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.