All These Little Worlds: all the details.

It’s taken a little longer than expected, but I’m delighted to announce the imminent publication of our second anthology, All These Little Worlds.

All These Little Worlds contains nine new stories, including a special long story from Charles Lambert. (Several of the stories here are longer than the stories in Various Authors, as much by chance as anything, and I do think it gives the stories more time to build their worlds.)

Two contributors from Various Authors are returning for the new book, both with very different stories to their previous contributions. I’d originally considered Charles Lambert‘s ‘Pretty Vacant’ for that first book, but in the end it was too long to fit so we ran the equally good but shorter ‘All I Want’ instead. Since then, I’ve never quite managed to get ‘Pretty Vacant’ out of my mind. It’s Charles at his best, and fortunately I managed to grab it for All These Little Worlds.

Our other returning author is Jason Atkinson. His ‘Assassination Scene’ went down well in Various Authors; ‘Get on Green’ is a very different story, and shows off his range.

I think it’s good to have a few repeat visits from our contributors, as it gives the series a sense of continuity, but the main thrust of the anthology series is to showcase a variety of writers and writing, and the other seven contributors to All These Little Worlds are new to us.

Mischa Hiller should need no introduction: his two novels with Telegram have been critically acclaimed. (They’re crying out for movie adaptations too, especially the Hitchcockian Shake Off.) His story ‘Room 307’ represents a real change of pace from the novels.

If you read a lot of new short fiction, you probably already know about the American quarterly Electric Literature. Their editor Halimah Marcus has contributed ‘Dress Code’, one of several stories here with a school connection, although each is different: while ‘Dress Code’ follows the troubles of a new teacher, ‘Get on Green’ shows a schoolday from the perspective of a young African-American girl. Ryan Shoemaker‘s ‘After All the Fun We Had’ is the story of one principal’s attempt to engage bored students by injecting a little entertainment.

Colin Corrigan‘s story ‘The Romantic’ is a curiosity that I don’t intend to say too much about here. Colin was recently published in The Stinging Fly. Jennifer Moore provides some light entertainment in her story ‘Swimming With the Fishes’, while Andrew Jury opens a window on the relationship between a recently separated man and his mother-in-law in ‘”Glenda”‘.

Finally, James Benmore‘s ‘Jaggers & Crown’ is part story, part potted history of the transition from vaudeville comedy to television sketch shows. It’s a particularly interesting one, and I’ve asked James to blog here about the background to the story. Watch out for his post, coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Here are the contents in full (though not in order):

• Halimah Marcus – Dress Code
• Andrew Jury – “Glenda”
• James Benmore – Jaggers & Crown
• Colin Corrigan – The Romantic
• Ryan Shoemaker – After All the Fun We Had
• Jennifer Moore – Swimming with the Fishes
• Jason Atkinson – Get on Green
• Mischa Hiller – Room 307
• Charles Lambert – Pretty Vacant

Copies of All These Little Worlds will be sent out to subscribers as soon as they’re back from the printers, which should be around the end of September. For more information, or to pre-order if you haven’t subscribed, see All These Little Worlds.