Category Archives: Issue #1

LONTAR Contributors in PSF-X

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PSF-XCongratulations to all of the announced authors for Philippine Speculative Fiction X (Vol. 10), including LONTAR contributors Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (L2, L6), Eliza Victoria (L4) and Kate Osias (L1, L4); the anthology is edited by Dean Francis Alfar (L3) and Nikki Alfar (L3), and looks to be an especially strong volume in an already impressive annual series.

The full table of contents is as follows:

A Long Walk Home – Alexander M. Osias
A Report – Sarge Lacuesta
A Small Hope – Gabriela Lee
For Sale: Big Ass Sword – Kenneth G. Yu
Children of the Stars – Francis Gabriel Concepcion
Fisher of Men – Razel Tomacder
Hunger – Lakan Umali
IT Girl – AJ Elicaño
Lamat – Noel Tio
Marvin and the Jinni – Raymund Reyes
Mechanical Failures – Jose Elvin Bueno
Mene, Thecel, Phares – Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
Night Predators – Joseph Montecillo
Oblation – Richard Calayeg Cornelio
Santos de Sampaguitas – Alyssa Wong
Soulless – EK Gonzales
The Dollmaker – Joel Pablo Salud
The Last God of Cavite – Andrew Drilon
The Owl and the Hoopoe – Renz Torres
The Run to Grand Maharlika Station – Vincent Michael Simbulan
The Target – Eliza Victoria
Thunderstorm – Cyan Abad-Jugo
When the Gods Left – Kate Osias

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LONTAR story in World SF anthology

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Apex Publications has just announced the list of authors for The Apex Book of World SF 4 coming out next month (edited by Mahvesh Murad), and I’m very happy to note that “Setting Up Home” by Sabrina Huang (translated by Jeremy Tiang), which originally appeared in LONTAR #3, will be reprinted in the volume! Congratulations to Sabrina and Jeremy!

Further congrats to contributors Zen Cho (L1) and JY Yang (L3) for their inclusion as well! We’ve got some very talented voices in speculative fiction on this side of the world, and it’s gratifying to see them continue to be recognised.

Recent Publications from LONTAR Authors

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Issue #4To celebrate the release of LONTAR #4*, we thought it would be a good idea to pimp the latest non-LONTAR publications by our amazing contributors.

1. Paolo Bacigalupi (L1, L4) has just released his seventh book, The Water Knife, published by Knopf, which is also his second novel for adults after The Windup Girl. It’s already received rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio and others.

2. Zen Cho (L1) has a highly-anticipated historical fantasy novel coming out with Ace/Roc (US) and Pan Macmillan (UK and Commonwealth) in September, called Sorcerer to the Crown. The book has already been praised by Naomi Novik, Charles Stross, Ann Leckie, Justine Larbalestier and Aliette de Bodard.

3. Kate Osias (L1, L4) has a new children’s book called The Triangle Man and the Flightless Diwata from CANVAS, and a story in the forthcoming anthology The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia called “The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso“.

4. JY Yang (L3) has three short stories available: “A Sister’s Weight in Stone” in Apex Magazine, “Red is the Color of Mother Dirt” in Athena’s Daughters, Vol. 2, and “RE (For CEO’s Approval) Text for 10th anniversary exhibition for Operation Springclean” in Bahamut Journal no. 1. She also has two flash fiction pieces out: “Cold Hands and the Smell of Salt” in Daily Science Fiction, and “Letter From an Artist to a Thousand Future Versions of Her Wife” in the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

5. Shelly Bryant (L2) has a new poetry collection called Pine the Passing, published by Alban Lake.

6. Joses Ho (L4) has a flash fiction piece called “Glow” at LabLit.

7. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé (L4) has authored a new poetry collection, The Wrong/Wrung Side of Love, jointly published by Glass Lyre Press and Squircle Line Press. His poetry and fiction have recently appeared in The Bend, Drunken Boat, Esquire (Singapore), The Missing Slate, Singapore Poetry, as well as the 30/30 Project from Tupelo Press. He has an essay and interview forthcoming in Jacket2, and his responses to the Proust Questionnaire will appear in the next issue of QLRS. As Poetry Editor at Kitaab.org, Desmond also runs the Lounge Chair Interview Series. Forthcoming from Ethos Books is his hybrid work, Babel Via Negativa, to be launched at the 2015 Singapore Writers Festival; also be launched at the festival is Eye/Feel/Write, a limited edition anthology edited by Desmond of ekphrastic texts written by 20 distinguished writers, in response to artworks exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum and National Gallery Singapore.

8. Daryl Yam (L2, L3) has “Thing Language” in QLRS 14:2, and “The Poems of Horvalla” in the forthcoming anthology In Transit edited by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow and Zhang Ruihe. He was also the guest prose editor for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal issue 28. His poetry is also out: “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” at The Substation Love Letters Project (2014/2015), and “Evening Poems” forthcoming in Of Zoos issue 4.1.

9. Jerrold Yam (L2, L4) has a new poetry collection called Intruder, published by Ethos Books.

10. Paolo Chikiamco (L1) has a story in The SEA Is Ours called “Between Severed Souls”. He’s also regularly updating the site of comic studio Studio Salimbal.

11. Jeremy Tiang (L3 translator) has two stories out: “Meatpacking” in Drunken Boat no. 21 Union Folio, and “Beijing Hospital” in Asia Literary Review. His translation of Yu Qiuyu’s The Book of Mountains and Rivers will be released later this year by CN Times Books.

12. Ng Yi-Sheng (L4) also has a story in the anthology In Transit, called “Between Flights”.

 

* As a reminder, the print version of LONTAR #4 ($14.90 SGD) is available directly from Epigram Books, and at Books Kinokuniya and Select Books; the electronic version (ePub or Mobi: $2.99 USD) is up at Weightless Books, where you can also get a one-year subscription!

Bestsellers at Weightless Books for May!

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Wow! Dovetailing on the exciting news about issue #3 in the previous post, Weightless Books has just released their list of bestsellers for May 2014, and issue #2 and issue #1 have taken the respective #1 and #2 spots!

Thanks go first of all to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, for signal-boosting the journal and driving traffic to Weightless; secondly to the readers who have thus far bought the ebook versions of both issues in such great numbers and shown the journal such wonderful support; and thirdly to Gavin, Michael, Andrea, and everyone at Weightless for providing such a great independent alternative for the distribution of ebooks.

If you enjoyed either issue, or both, please spread the word, and rate them on Goodreads (here and here). Small ventures like LONTAR depend very much on word-of-mouth. Let’s keep these sales coming, folks!

We prefer that you buy the issues through Weightless (especially since it’s the only place to find them DRM-free), but if your preferred method is to use the Nook or iTunes ebook stores, both issues are now available in both places (with Kindle, Kobo, etc. to come). Just click through the links on the Buy page to buy them through those venues.

LONTAR #1 and 2 now available for Kindle, plus interview with E.C. Myers!

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The awesome folks at Weightless Books have now made Kindle-ready versions of LONTAR #1 and #2 available on their site! Supplemental to the last post, this is the MOBI format that I was talking about. So if you have a Kindle, congratulations! You can now buy both issues without having to do any conversions first. This is of course in addition to the ePub format that was already there, which works on any other e-reader and Adobe Digital Editions.

So to sum up: MOBI = Kindle; ePub = everything else. Both formats are DRM-free.

In addition, Weightless has just posted an exclusive interview with issue #2 contributor (and Andre Norton Award-winner) E.C. Myers!

Q. Your story takes place near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. What was it about this region that inspired you to write about it?

This is a case where the story was shaped a lot by my research and ended up far richer than I first imagined. I wanted to do a contemporary version of the Korean folk tale “The Tiger-Girl,” so I started reading up on Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers. It was rather depressing, because there are very few of them remaining in the wild, and particularly in the wilds of Korea. They can be found in the mountains of the north, but they’re absent from the southern peninsula—a shame because the tiger is such an important part of Korean culture.

The more I read about the DMZ, the more fascinated I became, and I decided that if a tiger could still exist in Korea, it would be there; because that territory is largely off-limits to humans, it essentially functions as a gigantic nature preserve. Many references in the story to the DMZ and the cameraman Lim Sun Nam are real, albeit a few years out of date. There’s a free film you can watch online called Tiger Spirit that documents Lim’s quest to find tigers in the DMZ.

Catch the entire interview here!

A Note on ePub Format

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I’ve had a few queries from people wanting to buy LONTAR about the journal being available and/or readable for the Amazon Kindle. The format currently being sold at Weightless Books is ePub, which is the industry standard for ebooks, but which can’t be read on a Kindle.

ePub can be read by the iBooks app running on Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad), Barnes and Noble NOOK and the NOOK app running on iOS devices, Kobo eReader, Blackberry Playbook, Google Books app running on Android and iOS devices, Sony Reader, BeBook, Bookeen Cybook Gen3, COOL-ER, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton, AZARDI, FBReader, Aldiko, CoolReader, Mantano Reader, Moon+ Reader on Android, the Mozilla Firefox add-on EPUBReader, and Okular. Plus maybe some more that I don’t know about.

The Kindle is the only e-reader device that does not read ePub; Amazon uses their own proprietary format, called MOBI, that can only be read on Kindle devices; this is to lock you into their architecture, and make it prohibitive for you to switch e-readers (since you’d have to buy your ebooks all over again). You can use a program like Calibre to convert ePub to MOBI, but the results are never guaranteed, and the formatting can look wonky.

Both LONTAR issue #1 and issue #2 will soon be available on the Kindle, NOOK, Kobo, and iTunes ebook stores, but it will take some time; distribution is currently pending. Plus, I wanted to give Weightless a sales head-start, since they’ve been good to us, and are run by some pretty amazing people.

So if you’re dead set on buying the issues in the Kindle store directly for your Kindle, you’ll need to cultivate patience for a bit. In the meantime, you can buy the ePub versions DRM-free (which will not be the case at the other ebook stores) from Weightless Books and read them on any of the devices mentioned above, or on Adobe Digital Editions for PC or Mac (which can be downloaded for free).

One final note: if you have bought either issue (or both), please do take a moment to rate them on Goodreads, and possibly write a short review (issue #1 | issue #2).

LONTAR #1 is #1 at Weightless Books for Feb/Mar!

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weightlessWonderful news! LONTAR issue #1 is the #1 bestselling magazine at Weightless Books for February & March! (Thanks to Kam-Yung Soh for bringing this to my attention!) I’m frankly gobsmacked to see this, especially since it’s in the company of a whole lot of amazing speculative fiction magazines on the site. Thank you so much to everyone who has bought the issue so far; if you wouldn’t mind, take just a moment to rate it on Goodreads and maybe write a short review.

Also, thanks to Gavin Grant for promoting the journal on the site, and to Andrea Pawley for writing such a wonderful review back in February; I’m sure the combination of these has been extremely beneficial in bringing new readers to the journal.

So if you haven’t gotten it yet, head on over to Weightless Books for the ebook version, and/or the BooksActually Web Store for the print version.

And keep an eye out for issue #2, coming out later this month!

Issue #1 Launch Photos

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This past Thursday evening, LONTAR issue #1 was launched at BooksActually! Thanks go to everyone who attended and bought copies of the journal. And especial thanks go to all of our readers, who did a wonderful job bringing the pieces to life: Ang Si Min, Patricia Mulles, Alvin Pang, Wei Fen Lee, JY Yang, and Adan Jimenez. Below are some photos of the event (sorry I wasn’t able to get everyone!).

Wei Fen Lee reading Elka Ray Nguyen's story "The Yellow River".

Wei Fen Lee reading Elka Ray Nguyen’s story “The Yellow River”.

Alvin Pang performing Chris Mooney-Singh's poem "Jayawarman 9th Remembers the Dragon Archipelago".

Alvin Pang performing Chris Mooney-Singh’s poem “Jayawarman 9th Remembers the Dragon Archipelago”.

Patricia Mulles reading Kate Osias's story "Departures".

Patricia Mulles reading Kate Osias’s story “Departures”.

JY Yang reading Zen Cho's story "Love in the Time of Utopia".

JY Yang reading Zen Cho’s story “Love in the Time of Utopia”.

Photo by JY Yang. I honestly have no idea what face I'm making here, but June insists that it is "one of LITERARY DETERMINATION". And I'll take that.

Photo by JY Yang. I honestly have no idea what face I’m making here, but June insists that it is “one of LITERARY DETERMINATION”. And I’ll take that.

Issue #1 Mentioned at io9!

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Wow! A week after LONTAR grabbed the attention of Boing Boing, it’s now also been mentioned at io9!

In case you’re unaware, io9 is one of the top daily group-blogs covering science, science fiction, and the future. They do some seriously awesome work there, and have garnered a large readership as a result. Big thanks to Charlie Jane Anders for throwing a little love our way.

Order the print version of issue #1 online through the BooksActually Web Store or HipVan.