WEIRDER, WILDER, FURTHER INTO THE UNKNOWN
From well over one thousand entrants, to a shortlist of 60 well-deserved nominees, Alex and I have debated and chewed our fingernails down to nubs and bounced opinions off a select few trusted eyes and ears, and here we are:
cover art by Matt Blairstone
BRAVE NEW WEIRD Volume Two Table of Contents
(not final order)
Amitha Jagannath Knight - My Mother, The Exoskeleton
Anemone Moss - Everything You Dump Here Ends Up in the Ocean
Chris Kuriata - Family Not Going To Heaven
Daniel DeRock - Guest Opinion: We must take action regarding the [REDACTED] High School janitor
David Simmons - Food is Poison
Eirik Gumeny - A Balanced Breakfast
Elena Sichrovsky - Embryo
Geneve Flynn - A Box of Hair and Nail
Hussani Abdulrahim - The Library Virus
Ivan Zoric - Our Roots Will Dry Out in the End
Judith Shadford - Endless Yearning
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez - Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground
KS Walker - River Bargain Baby
LC von Hessen - Transmasc of the Red Death
M.M. Olivas - The Prince of Oakland
Michael Bettendorf - As the Music Plays Groovy
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas - Lullaby for the Unseen
Patrick Malka - Show Me
Perfect Kiss Strickoll - punctum (o baked alaska for you i am a former american)
Premee Mohamed - Quietus
Rachael K. Jones - The Sound of Children Screaming
Simone le Roux - The Man Outside
Thomas Ha - In That Crumbling Home
In addition to the Table of Contents, we would also like to honor a few notable individuals for their contributions to the New Weird spectrum:
Bravest, Newest, Weirdest in Short Fiction:
BNW Anthology - Jolie Toomajan, ed. - Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic
BNW Special Issue - Suzan Palumbo, ed. - Strange Horizons Caribbean Special Issue
BNW Creative Format - Cormack Baldwin, ed. - Archive of the Odd
BNW Breakout Author - Simo Srinivas - “The Ballad of the Octopus” & many more
BNW Comic - Bri Crozier - Blackbird Hunting
BNW Magazine - Charles Tyra, publisher - Cosmic Horror Monthly
BNW Collection - Lindz McLeod - Turducken
BRAVE NEW WEIRD Volume Two is out June 26th.
We weren’t certain how people would take to the notion of BRAVE NEW WEIRD when we launched it last year. It was driven, primarily, by a sense of fun; if Alex and I couldn’t have fun drawing new eyes to some of the off-the-radar stories peppering the Weirdest corners of the independent publishing world, then why bother putting in the work? Honestly, it’s what drives everything Tenebrous does: we need to have fun doing it.
But it was also driven by a sense of listlessness at seeing the same group of names year in and year out cropping up on numerous “Best of” lists. One of Tenebrous’ primary goals is to jam the door open to new writers, always and forever.
And fun or not, Alex and I take this incredibly seriously. It is vital to the genre to constantly revitalize itself; to perpetually chase the future; to condemn stagnation.
A piss-take and a deadly serious manifesto; things can be more than one thing.
To celebrate the release of BRAVE NEW WEIRD Volume Two, we’re releasing a limited hardcover run of just 50 copies along with bookplates signed by both Alex and myself. And for you completists out there, we’re releasing an even more limited run of 30 hardcover copies of Volume One; also signed by both of us.