Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/29

Another week has passed, so it's time once again for me to tell you about the books that came in my mail. This week, I've got four of them, all from different publishers, which is a nice thing. So I'll run through them as they're currently organized into a neat stack -- note that this is purely by size, and not by any more serious sorting mechanism.

So first up is a new edition of Patricia A. McKillip's World Fantasy Award-winning 1974 novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, coming from Tachyon in trade paperback on September 19. You know, I'm not sure if I've ever read Eld -- I know I haven't read as much McKillip as I think I should. (I had a bad reaction to the end of the "Riddle-Master" trilogy when I was a young and stupid teenager and avoided her for far too long after that.) Anyway, I expect to read this edition, and maybe you should, too.

And then there's Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. It features all of the winners of the 2015 Nebulas -- the ones published that year, and awarded the next May -- and it will be out in time for the next round of Nebula Awards later this month. (May 16, to be precise, and to avoid you camping outside your store of choice for too long.) This one comes from Pyr, and is the latest in a long series of annual Nebula anthologies stretching back to the beginning of that award in 1965. It has all of the Short Story nominees, the Short Story, Novelette, and Novella winners (by Alyssa Wing, Sarah Pinsker, and Nnedi Okrafor, respectively), plus related poetry winners. It also has an excerpt from the winning novel, which is traditional, and excerpts from the other nominated novels, which is not -- and which also seems to have crowded out any other nominated short works. I'm not crazy about this choice, but it's not my anthology.

Next up is a new standalone graphic novel by Svetlana Chmakova, Brave. Chmakova is previously the author of the similar Awkward, which I liked. (And a manga-esque series called Nightschool for Yen, which I read some of and then lost track of, but enjoyed every piece I did read. And something called Dramacon before that, which I know has a lot of fans but which I never actually saw or picked up.) Brave is about a group of middle-school kids, seems to be loosely related to Awkward, and will be out from Yen on May 23rd.

Last is a new hardcover from Sherrilyn Kenyon via Tor, Deadmen Walking. The cover calls it "A Deadman's Cross Novel," but the card page lists it at the end of her main series, "Dark-Hunters." So my best guess, as someone who knows of Kenyon's works but never really read them, is that this is the beginning of a new sub-series in her most popular world. It also seems to be a historical -- all pirates and so forth -- rather than being contemporary like the bulk of the series. Walking is a hardcover, available May 9th.