Congratulations 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

To 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!

This coming Friday night at 7.30pm, Epigram Books and Math Paper Press will jointly launch LONTAR issues #2 and #3 at BooksActually!

The Facebook event page is here. I will be joined by contributing writers from both issues for an evening reading, Q&A and autograph session. Our invited readers are:

• Cyril Wong (3)
• JY Yang (3)
• Shelly Bryant (2)
• Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (2)
• Tse Hao Guang (2 & 3)
• Patricia Mulles (for Nikki Alfar) (3)
• Ang Si Min (2)
• David Wong Hsien Ming (3)

This is an excellent chance to hear some fantastic readings of prose and poetry, and pick up some Xmas gifts for the special people in your life who dig on literature of the imagination!

Issues #2 and #3 are back from the printer!

This is a very exciting day. The print edition of #2 has been a long time coming (the ebook has been out since April), and both the print and ebook edition of #3 mark the beginning of publication by Epigram Books. They were both printed at the same time to save costs, which means that they look and feel very much the same. And all three issues look fantastic together on the bookshelf.

Issue #2 is available now at BooksActually (as is #1), and issue #3 will be at all major bookstores in Singapore within the next couple of weeks. We’re planning on a joint launch for them sometime in December, so stay tuned to this space.

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.

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!

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 issue #2 (Spring 2014) is now out and available! The DRM-free ebook has been posted to Weightless Books, and can be yours for the mere paltry payment of $2.99 USD. Many, many thanks to Michael and Gavin and everyone at WB for making the issue prêt à acheter so quickly.

Contents

1. Sophomore Segue | Jason Erik Lundberg (Editorial)
2. The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds | E.C. Myers (Fiction)
3. What Is Being Erased | Tiffany Tsao (Fiction)
4. Doppelgänger | Jerrold Yam (Poetry)
5. A Script | Tse Hao Guang (Poetry)
6. Waiting for the Doctor | Ang Si Min (Poetry)
7. Naga, A Khmer Myth | Shelly Bryant (Poetry)
8. Funkytown | Daryl Yam (Poetry)
9. Entanglement | Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Fiction)
10. The Floating Market | Eliza Chan (Fiction)
11. The Apartment | John Burdett (Fiction)

Once again, we have a strong issue, with some really wonderful writing from a variety of locales. All of the poetry this time round comes from Singapore, which was unintended, but really showcases the poetic prowess of our Little Red Dot.

Thanks to all of our talented and imaginative contributors for making it another great issue, as well as the hard work of poetry editor Kristine Ong Muslim, cutting-edge art direction from Sarah and Schooling (I mean, just how awesome is that cover?!), and publication faith of publisher Kenny Leck.

So go ahead and nab your own ebook copy of issue #2 (and pick up a copy of issue #1, in case you missed it earlier).

Update: We got Boing Boinged!

The manuscript for LONTAR issue #2 has been sent to the folks at Math Paper Press, and if all goes according to plan, we should be on schedule for a Spring (March/April) release. It’s another strong issue, and I’m very happy with how it came out.

Here’s the table of contents:

• The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds | E.C. Myers (Fiction)
• What Is Being Erased | Tiffany Tsao (Fiction)
• Doppelgänger | Jerrold Yam (Poetry)
• A Script | Tse Hao Guang (Poetry)
• Waiting for the Doctor | Ang Si Min (Poetry)
• Naga, A Khmer Myth | Shelly Bryant (Poetry)
• Funkytown | Daryl Yam (Poetry)
• Entanglement | Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Fiction)
• The Floating Market | Eliza Chan (Fiction)
• The Apartment | John Burdett (Fiction)

I’m now reading for issue #3, so if you want your work to be considered, send it to me via the Submittable portal. If you’re still waiting for a reply from me, please be patient for just another couple of weeks and I’ll get back to you.