Crandolin, by Anna Tambour, shortlisted for the 2013 World Fantasy Award in the novel category, has been described by Paul Di Filippo thus:

Tambour deftly deploys a variety of tones and strategies in this book, which she manages to unite gracefully into an organic wholeness and distinctive voice. We have bits of erudite lost history, in the manner of Umberto Eco. We have surreal and absurdist moments such as we might find in the work of Stepan Chapman or Rhys Hughes. Haruki Murakami’s melancholy aloneness and perverseness of existence figure into Tambour’s style, as does Rikki Ducornet’s jeweled oneiric prose. Of course there’s a heavy dose of the Arabian Nights in the tale. And when the Muse and the Omniscient assume human form and interact with the Russians, I was reminded of nothing so much as Thorne Smith’s The Night Life of the Gods.

The hardback edition might take a couple of weeks (from the time of writing this) to arrive at Amazon at a reasonable price, but is already available at The Book Depository, with free delivery worldwide. Please also look out for new fiction from Anna Tambour at Tor.com this month. [Note: The story, 'The Walking-Stick Forest', is, in fact, to appear at Tor.com on the 4th of June.]

Chris Conn Askew's marvellous cover for Crandolin, by Anna Tambour.

Yesterday saw the end of the month-long collaboration between Chômu and Schlock Magazine, featuring not only an interview with Chômu, but reviews of the debut collections of Justin Isis and Luke Geddes in the Pop Culture Destruction section, and new fiction from both the above-named authors in the April Issue, which also includes fiction from T.R. Healy, Elsa Fiott and Ken Liu.

Finally, we are beginning to see reviews of our February release, The Galaxy Club, by Brendan Connell, appearing here and there online.

Justin Isis and levitationalist celebrate the coming of spring

In further news, we are very pleased to announce the imminent release of Chômu’s first hardback, the World Fantasy Award finalist Crandolin, by Anna Tambour. This hardback edition is due for publication on the 1st of May.

Finally, the winner of February’s prize draw, for a personalised copy of The Galaxy Club, is Martin Hayes, of County Wicklow, Ireland. The customised copy of The Galaxy Club is now winging its way across the Atlantic.

Please watch this space (and/or sign up here to our mailing list) for further Chômu updates.

Boasting wraparound art from Jessica Fortner, our first release of 2013 is Onion Songs, by Steve Rasnic Tem, a career-spanning collection of 42 short stories, representing over 30 years of work and surely consolidating Tem’s reputation as a writer of impressive scope and vision. The stories collected in this volume showcase the off-beat and experimental side of Tem’s fiction. With universal themes, such as aging, death, loss, relationships, and with imagery that is both gritty and bizarre, Onion Songs peels back the layers of human existence like no other story collection, strangeness and realism alternating until they become, ultimately, interchangeable. Sample the taste of onion soup for the soul by picking up a copy here.

A starred review at Publishers Weekly describes the collection thus:

Tem lets his characters, their situations, and their emotions creep up slowly on the reader. His style is thoughtful and poetic, and the tension he builds effectively sustains well-crafted plots. He has found a perfect balance between the bizarre and the straight-forward…

Meanwhile, Peter Tennant says:

Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic… Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I’ve read in the last year.

The winner of December’s prize draw is Johnny Core, in the south of England, to whom a signed and bookplated copy of Brendan Connell’s Lives of Notorious Cooks has been sent. And now, below, this month’s prize draw:

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of Onion Songs

This month, the prize draw is for a uniquely inscribed copy of Onion Songs. The author also promises that he will write and print out an entirely new piece of flash fiction, as a first edition of one, which he will inscribe to the winner. Here are the rules for anyone unfamiliar with them: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘The world is just a great big onion’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘The world is just a great big onion’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 29th of March, 2013.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview is still with Anna Tambour, author of Crandolin.

This will be, in all probability, the last post on the Chômu website until 2013. If you’ve enjoyed our releases in 2012, please do continue to support us. Next year will see us release books by Steve Rasnic Tem, P.F. Jeffery and others yet to be revealed. We hope that your holidays are sufficiently irreal and suffused with yuugen. And now, let us leave you with overdue pictures of some of this year’s prize draw books:

Artist Ben Baldwin won all this Joseph S. Pulver loot simply by entering the Chômu prize draw at FantasyCon 2012 (computer not included, probably).

A very elegant package put together by Anna Tambour for the winner of the Crandolin prize draw.

May you never lack yuugen, in the year ahead, or for the rest of your lives.

Today we are happy to announce the release of our twentieth title, Crandolin, by Anna Tambour, a book which very much deserves the distinction. Set in Literaturnaya typeface, with a matte laminate jacket and back and front cover art from Christopher Conn Askew, Crandolin is a dizzyingly tall tale of mediaeval cookbooks, heraldic beasts, time anomalies, railways, secret recipes for helva and moustaches, music, food, maidens in towers, science, superstition… and a donkey. Please purchase your one-way ticket on the Crandolin Express here.

We couldn’t fit all the praise so far received for Crandolin on the back cover, so here are a couple of quotes that we did not manage to include:

Epicurean fantasy at its finest. Crandolin is an uncanny mating of passion and precision: that Anna Tambour is billed as ‘author’ and not ‘magician’ belies the virtuosity with which she coaxes a whirlwind of gluttonous carnality into her scintillatingly intricate narrative web.

- Rachel Edidin

For gourmands literary and culinary, Tambour is always a treat, and Crandolin is Tambour at her best. Bold and subtle, rich and delicate, this is fiction to savour, fiction to sustain the soul.

- Hal Duncan

Please note, at the time of writing, some Amazon sites are listing waiting times of up to 8 weeks to order Crandolin. This figure should go down soon. If you are concerned about receiving the book in time for Christmas, however, the Book Depository, which has free worldwide delivery, is already stocking the book and promises dispatch within 48 hours. We are also hoping to release a hardback edition of Crandolin. As yet there is no definite schedule for this, but news will follow as soon as we have any concrete details. And now, details of this month’s prize draw:

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of Crandolin

The prize this month is a uniquely inscribed copy of Crandolin. Here are the rules for anyone unfamiliar with them: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘borscht borscht borscht’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘borscht borscht borscht’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 30th of November.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview will be with D.F. Lewis, author of Nemonymous Night.

Never been a beauty queen. But she was a magical teenage princess. Chômu’s seventeenth publication – officially released today – appropriately enough, is I Am a Magical Teenage Princess by Luke Geddes. We have been fortunate enough to work on this occasion with design megastar Rian Hughes, who has blessed us with a remarkably winsome-yet-wicked cover. Reviews are already beginning to appear on the internet, at Publishers Weekly and The British Fantasy Society. You don’t have to be a beauty queen or seventeen to enjoy I Am a Magical Teenage Princess. This is a book for the magical teenage princess in all of us. Pick up a copy here and find out for yourself. Or read this blurb explaining the book’s appeal first, and then pick up a copy:

It’s easy to sneer at ‘pop-culture detritus,’ but let’s face it—no matter how timeless and profound and unique we imagine our selves to be, we have no choice but to make them from the trash on hand. This is especially true of the teen bricoleur, that poor soul who has to cobble herself together from available materials: Scooby-Doo, drive-ins, soap operas in space, Wonder Woman, the Archies. The wonderfully playful and witty stories in Luke Geddes’ I Am a Magical Teenage Princess show just how resourcefully and delightfully that work can be done. You say whimsy and depth are incompatible? Nonsense. This is deep whimsy, is a book that employs rollicking sharp humor to explore the sad, solitary adolescent in all of us. Luke Geddes is a big talent, and this is a marvelous debut.

- Michael Griffith, author of Spikes

See below for details of the Magical Princess prize draw, or, if you can’t wait that long, buy yourself a copy here.

Other news

Just uploaded to HTML Giant is an article by Julie Sokolow on Chômu’s Dadaoism anthology and the psychedelic experience. A page has recently been added to the Chômu website for our December release, Brendan Connell’s loftily demented Lives of Notorious Cooks. With that and our November release – Anna Tambour’s Crandolin, of which David Kowalski has written, “It’s like it was written by a demented chef” – it seems we can expect a great deal of gastronomic irreality from Chômu’s year end. Finally, in our mini round-up of news, don’t miss the interview with Chômu writer Justin Isis at Inter Nova. The interview was originally posted last year in German, but has now been translated into English.

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of I Am a Magical Teenage Princess

The prize draw last month was won by Gabriel Brum, of Brazil, to whom a specially inscribed copy of Michael Cisco’s Celebrant has now been sent.

The prize this month is for a uniquely inscribed copy of I Am a Magical Teenage Princess. We will repeat the rules here for anyone unfamiliar with them: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘I am, personally, a magical teenage princess’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘I am, personally, a magical teenage princess’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 1st of August.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview will be with Luke Geddes, author of I Am a Magical Teenage Princess – coming to the in-boxes of our subscribers soon.

Next week, we release Dadaoism (An Anthology), a book that has been absorbing a great deal of our energy for some time. A review of the anthology has already gone online here. Gordon Hauptfleisch describes the book as:

…an often challenging but ultimately rewarding collection of angst, anxiety, and alienation as conveyed in whimsy, wit, and wordplay.

In June and July, we return to single-author volumes, with the novel Celebrant, by Michael Cisco (a work of which China Miéville, has said, “With Michael Cisco doing things like this, sometimes it feels like the rest of literature might as well get up and head home”), and a debut collection of short fiction – I Am a Magical Teenage Princess – by the inestimable Luke Geddes. This latter features a cover design from special guest designer, Rian Hughes. Both books have been reviewed favourably by Publishers Weekly. And here are the links of the Publishers Weekly reviews for Celebrant and I Am a Magical Teenage Princess.

Christopher Conn Askew, who produced beautiful wraparound cover art for Celebrant, will also be producing another lush wraparound cover for the September paperback reprint of Quentin S. Crisp’s collection All God’s Angels, Beware! (previously an Ex Occidente limited edition). October, November and December willl bring work from John Elliott, Anna Tambour and Brendan Connell. Please watch this site or subscribe to our mailing list at this link (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) for further details.

For a more in-depth view of what is happening at Chômu, and greater detail on some of the books mentioned here, as well as some of those not mentioned here, please read Jason Rolfe’s interview with Quentin S. Crisp at Bibliomancy.

Finally, Chômu would like to congratulate Reggie Oliver and Michael Cisco for their nominations in the novel category for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards (thank you for entrusting your novels to us), and to thank whomever nominated Chômu Press to the shortlist for the PS Publishing Independent Press Award. Thank you, and get suavée!