We're beyond thrilled to unveil the cover of Anca L. Szilágyi's debut novel, DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR, which is being released on December 5. Preorders available NOW!

We asked Anca to share a few words about the inspiration behind this design:

I've been a fan of  Nichole DeMent's work since I first encountered it in 2013. I knew right away that the moody, mythic imagery of her Oracle series fit the atmosphere of Daughters of the Air. In the years prior, I'd used paintings as prompts to finish a first draft of the novel, putting Dover art stickers into notebooks and writing whatever came from them. There was a lot of groping around in the dark for a long time, but I gradually learned which artists generated ideas for me, and more specifically, which artists seemed to generate ideas for which characters: Chagall aligned with Daniel, the father; Modigliani aligned with Isabel, the mother; and Kandinsky aligned with Pluta. Eventually, though, the story as a whole suggested its own aesthetic. 

I adore the cover image, "Bird Moon"; it makes me think of wandering through tall, crackly grasses on a summer night, listening to the rattle and click of flying creatures. It also reminds me of a particular, pivotal scene in the book that is wild with possibility, both dangerous and transformative. I'm grateful to Nichole for letting us use this gorgeous piece!

"Bird Moon" image by Nichole DeMent. Design by Michael Norcross.

This year's Brooklyn Book Fest is behind us, and we had a fantastic time meeting new readers and old fans alike this year! 

We had quite a few samplers for new readers to check out: a selected entry from Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions and first-chapter samples of Christopher Smith's Salamanders of the Silk Road and our December release, Daughters of the Air by Anca L. Szilágyi.

Daughters of the Air Tour of Gowanus

We were joined this weekend by Anca L. Szilágyi in advance of Daughters of the Air's debut. During the afternoon of the festival, we had the opportunity to explore Brooklyn for an Instagram tour.

Daughters of the Air (December 5, 2017) is a literary fabulist story of a runaway teen set across the Americas:

Tatiana “Pluta” Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl—until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively—and literally—spreads her wings.

The author took us on a walking tour of Gowanus, Brooklyn, where many scenes in the novel are set.

Our walking tour centered mainly around the Gowanus Canal, including a bridge where Pluta learns about the area's history. During the tour, Szilágyi mentioned the fascinating appeal of the "nooks and crannies" around the canal, which is surrounded by dead-end streets with seemingly no purpose.

You can find more scenes from the tour by following Anca Szilágyi on Instagram.

Brooklyn Book Festival is one of our favorite events of the year, and 2017 was a wonderful time. We look forward to seeing everyone at BKBF 2018!

Meet Monidipa "Mimi" Mondal: our newest intern, blogger, and slush reader! Mimi joined the Lanternfish team in April. You'll be reading a lot more from her in this space, so we thought we'd share a little about who she is and what does.

I first met Mimi at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, in the summer of 2015. Mimi had just arrived from India and was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholar at the workshop. Soon after, in the fall, Mimi moved to Philadelphia to pursue her MFA at Rutgers University. Now she divides her time between New York and Philadelphia, writing and editing. 

Hi Mimi! What do you like to read?

Hi! If you catch me unawares, you will probably find me reading a Wikipedia article. But, more seriously, I read a lot of fiction, and usually the fiction is speculative, although I read less of high fantasy or very technical science fiction. I feel oppressed by flat-out realism, though, and it makes me really glad that flat-out realism has become unpopular in literary fiction as well. Things like dreams, mythology, religious training (or lack thereof), cultural memory, neurodiverse perception, and individual trauma and experience are as real and relevant as – if not more than – that narrow band of reality that's true for everyone.

I also read a lot of news and personal essays, especially from underrepresented voices. I'm fairly broke but I make a tiny monthly donation to Wikipedia, because I read hundreds of articles all the time about completely random things. Ask me all you want to know about deep-water fish (including the lanternfish), dinosaurs, or ancient civilizations! I know a little bit about a lot of things. I was a quiz-competition kid before the Internet became so easily available to everyone, and since then it has been Wikipedia all the way. 

How did you become interested in publishing?

I was interested in publishing long before I knew much about publishing houses, how they worked, or anyone who worked there. I went to college at Jadavpur University in India, where I was an English major, so all of my friends were aspiring writers to some extent. Way back in 2008, some friends and I started an online magazine called Ex Nihilo, which ran for about a year on a WordPress blog, and later on a website that no longer exists. That beloved magazine folded because we could not figure out a way to monetize it, either for ourselves or to pay our contributors. I went on to intern at a quirky independent press called Blaft Publications in Chennai and then to work as an editor at the big, shiny offices of Penguin Random House India in Delhi. 

In 2013, I went off to do an MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, which I finished in 2015. The UK has a fantastic literary scene, filled with delightful children's literature (Harry Potter only scratches the surface of it!) and cheerful, grotesque humor – both of which I have inherited in my bones. Surrounded by the rain-soaked hills of Scotland, separated by a forested ridge from an ancient cemetery, I wrote my thesis and graduation project on the publication of science fiction magazines, which was probably my first step towards the United States. 

What are some of your latest editorial projects?

My last big editorial project was an anthology called Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, which I edited with Alexandra Pierce. It is forthcoming from Twelfth Planet Press in Australia this month. This is a collection of people writing posthumous letters to Octavia Butler, along with some academic essays and interviews. It was a deeply emotional and inspiring project, probably the book I am the most proud of having worked on so far. 

Also: these are not strictly editorial projects, but I have been reading and selecting submissions for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship for the past two years (a privilege of being a former Scholar). This year, I will also start reading submissions for the Speculative Literature Foundation grants. 

Finally, what are you writing right now?

I never thought I would say this, but in the past few months I have mostly been writing nonfiction about identity, race, immigration, and so on. I see myself primarily as a fiction writer. At first I was writing these nonfiction pieces mostly for myself and my friends – long rants, not even meant as essays but as online conversations on Facebook. They were a natural response to the currently unstable political situations in both India and the United States. 

The first of those essays was solicited and published by Uncanny Magazine in May. Uncanny is a science fiction magazine, and the editors knew me because of my prior fiction writing. But then I sent that essay to the New York Foundation for the Arts and was selected for their 2017 Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, so I hope I will be writing more of those essays in the next few months. 

That's all for now! You'll be hearing more from Mimi soon in our upcoming blog posts.

2016 was a, hm, special sort of year. Deadly to celebrities, it left the rest of us unsure whether American politics's hard right into absurdity and post-factual vitriol was in fact real or whether the wrong person rolled the dice and now we're all trapped in the Darkest Timeline. 

But before we breathe a sigh of relief, let's remember: 2017 hasn't had time to show its true colors yet. Out of the frying pan . . .

Still, here at Lanternfish Press we didn't have such a terrible year.

Some highlights:

In September, we released Salamanders of the Silk Road, which is one of those books you'll read, then put down and say "I'm not sure what that was . . . but I think I liked it." A surrealist take on the legend of Prester John, Salamanders asks what happens to mythic figures when their time is past. (Hint: depression and run-down beach houses in Florida, apparently.)

Oh, and did we mention it has monsters?

We held the launch party for Salamanders at the legendary Parnassus Books in Nashville, where eager readers left the store sold out of copies and landed the book on Nashville's bestsellers list!

We confess, we patted ourselves heartily on the back after that.

Author Christopher Smith reads from Salamanders

In October we released our first-ever coloring book: Other Worlds, a space odyssey created by Philadelphia artist Saul Rosenbaum. Then, just for fun, we threw a whole bunch of parties where Philadelphians gathered to ink the pages. 

Here's my masterpiece (as you can see, there's a reason why I stick to words most of the time):

In space the sky is pink?

For Halloween, we threw a party celebrating two years of The Afflictions, inviting people to dress up as diseases from the book. There was much to celebrate: the book was published in Spanish this year by La Bestia Equilátera, a publisher in Argentina, and is now forthcoming in Italian!

In November we opened for submissions. This was our first year using the Submittable platform, and tbh we're pretty in love with it. We were terrifically impressed with the quality of manuscripts we received (well done, you). We also welcomed on board a new team of manuscript readers, who even now are doing valiant battle with what remains of the slush pile. A million thanks to them for their keen wits and hard work.

There's someone else we should introduce to you: our tireless intern, Advait Ubhayakar. Advait, would you like to say a few words?

"Hi, I'm Advait. Since the early 2000s, I have earned my bread and butter writing for businesses around the world. For spices, salt, and the meatier things of life, I write & read stories and poetry in English, and speak & sing four Indian languages. I am in the midst of revising a novel set during the 2014 Indian election: a time that seems so innocent compared to, umm, more recent world events."

As for 2017, well: who knows about the future. You really can't trust it. But we're pretty excited about our prospective new titles, which include reprints of hard-to-find Victorian novels as well as fresh original fiction. 

So stay tuned, friends. We can't wait to share more. 

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay posted!

Lanternfish Press Submission Guidelines

Lanternfish Press is now accepting submissions through our shiny new Submittable portal. We’re looking for smart surreal and gothic fiction, genre-bending SFF and mystery novels, and writerly nonfiction works on politics and philosophy. We’re very eager to read submissions from women, people of color, queer and neurodiverse folks of all stripes, and anyone else who doesn’t look a whole lot like Jonathan Franzen.

Please NO short story collections, poetry, romance novels, YA, or inspirational.

Beyond that, it’s hard to describe exactly what we’re looking for in a manuscript. Often we don’t know until it crosses our desks. But here’s some general advice:

Read. Read voraciously. Read writers who don’t look like you. Read foreign writers. Read dead writers!

Writing is a conversation. It can offer people who lead wildly different lives a window on each other’s worlds. It can bridge gaps between cultures and gulfs in time, overcoming unbearable solitudes. We tend to click with writers who’ve grappled with many stories and whose work is informed by that broader perspective. 

Aim high.

Being “relatable” is overrated. Nine times out of ten it just means saying things that resonate with the favorite stereotypes of a given marketing demographic. Yawn. If you really want to wow us, shoot for a perspective that a European writer of the sixteenth century, a middle-class Nigerian teenager of today, and a woman born in an agrarian community two hundred years in the future might all be able to make sense of. If you have trouble putting your finger on what could possibly interest such different people, William Faulkner’s brief but pithy Nobel lecture is a good place to start.

Have fun.

Who says a “serious” book can’t also be entertaining? We love stories that aren’t afraid to have fun: raucous, gleeful, zany romps through new worlds bursting with life. 

Embrace your voice.

We appreciate skillful prose, whether the style is spare and clipped or elaborate and intricate. We have nothing against either long or short sentences. Don’t be afraid of your own voice. Shout it loud! 

As a matter of house style, we do tend to dislike present-tense narration unless the author has a very solid reason to use it. (“It’s more vivid” is not a solid reason.) Instead of reaching for immediacy through use of the present tense, we encourage writers to explore other ways of escaping abstraction and engaging the reader in a lifelike world of concrete things and sensations. 

/rant

Good luck.