Pornokitsch

Presented with great pleasure, the table of contents for Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke:

• Introduction: "The Nightmare City" by Christopher Fowler
• "Inspector Bucket Investigates" by Sarah Lotz
• "Uncle Smoke" by Archie Black
• "A Dance of Life and Dust" by Aliette de Bodard
• "Victory Year" by Alexis Kennedy
• "The Collection" by Esther Saxey
• "An Unburdening of the Soul" by David Thomas Moore
• "Necropolis" by Jonathan Green
• "The Knowledge" by Rebecca Levene
• "Londoner" by Jenni van der Merwe
• "The Unkindness of Ravens" by Glen Mehn
• "The Pickwick Syndrome" by Kaaron Warren
• "The Hound of Henry Hortinger" by Michelle Goldsmith
• "Aye, There's the Twist" by James Wallis
• "The City of the Absent" by Charles Dickens
• "A Brief History of the Great Pubs of London" by Lavie Tidhar
• "Bullseye" by Sarah Anne Langton
• "Cuckoo" by David Thomas Moore
• "Martin Citywit" by Adam Roberts

Edited by your very own Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin.

The collection is graced with a half dozen stunningly Dickensian illustrations from the great Gary Northfield. Gary's work has shown up everywhere from National Geographic to Horrible Histories. When we needed an artist to bring to life new Dickensian stories in the tradition of Phiz and Cruikshank, he was, by far, the obvious choice. We'll probably share one or two at some point, but we're not done drooling over them yet.

Plus, since we're enormous nerds, we've taken the design cues and typography for Smoke from the 1867 editions of Dickens' works, published by Chapman and Hall. These glorious books were supervised by the man himself, making them as close as possible to his own particular vision. The Chapman and Hall editions went on to inspire the great Nonesuch Press in their editions of Dickens' work. Those were then reprinted and imitated to hell and back. Obviously, we wanted a crack of our own. 

There are a few wonderful oddities about Smoke. David Thomas Moore managed to drive us nuts by delivering two equally brilliant, cunningly interconnected stories. We couldn't choose between them, so we've abused him into letting us print both. Charles Dickens missed the deadline, but he's such a lovely chap that we let him in anyway. And, don't tell anyone, but Adam Roberts' "Martin Citywit" is actually a 10,000 word novelette, and is absolutely stonking. 

BUT WAIT...

We're also pleased to announce Fire - an electronic chapbook of shorter-short fiction. Fire contains three fantastic stories from three unique voices, all skirting the inflammatory outer edges of Dickensian-inspired SF.

• "The Tracks that Tower over Valleys" by Harry Markov
• "A Tale of Cities Two" by Tom Loock
• "Sketches by Zob" by Osgood Vance

Stories of the Smoke will be available this April as a limited edition hardcover and in all the handy digital formats. Fire will be available digitally.

A portion of the proceeds from all sales of both titles will go to the amazing people at English PEN, 'cause that's what Dickens would want.