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.

First, for those who missed them last year, a selection of Chômu-related links. Chômu was named best UK small press, and I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, by Justin Isis, joint best collection with Ralph Robert Moore’s I Smell Blood, in Peter Tennant’s pick of 2011, over at the Black Static website. Also at Black Static, an in-depth interview with Quentin S. Crisp about Chômu Press. Chômu was also named best small press of 2011 at Johnny Mains’ Occasionally Horrific. And Weird Fiction Review, naming Michael Cisco’s The Great Lover as the “weird book of the year”, had the following to say in their 2011 round-up:

As for who is taking the most chances, that’s also clear: Chômu Press.

2012 promises a more relaxed schedule than 2011, but with the help of the Dadaoism anthology, we will still be publishing more writers this year than last. And on that subject, we can now reveal the table of contents, as follows:

1 ‘Portrait of a Chair’, by Reggie Oliver
2 ‘Autumn Jewel’, by Katherine Khorey
3 ‘Visiting Maze’, by Michael Cisco
4 ‘The Houses Among the Trees’, by Colin Insole
5 ‘Affection 45′, by Brendan Connell
6 ‘M-Funk Vs. Tha Futuregions of Inverse Funkativity’, by Justin Isis
7 ‘Spirit and Corpus‘, by Yarrow Paisley
8 ‘Timelines’, by Nina Allan
9 ‘Jimmy Breaks up with His Imaginary Girlfriend’, by Jimmy Grist
10 ‘Body Poem’, by Peter Gilbert
11 ‘Testing Spark’, by Daniel Mills
12 ‘Noises’, by Joe Simpson Walker
13 ‘Romance, with Mice’, by Sonia Orin Lyris
14 ‘Grief (The Autobiography of a Tarantula)’, by Jesse Kennedy
15 ‘Orange Cuts’, by Paul Jessup
16 ‘Instance’, by John Cairns
17 ‘Kago Ai’, by Ralph Doege
18 ‘Fighting Back’, by Rhys Hughes
19 ‘Nowhere Room’, by Kristine Ong Muslim
20 ‘Koda Kumi’, a Justin Isis re-mix of ‘Italiannetto’ by Quentin S. Crisp
21 ‘The Lobster Kaleidoscope’, by Julie Sokolow
22 ‘The Eaten Boy’, by Nick Jackson
23 ‘Poppies’, by Megan Lee Beals
24 ‘Abra Raven’, by D.F. Lewis
25 ‘Pissing in Barbican Lake’, by Jeremy Reed
26 ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicides’, by Jeremy Reed

Beyond the Dadaoism horizon, please keep a look out for announcements regarding exciting new work from Michael Cisco, and the sparkling debut collection from Luke Geddes.

While we are here we would also like to announce the winner of the prize draw for a specially inscribed copy of Nick Jackson’s The Secret Life of the Panda. The winner is Caroline Callaghan, of West Yorkshire, who will be receiving a copy of the collection shortly, with an inscription and some illustrations added by hand.

The next exclusive interview to be sent out to our e-mail subscribers will be with author Rhys Hughes. If you have not already signed up to our mailing list, and would like to receive interviews and updates, please sign up here.

We are proud of each of our releases and are gratified to know that our titles are now enlivening bookshelves and enriching readers’ lives around the world. Therefore, first of all, please allow us to introduce a small selection of links here relating to those titles and/or their authors:

Reggie Oliver was featured in Suvudu’s Take Five series, telling us five fascinating things about The Dracula Papers. Signed copies of The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar’s Tale are available from the Aldeburgh Bookshop.

Chômu authors Michael Cisco and Brendan Connell were interviewed together by Jeff VanderMeer for the Amazon blog Omnivoracious.

Gestalt Mash features a characteristically lively interview with Justin Isis, author of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, and the review blog of stalwart Theaker’s Quarterly features a review of Revenants by Daniel Mills.

Musings on the cover of The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, by Mark Samuels, are to be found at Grim Reviews, and Quentin S. Crisp talks about “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” and other things, at Matt Cardin’s Teeming Brain.

In other news, we now have winners for the Dying to Read and The Great Lover prize draws, and can announce that inscribed copies of the books will be sent to Jérôme-Luc Paulin and Steve Poupard respectively. The winner of the prize draw for Link Arms with Toads! by Rhys Hughes will be announced soon. Please look out for prize draws with our future releases.

Speaking of which, those following developments on the site will have noticed that after Nemonymous Night, we have also scheduled releases for two very different (to each other and to just about anything else we’ve encountered) novels, Jeanette, by Joe Simpson Walker (July release), and The Orphan Palace, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (October release). The former is in the transgressive tradition of Pauline Réage, with a gritty British sixties setting. This will also be the longest work we have so far published. The latter comes from one of the rising stars of the weird, for whom, we believe, the stars are now right; a novel of madness, written in poetry, or perhaps a novel of poetry, written in madness.

Those awaiting news of the Dadaoism anthology should also rest assured that gears are invisibly turning, and we are working hard on making this something special. However, it should be noted that, due to the high number of submissions, it is taking us some time to sift out the very best. We are excited, however, to have already found a considerable quantity of gold in our prospecting. We will release more information on the contents, scheduling and so on for the anthology when it is available. At present, we are still carefully sifting.

Other things to look forward to include mini-interviews with our authors. Interviews with Brendan Connell and John Elliott have already been conducted, and will be sent out in the near future to everyone on our e-mail list. Please note, you must subscribe in order to receive the interviews and other planned exclusive content. Please also subscribe or keep watching this site for news on further releases and developments.

Thank you.

'Super Limited Edition' plus accessories.

Entrants were asked to send a tweet-sized message (perhaps in the form of a caption) conveying what they thought was the hidden meaning of the book’s cover. A winner has now been selected. Daniel Corrick sent us the following entry and will be receiving the ‘Super Limited Edition’ soon:

Synthetic realities; gold plated Existentialism: the soft, moist charms of consumption and conformity. Welcome to style.

'Super Limited Edition' - glimpse of internals.

For the disappointed who did not win on this occasion, if you are a fan of J-pop you have another chance to win by entering the competition at this link, organised by International Wota and Chomu Press.

The rules are simple: in fifty words or less, describe how you would serve a Japanese idol of your choice as a meal and why you chose this specific recipe for this specific idol. A Johnny’s boy in a flambee? A sticky sweet dessert for an H!P star? An Avex Trax diva served up as a spicy roast? You decide, and explain why!

First prize will be a copy of Justin’s I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, signed and personalized by the author himself, and a $50 YesAsia gift certificate. Second prize will be a signed and personalized copy of Justin’s book and a $30 YesAsia gift certificate. Third prize will be a signed and personalized copy of Justin’s book.

Read more here.

Don’t forget, also, the prize draw to win a uniquely inscribed copy of the excellent Revenants by Daniel Mills, which closes on the 9th of March.

See below for a tantalisingly blurry photograph of the ‘Super Limited Edition’:

Blurry, mysterious image of 'Super Limited Edition'.

At last the date has arrived and the second Chômu Press publication is unleashed. We are very proud to present, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis.












Here is what others have to say of the collection:

If you ever wanted to experience some life-bending obsession but thus far are still waiting for one to come along, reading I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like will serve as the next best thing. In his disarmingly masterful first collection of stories, Justin Isis reports on what it is like to be young, Japanese (quite incidentally in our global culture), and hopelessly a slave to awful and bizarre attractions—eccentric enchantments that any fugitive from the conventional world would take agonizing pride in confessing to a sheaf of private papers. Indeed, these are stories in the best tradition of the confessional genre. Even when they are not narrated in the first person, the focus is still that of a Poesque psyche utterly fixated with an imprudent intensity upon someone or something of an unparalleled nature. One problem in writing for the uninitiated about Isis’ stories is how to praise them in terms appropriate to their character. But while there are so many ways in which one might go wrong, each would be likely to bring up some aspect of their fascination. So for present purposes, let us simply generalize them as admirably captivating narratives with the following “black box” label: To be read by those who themselves would be overtaken by the extraordinary liaisons and manias that either save or doom—it can be hard to tell—the characters in these works.

- Thomas Ligotti

Justin Isis’ stories read like future videos, in their shape-shifting, voyeuristic Eurasian themes, dominated throughout by the obsessive retrieval of visual detail pulled right from the edge of one space-time dissolving into another. “He wondered about how present he was” the narrator of the title story questions, and it’s the author’s ability to live parallel to what he is seeing that gives the collection an elusive, fetishistic concentration, as though Isis is trying to step into a film as a real-time participant. I love these stories for their fractionally off-world message that is always vitally, sexily modern.

- Jeremy Reed

To learn more about Isis in his own words, please read the interviews here and here.

There are also reviews starting to appear online. The first ones can be seen here, at Blog Critics, from Jessica Schneider and here, at the Theaker’s Quarterly blog.

Warning: I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like is not horror fiction.

Competition

To celebrate the launch of our second book, Chômu Press would like to announce a competition to win a ‘Super Limited Edition’ of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like. What is the hidden meaning of the cover of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like? If you think you know or have some interesting ideas of your own, please send your interpretation (tweet-size) to the Chômu Press Twitter feed, using @chomupress. (Please feel free to express the meaning in the form of a caption.) So that we can send you a private message to obtain your contact details if you win, please also make sure to ‘follow’ the Chômu Press Twitter account. To indicate that your tweet is a competition entry, please accompany your interpretation with the hashtag #fleshcover. Alternatively, those who don’t have a Twitter account may send us their entries (again, tweet-size – 140 characters or fewer) via the normal Chômu address: info at chomupress dot com. We may tweet the entries of those who enter via e-mail. Because of text-size considerations, if we do so we will omit the name of the entrant. Therefore, in e-mail entries please specify if you would rather not have your entry tweeted. Multiple entries are allowed.

The closing date for this competition is the 14th of February. The interpretation judged to be the most interesting by Chômu Press and the author will receive a unique and special ‘Super Limited Edition’ copy of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, signed and decorated by the author.

Finally, please subscribe to our mailing list to keep updated on future releases, behind the scenes insights, news and exclusive rarities (and the competition results).

Much is happening behind the scenes at Chômu Press.  First, we are very excited to announce that our next publication will be the brilliant début collection I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like from Justin Isis.

We also have a growing list of books that we are planning to publish soon. Unfortunately we cannot give details of these yet, but please watch this space and/or subscribe to the the email list for further details of Justin’s collection and for Chômu Press news in general.

We think you will be surprised when the curtains part and,  slowly, all that has been prepared is revealed.