Edited by Claude Lalumière & Don Pizarro

Cover by Galen Dara; Layout and Interior Art by Carrie Cuinn

Contributing Authors (in alphabetical order)

Colleen Anderson
Megan Arkenberg
Jesse Bangs
Todd T. Castillo
Tina Connolly
Michael J. DeLuca
Andrew S. Fuller
Lidya S. Gray
S.J. Hirons
Garry Kilworth
Yarrow Paisley
Amber Polo
Ursula Pflug
Gord Sellar
Trevor Shikaze
Michael Skeet
David Sklar
Ray Vukcevich
George S. Walker
A.C. Wise

We are so pleased to be able to show off another beautiful cover, designed and illustrated by our Art Director, Galen Dara. Be sure to click on the cover image to see a larger version!

We want to expand on the first book, without discarding any of it. The stories from Cthulhurotica are bold, sexy, creepy, empowering and frightening. What we’re looking for now is more … We want stories which use more of Lovecraft’s settings and characters. We’ve got Innsmouth and Arkham, but what about the mountains, the Artic, aboard the Emma? We met Nyarlathotep, the Mi Go, and the King in Yellow, but what about Ithaqua, or the Hounds of Tindalos? Tell us about Charles Dexter Ward’s neighbor, or the secretary in Professor Peaslee’s office.

What if Richard Upton Pickman painted pinup girls too?

Read more about what we’re looking for, and submit your unpublished original story, HERE

• You can now find reviews of our work
• Read interviews with our editors and staff
• Listen to our appearances on podcasts (free!)
• We have updated our appearance schedule for the year

In case you missed it on Twitter, the Hugo-nominated SF Signal podcast sat down with Claude Lalumière and Don Pizarro to talk about Bibliotheca Fantastica. Listen to it here!

We can’t wait to share the Table of Contents for this book with you.

- Carrie Cuinn, Publisher

• so far, we’ve received 110 submissions, and sent responses to all of them. If you have NOT received a response to your submission, please check your spam filter. If it is not there, please contact us.
• of that total, we’ve passed on 90 and have kept 20 in the pool of stories we’re seriously considering.
• of those 20, 11 are by men, and 9 by women.
• of those 20, 6 are by Canadians.

Keep those submissions coming!

More information (and the submission form) can be found here: http://daganbooks.submishmash.com/submit

Name: Ken Liu

Age: 35

Author of: “How Do You Know If a Fish Is Happy?”

Current Geographic Location: Massachusetts, near Boston.

Original Hometown, if different: Lanzhou, China

Twitter: @kyliu99

Website: http://kenliu.name

Recent publications: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing, 2011, available for purchase here; “The Countable,” Asimov’s, December 2011; “Staying Behind,” Clarkesworld, October 2011, available to read free here; “Real Artists,” TR:SF, a special publication by the MIT Technology Review, October 2011, available for purchase here; “The Last Seed,” Daily Science Fiction, September 2011. Read it for free here.

Which zodiac sign where you born under? Ophiuchus / Dragon

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? FTL travel.

What inspired your story? I’ve always wanted to write a story based on the legend that a carp jumping over the Dragon’s Gate will become a dragon. A sci-fi setting seemed perfect.

Did you listen to music while writing it? No. I can’t listen to music and write at the same time.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? One. A very extensive one.

What is your favorite bit?

“I believe that Freddy is my friend, and that makes all the difference.”

Plus, they included the IN SITU cover (which is based on Liu’s story in that anthology, “You’ll Always Have the Burden With You“).

Read the interview here!

Age: 31

Author of: “The Fish-Wife’s Tale”

Current Geographic Location: Cleveland, Ohio

Twitter: @mbennardo

Website: http://www.mbennardo.com

Recent publications: “Honesty”, published November 2011 in The Spirit of Poe anthology from Literary Landmark Press (order book here: http://literarylandmarkpress.blogspot.com/); Various contributions, published September 2011 in The Time Traveler’s Pocket Guide from The Time Travel Bureau (order book here: http://timetravelbureau.com/); “Starvation”, published October 2010 in Machine of Death from Bearstache Books (order book here: http://machineofdeath.net/about/book)

Which zodiac sign where you born under? Taurus. Send gifts and well wishes in mid-May.

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? The ability to read, speak and understand any language, whether current or defunct. I’m mostly looking for human languages, but animal languages would be considered a welcome bonus unless — in true ironic wish fulfillment fashion — this involved hideous and painful deforming of my face and body to make possible the noises and signs that ducks, whales, elephants, and ants use to talk to each other.

What inspired your story? Given the subject of the anthology, I thought it would be fun to write a story that purported to be excerpts from a nature guide to fish and marine life. So naturally I turned to my own bookshelf of guides for inspiration and guidance.

In particular, I looked to older nature guides, which were often written by amateur naturalists. Because of that, you’re likely to find lyrical digressions and folkloric tidbits alongside sober scientific facts. Neltje Blanchan’s Wildflowers Worth Knowing (1917) and Harriet Louise Keeler’s Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them (1900) are two great examples that I had in mind while writing. But the book I turned to most was Nicholas Culpeper’s exhaustive (and somewhat insane) classic guide to the plants of England and their astrologically derived medicinal uses, The Compleat Herbal (1653).

Did you listen to music while writing it? I don’t often listen to music when I write since I usually end up too engrossed to hear it anyway.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? Because I wanted the excerpts from the fictional nature guide both to paint a picture of a society that relies on the sea for all aspects of its livelihood and culture, and to tell a simple story about some of the people who live in that society, I fiddled extensively with this story in the outline stage. By the time I started writing, I knew exactly what I wanted to cover, but even so I had to shift and trim many of the details once they were on the page to get the pacing right.

While revising, I focused on making sure that the unusual structure of the story didn’t overwhelm the points of interest. Each excerpt needed to follow a particular format, but I also needed to make sure that descriptions of fish and their habits didn’t bog the story down. This took at least two careful revisions, and a lot of unnecessary bits were snipped out.

What is your favorite bit?

“This belief leads to small conspiracies in which the superstitious will endeavor trick each other into ‘catching’ an Eyeless Fish. If any islander should suspect his neighbor of having done him a wrong, he may hand his neighbor a small container–a wallet, a shoe, a bucket, even a plucked chicken–in which he has secreted an Eyeless Fish. For the purposes of superstition, picking up or even accepting one of these containers is considered sufficiently like ‘catching’ that the divination is believed to be effective. Even today, it is safe to say that the Eyeless Fish has unknowingly indicted many a person of crimes that he may never have committed…”

Photo courtesy of K. Sekelsky

Name: Tim Kane

Age: 40

Author of: “Vanity Mirror”

Current Geographic Location: Chula Vista, California

Twitter: @timkanebooks

Website: timkanebooks.com

Recent publications: “Moth and Rust”, published in September 2011 by Nevermet Press in the Stories in the Ether anthology (buy it here); “Zombie Maker”, published in June 2008 by Bards and Sages in the Legendary Horrors anthology (buy it here).

Which zodiac sign where you born under? Pisces

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? Probably to eat me. I mean, it’s the fish’s wish.

What inspired your story? Reading about a Chinese legend about a race of creatures that live in mirrors. It came from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. In ancient times, there was a war between these creatures and mankind. The Yellow Emperor used magic to enslave these creatures in mirrors, forcing them to mimic our movements. If you stare into the depth of a mirror, you may sometimes see the fish shimmering just at the edges, ready to throw off its shackles and restart the ancient war.

Did you listen to music while writing it? No. I like to concentrate on the writing without distraction. I do, however, drink plenty of coffee.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? Several, though I don’t really count. I never want to rush the writing, even flash fiction.

What is your favorite bit?

“The face in the mirror showed eyes too large to even be human. A silvery sheen coated his skin. Dotted along it were…Scales?”