies will start flowing out within the week. So that seems like as good a time as any to finally reveal the full table of contents.

Fiction
"Molting" by Andrew Howard
"Word Count: Negative 1" by Ashley Arnold
"The Three Wishes of Miles Vander" by Bill Ward
"Premature" by Mark Rich
"Paradise" by Adam Lowe
"White Sheets" by Mike Driver
"Rome (a Metrophilia)" by Brendan Connell
"Half-Sneeze Johnny" by Kurt Kirchmeier
"My Cthulhu Story" (a comic) by G.W. Thomas
"Furrier" by Flavian Mark Lupinetti
"She’s a Hearth" by Paul Abbamondi
"The Life and Times of a Hungry World, Told Briefly" by Alex Dally MacFarlane
"The Transparency" by Michael Obilade

Poetry
"Househunting on Mars" by Bonita Kale
"Praise for What I Don’t Know" by Thomas Zimmerman
"Cracked Shells" by Beth Langford
"Spring in the Lab" by Alyce Wilson
"Farm School" by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
"A Manual For Good Housekeeping in the Age of Global Warming" by Miranda Gaw
"Ivanikha" by Dana Koster
Two Poems by Franz K. Baskett
"Worldviews on a Desert Trail" by Jason Huskey
"Towards the Afterlife" by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

Plus!

"Who Goes There," Betty Ragan's interview with Marc Schuster and Tom Powers
"The Rise of the Fembots: A Brief Introduction to Female Android Sexuality in Film" by Eric Borer

Artwork from Remi Treuer, Rod Walker, and Lisa Willis -- and assorted other fun! I hope you'll consider picking up a copy. For just $4 ($6.50 international), it's a steal -- and all that money goes directly back to my contributors, keeping them happy and fed!

And, amazingly enough, two years of this hasn't quite deterred me yet! I'm accepting submissions for issue #5.

Congratulations to Kaleidotrope contributor Marge Simon (#1, assorted artwork) on her Stoker Award win!